Thank you.
My name is Gerry Thiessen. I am the mayor of the District of Vanderhoof, and also the chair of the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako. I am speaking from the traditional territory of the Saik'uz First Nation.
In our regional district, we have six communities like Vanderhoof. Each of these communities has a rail line going right through it. We were brought to this area. My grandfather was asked, on a program with CNR and the Government of Canada, in 1942, to move from the Prairies to our area and settle here with the hope of settling the railway as we went along.
At that time, there was lots of opportunity for industry to have access to rail cars. We saw our cattle being moved to market through the railway. We saw our lumber moved through the railway, and there was lots of access for us to sell our goods.
That has changed. We now have about 30 trains that go through our communities; whereas, in the past there were about a half a dozen a day that would go through our communities. A long train used to be 40 boxcars. Now it's not uncommon to see 100 boxcars.
Along with that, we are told that about 10% of the goods that go through our communities have hazardous material on them. That is significant. It's really significant when each one of our six communities in the regional district of Bulkley-Nechako operates with a volunteer fire department.
These men and women leave their families and volunteer their time to give back to the community, to make sure that we have a safe community in a place where their families can grow up and be part of living here in a rural lifestyle.
It's not fair for us to be told, as communities, that we have a joint responsibility to keep hazardous material and that, if there is a problem in our area, we will need to be responding to those things. We do not have the equipment, as volunteers, to address that.
At a recent meeting in the early part of November, we had a presentation from CN Rail at the regional district. Our understanding from the presentation was that there is no equipment in our regional district of Bulkley-Nechako, which has a bit more than 300 kilometres of rail line in length from one end to the other. There is equipment in Prince George, as well in Terrace, British Columbia.
What we understand is that train personnel—should there be a derailment, should there be a fire or anything like that—would need to come out of Edmonton. We were told that if there were something, we would need to somehow get close enough to a derailment to check to make sure what the bar-code was on the side of the train, and that if we got that information and sent it to CN, they would be able to tell us what was in that derailed car.
That's not a viable solution when you're working with volunteers. They give of their time. There needs to be quicker access to an emergency.
If there were an emergency in the town of Vanderhoof, which I am very familiar with, many of our emergency personnel would be in a tough situation because our volunteer fire department, which is our emergency response team, is within about a half a block of the rail line.
To me, it would just put us at a really [Technical difficulty—Editor]. We would have to evacuate our town while we were waiting for the information coming back of what was in those boxcars that were derailed.
Recently there was an accident that came through our community during my time as mayor and the first I heard about it was when I received a call from the local news media, asking me what I thought about the rail accident in my community.When I called to ask about it, I was basically told that they were taking care of it and that they were okay.
When there was a derailment just east of our community and I had some concern about how close it was to the Nechako River, again I was told that this wasn't something we needed to worry about and that they were taking care of it.