It’s a quiet Saturday night in 1979.
Residents in Mississauga, Ontario are asleep.
The next day is expected to be quiet for the thousands that live there.
Many would be looking forward to a nice breakfast with families, maybe some time with a newspaper crossword puzzle or even a walk to honour fallen heroes of the great war.
Not only is it Remembrance Day, it’s also a Sunday.
But that’s not what happened.
Seven minutes before midnight on Nov. 10, 1979, the city centre of Mississauga was rattled as windows shook and fireballs shot into the sky.
Within 24 hours, it became the site of the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx, and I share the story of the miracle that was the Mississauga Train Derailment!
The history of Mississauga begins on Aug. 2, 1805, when Toronto Township was formed by officials from York, now Toronto, purchased 85,000 acres of land from the Mississaugas under Treaty 14. Over time, the community began to grow and by the 1920s Mississauga was a popular place for residents of Toronto to visit to take advantage of the cottages along Lake Ontario.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Mississauga was more rural than urban, but a shift began in the 1960s. In 1965, with the desire to become a town put to area residents, they were given the choice of two names.
Mississauga or Sheridan. By a vote of 11,976 to 4,331, Mississauga won, and the Town of Mississauga was created.
Within a decade, it was clear that more urbanization was needed. In 1974, Mississauga amalgamated with Port Credit and Streetsville to form the City of Mississauga.
The city grew over the next few years, as lands were annexed, and the Square One Shopping Centre was opened. Today, it is the largest shopping centre in Ontario, and the second largest in Canada.
And as the 1970s decade came to a close, Mississauga was about to become the centre of one of the most significant disasters in Canadian history.
In the morning of Nov. 10, 1979, Canadian Pacific Train 54 was traveling along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad in the United States pulling along several cars.
It crossed into Canada, and collected a few more cars in Sarnia, including one tanker filled with chlorine.
There were three locomotives pulling the 106 cars, manned by three crew members: conductor Ted Nichol, engineer Keith Pruss and his son-in-law and brakeman Larry Krupa.
The journey to Toronto was expected to be simple as the train lumbered along at about 100 kilometres per hour.
But far behind the locomotive, about one-third of the way down the long train, disaster loomed as the 33rd car developed problems.
One of the wheels of the car was improperly lubricated causing friction and heat to build up as the train made its way towards Mississauga,
Anyone waiting at a crossing, waiting for the train to pass would see smoke and sparks fly as the 33rd car in the line passed by. When the train passed another train, the crew smelled smoke when it reached the car.
Eventually, the intense heat burned a hole through the axle and bearing.
Creating a loss of integrity, and with it the wheel started to wobble.
At 11:53 p.m., it reached a critical point and with a sudden jolt, a wheelset, consisting of an axle and pair of wheels, fell off the train car completely.
Lynne Riddel lived nearby heard a loud bang and looked towards the train crossing and saw a red-hot set of wheels fly 15 metres in the air.
It landed in her backyard.
Her father-in-law lived next door and ran over with a garden hose to spray the fiery wheels.
Meanwhile, without the axle, the train car immediately jumped the track.
There was no stopping the disaster.
Three kilometres away from the train crossing Ron Dabor and his wife Kay noticed sparks flying into the sky.
Unbeknownst to them on the track, tankers began smashing into each other, tearing through metal as they flew off the rails as propane, styrene and caustic soda poured out.
Thinking quickly, Dabor put his car into reverse and gunned the engine.
In a split second, a fireball shot up 1.5 kilometres into the air lighting up the dead of night.
People 100 kilometres away saw the sky suddenly brighten in the distance.
The explosion was followed by a massive shockwave that rocked Mississauga.
While the chain of events leading to the train derailment began outside the city, the actual derailment itself was not far from the city centre. Thousands of people, homes and businesses were located in the area around the tracks.
Rob Johnston, Lead Audio and Sound Design for Curiouscast podcast network, was a child at the time and he says that at first, he didn’t know what had happened.
Meanwhile Alphy McCann, another resident thought it was the worst-case scenario quote,
“I thought it was a nuclear attack. I was sure it was the end. I had gone to bed just before midnight, when all hell broke loose. I jumped out of bed and looked out the window. The sky was lit up with a huge orange flame.”
Wayne Zimmer, a 13-year-old boy living near the crash site, had a more whimsical idea… He thought it was a spaceship from another galaxy landing in Mississauga.
John McGlashen, who lived only three blocks away said,
“It was horrific. Our house shook. The windows rattled. The sky was bright orange, and when I saw the fireball, we were already running to the car, only with the clothes we had on, and on our way out of the city. We didn’t even know where we were going.”
