Family left with questions in workplace death of CP Rail engineer
Credit to Author: Derrick Penner| Date: Tue, 10 Dec 2019 02:24:33 +0000
The widow of a CP Rail engineer killed on the job on Dec. 2 is still struggling with questions about the death of her husband, a safety-conscious, long-serving company veteran.
“My first question was how did this happen,” said Brenda McLean. “My husband had been working there 32 years and is like the safest guy there.”
Kirk Charles McLean, 56 and the father of two grown sons, was killed at CP Rail’s Port Coquitlam yard.
“This should not have happened,” she said. “My biggest concern is I don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
McLean’s death was the 10th railway fatality in the last 24 months in Canada, according to the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference.
Kirk McLean was killed in a workplace accident Dec. 2 in the CP rail yard in Port Coquitlam. Multiple investigations are being held into his death.
Brenda McLean was told that her husband had just left the train he had just brought in to the CP yard and was walking across tracks on his way to book off from his shift when he was struck by the moving cars of another train.
In a brief exchange with the coroner the morning after the incident, she said she learned that the scene was very dark and initial pictures showed Kirk had his hood up and appeared to be looking down.
For her, that raises questions about why there wasn’t better lighting, whether there had been radio communication to alert others that her husband had just brought a train into the yard, and management’s role when two trains or more are moving in the yard.
She put some of her concerns in a letter that was sent to investigators, a copy of which was forwarded to Postmedia by a family spokesman.
“Not I, my boys or hundreds of people who worked with Kirk will ever believe that nothing was ‘wrong’ that night,” she wrote in the letter.
The Transportation Safety Board is still “gathering information to determine what level of investigation we would do,” according to TSB spokesman Christopher Krepski.
The board’s objective is to classify the seriousness of transportation occurrences within 72 hours of the TSB being notified “to the extent practicable,” according to a policy document on the board’s website, but “it takes the time it takes” to investigate, Krepski said.
Locomotive engineer Kirk Charles McLean was killed in this Port Coquitlam rail yard accident on Dec. 2
The B.C. Coroners Service would only confirm that it is investigating the death of a man in his 50s on Dec. 2 in Port Coquitlam and “it would be premature to comment on any findings during the early stages of our investigation,” said spokesman Andy Watson, because “it would be speculative at this point.”
CP Rail spokesman Jeremy Berry, in a statement that didn’t name McLean, said that a thorough investigation is underway and “no further details are being released at this time.”
Union spokesman Christopher Monette said the Teamsters Canada Rail Conference, which represents 3,500 CP workers, said they share the family’s frustration.
Such investigations “really do take time,” Monette said, and while the union has participated in parts of the investigation, “we’re still far from having a complete picture of what happened.”
“We can only really hope Brother McLean’s family get the answers they deserve as soon as possible,” Monette said.
In the meantime, the family is planning a celebration of life for Kirk mcLean, which is set for Thursday at the Best Western Plus Mission City Lodge.
Brenda said she and her husband first visited B.C. in 1986 to see Expo 86.
Born in Hamilton, “Steel Town,” Brenda said Kirk loved “his Hamilton Tiger Cats,” but they headed west from Toronto to follow an opportunity for a solid career with the railway at the suggestion of her sister’s former husband.
He started as a brakeman, worked his way up to locomotive engineer and loved every part of the job, she said. And he had talked about possibly retiring next year.
“Just that he was on his own and ran this train, he was up in the canyon and it was beautiful,” she said.
He was also a devoted family man who volunteered with Mission Minor Hockey Association eventually coaching his son’s teams, Devon and Jordan, who are now 24 and 22.
She said the doorbell of their Mission home rang after midnight last Monday, and at first she thought their younger son might have forgotten his keys.
“I got up and coming down the stairs, you can see out, and all I could see was a sea of black,” she said, CP Rail police officers, RCMP and representatives from victim services.
“All I remember hearing is the word fatal, and I lost it,” she said. “And then I had to tell the boys, my mom lives with us and she was quite distraught.”