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I live within shouting distance of the accident. I was busy bbm'ng and emailing with friends as I was watching it all happen live.
At 3:30 my daughter and I pulled into our parking lot. She heard the sirens but we hear them all the time as the accident area is built up and 4 highways converge. There are constant sirens here.
10 min later I heard choppers. I was out walking my dog and I figured that the chopper was WESCAM's but surprisngly it was the ORNGE! That's when I knew enough to run up stairs and flip on the scanner.
It took Ornge about 5 tries to land. King Rd was supposed to have an underpass the bypass the trains and the city had to buy land to build for this. Its a good thing that the delay's happened because the land that was cleared for this was the landing strip for 3 Ornge choppers.
There were at least 3 CACC's helping out. Toronto Ems sent a bus, Hamilton was here along with Halton.
I saw the choppers come and go. I will post some pics I took of them when I have a chance.
Sadly, 3 VIA employees died. We all like to listen to 'action' but when you hear people dying like this only hearts of stone aren't saddened.
I am outside right now and there are cops blocking off King Road (not King Street as one media outlet called it) and there will be a lot of people working thru the night and day(s) to clean this up.
Thank goodness there weren't more casualties, there was a train that derailed in '08 in the same place.
Thank goodness that this wasn't a freight train carrying god knows what. If this happened on Saturday and there were dangerous chemicals exploding and leaking I am 500 meters away.... I don't even want to contemplate this.
And thank goodness to all the police, fire, EMS, hydro, rail, etc, etc staff working their butts off, many logging off their day shift 5 hrs late.
On a nite when spoiled athletes play basketball and show and when millions watch actors walk on a red carpet you quickly learn what is important and really, why do we care about these people. The real heroes were working their asses off today.
The media were slow to the scene. I don't know when CH got there but CP24 and Global took almost 2 hours.
All comms on Halton"s EDACS system were extremely busy