Cal Millar, who worked for the Toronto Sun as a staff writer and lived close by said “There was a deafening roar, a brilliant glow and intense heat as I stepped out from a building that shielded me from the flaming train wreck. I dropped to my stomach and pressed my body close to the building. The day-like glow lasted for about a minute and soon the roof of the building that protected me was afire.”
The Dabors who saw the train spewing sparks in front of them reversed their car straight into a ditch, then leapt out of the car and ran for their lives leaving behind a $10,000 fur coat in the backseat.
Meanwhile at the front of the train, the three-man crew were sitting ducks.
The sudden loss of cars behind the locomotive caused the air pressure to fall and the brakes locked automatically as the fireball erupted engulfing the 32 cars connected to the locomotive and still on the track.
Larry Krupa, the brake man, yelled to Keith Pruss that they had a tanker on fire.
Pruss could see flames going up 40 storeys in the air and the line of derailing cars piling up, adding more fuel to the inferno.
Pruss said,
“It was like a small Hiroshima. It was just like flaming hell back there. I had visions of all those homes being engulfed.”
Pruss asked his son-in-law d to free the tankers.
Krupa gave a simple Okay.
As Krupa jumped from the locomotive, Pruss wondered if he would have to tell his daughter that he watched her husband die that night.
Without thinking of his own safety, Krupa ran down the train towards the burning cars and uncoupled two tankers allowing his father-in-law to pull the remaining cars from the growing fire and two kilometres down the track.
Krupa’s quick thinking and bravery saved the lives of the crew and prevented the disaster from becoming much worse.
Pruss said,
“He wasn’t hurt, thank God but I’ll tell you, I’m his father-in-law, and I wouldn’t have done that. He’s the boy who deserves the credit. If he hadn’t done that, more than half of Mississauga would have gone up.”
As soon as people reported a giant explosion, firefighters in Mississauga rushed to the scene. At 12:01 a.m., less than ten minutes later, a second explosion rocked Mississauga as a tanker car was thrown one kilometre away.
The first responder on scene was Bob Barridge, a police officer. He said,
“I had my back to the wreck, and she blew. My hair was singed. I felt I was dead.”
Meanwhile, Charlene Heath, a local resident said,
“We heard a major explosion. We watched as a tanker car was projected hundreds of feet in the air. The sky was burning red.”
The flash from the explosion was so big it was seen in Niagara Falls, 70 kilometres southeast of Mississauga and reported to police.
In Toronto, tens of thousands were woken from their sleep by the sound. Tom Godden thought it was a different type of accident quote,
“My first thought was that a plane went down. I remember that the first blast woke me up in Malton, and I saw the second fireball from my apartment. It was a scary situation.”
Firefighter Charlie Duncan had just arrived at the scene when the explosion happened. He said,
“I was laying lines and can remember hearing a hissing noise. I knew there would be an explosion and turned to run. I saw large pieces of metal flying by. I thought, ‘if the radiant heat doesn’t get, ya, one of those will.’ Something hit me in the back, I don’t know what it was. My coat was steaming, so I lay in the ditch to cool it off. It was a matter of obligation to go back to put the fire out, it’s a simple as that.”
In Toronto’s west end, Marie Lucinger-Busic was walking out of her wedding reception when she saw Mississauga’s sky burning red.
Emergency lines across were flooded with calls.
Every firefighter and police officer in the city was soon joined by the Metro Toronto Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Ontario Provincial Police.
One group of firefighters were at a wedding 30 km away in Georgetown.
They dropped everything and arrived wearing fire gear over their tuxedos.
But as they arrived, they quickly realized there was little they could do.
The flames were burning so hot they couldn’t come close.
Their only course of action was to use water to cool down the cars and wait for the fire to burn out.
This would’ve been a fine plan except for one thing.
In the inferno, buried in the mangled wreckage was the car they picked up in Sarnia.
It carried 90 tons of liquid chlorine.
At the time it was believed that 70 percent of the chlorine burned up in fireball that shot up 1.5 kilometres into the atmosphere but there was no way to know for sure.
If the fire ignited the liquid choline it would turn into the poisonous gas phosgene, also called chlorine gas.
Phosgene at room temperature was used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, leading to the deaths of 85,000 soldiers.
If phosgene gas were produced by fire, it would put hundreds of thousands of people in Mississauga, and even Toronto, at risk.
Such a scenario was not out of the realm of possibility.
Only four years earlier, an explosion of a rail tanker full of chlorine killed four people in Niagara Falls, New York. \
In Youngstown, Florida in the mid-1970s, chlorine gas leaked from a derailed tank car and choked the motors of passing cars, leaving eight people trapped where they died struggling to breathe.
There was only one course of action for Mississauga in 1979.
Evacuation.
and it would fall on the new mayor of Mississauga.
Hazel McCallion.
Born in 1921 in Port Daniel, Quebec. to a father who owned a fishing and canning company, and a stay-at-home mom.
As an adult, she became a star hockey player for the local team and eventually went became a professional player making five dollars a game for a Montreal team part of a three-team women’s league.
She had desires to study in university, but her family couldn’t afford it, so instead she went to work for Kellogg for almost two decades until she was ready for a new challenge.
Politics.
McCallion became a new member of the Streetsville Planning Board in 1964 and served as Chair of the Board in 1966 and again in 1968.
Later that year, she became Deputy Reeve of Streetsville and then elected as Mayor of Streetsville in 1970, serving until December 1973. when Streetsville amalgamated with the Town of Mississauga and the Town of Port Credit in 1974.
In this new municipality, McCallion was elected to city council, and kept her seat, winning by acclamation in 1976.
From 1974 to 1978, she sat on nearly every committee in the city, along with various federal and provincial committees.
McCallion became known for a forceful personality and boundless energy to get things done.
It earned her the nickname of Hurricane Hazel, after the deadly hurricane that struck Toronto in the 1950s.
On Dec. 1, 1978, she was elected mayor of Mississauga, defeating incumbent Ron Searle by 3,000 votes and became first woman to hold that post.
She had no idea one of the biggest challenges of her mayoral career was around the corner.
On Nov 11, 1979, at 1:30 a.m., police began to knock on the doors of the homes in the immediate area, ordering people to drop everything and evacuate.
6,000 people were affected by this first order and sent to the Square One shopping mall, which became an emergency shelter.
McCallion said,
“When I got dressed. I rushed down to Square One and saw these people there. And they had come in their nightclothes. People left without their prescriptions. It was a very serious situation, so we had to get organized.”
One of those evacuees was Matthew Wilkinson. He was a young child at the time and doesn’t remember being moved as his mother never woke him when they are left home.
He said he went to bed in Mississauga and woke up in Oakville. His father was working at the hospital and had no idea where his family had gone, and it took him half a day to locate them.
Meanwhile at the crash site, firefighters poured water on the chlorine tank in the fire to keep the car as cool as possible.
At 4 a.m., a third explosion erupted as more propane tanks ignited which second wave of evacuations.
Gertrude Hammill was one of 27,000 people evacuated and described the terrifying situation, quote. “It’s impossible to describe the anxiety we had on having to leave our homes, and on not being allowed back into our homes.”
It was especially horrifying to leave pets behind, not knowing if they would return to wagging tails or not.
People went to city hall to drop off their house keys hoping emergency crews could feed their pets.
At 6 a.m., firefighters and emergency personnel discovered that the chlorine tanker was leaking from a one metre sized hole.
The discovery was made just as firefighters were starting to make headway.
They continued to allow a controlled burn, while concentrating water on the chlorine tank to keep it from heating up and exploding.
Every firefighter and emergency personnel knew that if chlorine gas was released, they would be the first victims gasping for air.
As the sun came up, buses and ambulances lined up to Mississauga Hospital to begin evacuation efforts.
Soon after, the wind picked up and more people were told to drop everything and leave their homes.
Rob Johnston woke up that morning, knowing something odd happened the night before but unaware of what was to come for his family, and the rest of Mississauga.
Peel Regional Police officers drove through neighbourhoods, and over loudspeakers told residents to leave. Officers then knocked on every door to make sure people had left or were in the process of leaving.
Some refused to leave, believing the threat was not as bad as reported.
Willa Wilson, an elderly woman, stayed in her home with four members of her family. When asked later why she didn’t leave, she said,
“I don’t know. We just decided to stay. I didn’t feel it was that important.”
As the morning went on, things didn’t improve and the evacuees who were at the Square One Mall were sent to high school gyms farther away as the risk increased.
James Fleming, the assistant editor of Macleans Magazine, was living in a20-storey apartment building with his wife and new baby Sarah when the blast rocked them awake.
They stayed in their home that first night.
The next morning, he called the police and was told he was on the fringe of the evacuated area.
Fleming said,
“I didn’t like the south of his voice, so we threw some clothes into a suitcase and went to my parents’ home in Oakville. We could smell the chlorine.”
Back in Toronto, new bride Marie Lucinger-Busic, who saw the red sky over Mississauga the night before, was surprised when several of her guests attended the luncheon reception wearing formal outfits from the night before.
That’s when she learned of the disaster, and that many of her guests were unable to return home.
At 1 p.m. on Nov 11, experts from Dow Chemical were now in the area and ran a computer simulation to produce the weather forecasts for the next few days.
Realizing that the weather is not going to help them, city officials expanded the evacuation boundary.
Over 70,000 people from an area covering 64 square kilometres were now displaced.
Russ Harris, who went by the nickname Lucky, was in his camper on his way to do some fishing on his Sunday off. As he approached the road block, a police officer told him,
“You’re not going to do any fishing today. Get the hell out of here.”
As Harris drove away, he realized he forgot his heart medication.
He turned back but the cop stopped him again.
When Harris asked where he could park his camper in case, he had heart problems, the officer told him to follow his patrol car.
That night, Harris slept in his camper outside the police station.
The next morning, he heard a knock on the camper door. quote “I opened it and there was a cop standing with a plate of bacon and eggs. Beautiful.”
By 3:40 p.m., a sixth evacuation order was issued, which included all nearby nursing homes and the Queensway General Hospital.
Evacuees from earlier in the day were displaced once again, this time to the International Trade Centre on Airport Road.
By now point, Rob Johnston and his family were leaving the city as well.
Over 1,000 patients were relocated from the hospitals in Mississauga, using buses and dozens of ambulances to hospitals across the region.
As firefighters did their best to cool down the burning wreckage, a seventh evacuation order was issued.
This included neighboring Oakville, Ontario.
James Fleming and his family, who had left their apartment for his parents’ place in Oakville, were now being evacuated to Collingwood, 123 kilometres to the south.
24 hours after the derailment 250,000 people were evacuated from Mississauga and the surrounding area in the largest peacetime evacuation in North America.
At 12:30 a.m., Mayor Hazel McCallion told the media that no one was to be inside Mississauga. She said the city was quote:
“Closed until further notice.”
Meanwhile people in Hamilton and Toronto’s west end sat on pins and needles wondering if they too would be evacuated.
At the crash site, exhausted firefighters continued to work around the clock to do what they could to avoid a deadly disaster.
Their hard work was beginning to pay off.
Things were cooling down and it seemed the risk of a chlorine gas explosion was falling with each passing hour.
But 15 kilograms of liquid chlorine was still leaking out of the tanker by the hour so there was still a risk.
Mississauga was like a post-apocalyptic movie, as an eerie silence fell over the entire city.
On the third day, fires were finally out.
The chlorine was still leaking, but it was estimated that 75 percent had evaporated into the atmosphere.
Emergency personnel also drained remaining propane tankers to prevent a fourth explosion.
At one point, two small eruptions c sent plumes of chlorine gas high into the air.
The poisonous cloud hung briefly over the area but then the wind blew it south over Lake Ontario.
At 1 p.m. on Nov 14 11,000 evacuees were allowed to return to their homes.
Everyone was in such a rush that it created a seven-hour traffic jam.
Others lined up at barricades so that they could be ready to go home as soon as they were given the all-clear.
On the fourth day, emergency crews were pumping out the chlorine remaining in the tanker, a process that continued into day five.
That’s when the first major injuries were reported when eight firefighters accidentally walked into a pocket of chlorine gas and were hospitalized.
Thankfully the rest of the day, more evacuees returned home.
Finally, on the sixth day, emergency crews had drained almost all the liquid chlorine from the tanker.
Deputy Fire Chief Ross Kelly said of the entire situation,
“That was the frightening part, not knowing what it would do. This was not like other fires, where at least you know what is going to happen. The amazing thing was that no one backed down. We just kept going, and going at it, and we beat it.”
With the risk of a chlorine gas explosion now gone, half of the remaining 33,000 evacuees were allowed home by the afternoon.
Six days after the disaster began, at 7:42 p.m., the last evacuation order was lifted and the remaining evacuees walked back through their own front doors. Mississauga was finally reopened.
The November 26, 1979, cover of Macleans featured a picture of the burning wreckage and in large letters the headline,
“Mississauga Nightmare”
But that wasn’t entirely accurate.
The Halifax Explosion killed 2,000 and injured 9,000 at least and you can hear all about in my podcast episode from early 2024.
The Mississauga Train Derailment wasn’t even close to a tragedy it was more of a miracle.,.
How many people died due to the Mississauga Train Derailment?
Zero.
Injuries?
Beyond the hospitalized firefighters, there was one injury.
Hazel McCallion sprained her ankle while at the wreck site.
That didn’t stop her from giving updates to the press and citizens. At one point, Ontario Provincial Police deputy commissioner Jim Erskine carried her into a press conference.
Dead pets?
None.
Well…one pet.
A cat that was left alone in a house decided the law of the jungle applied, and it ate the canary it shared a home with.
Thanks to emergency personnel and volunteers in the city who fed an estimated 10,000 cats, dogs and other pets that were left in homes over the course of those six days there weren’t more pet victims.
Buildings and crumbling ruins from the explosion?
Beyond the area around the railway line that was hit by the explosion, most places dealt with, at most, a few broken or cracked windows.
This is why the event is called The Mississauga Miracle.
and at the heart of this story is the fast-thinking hero Larry Krupa and the tireless dedication of emergency crews, Hazel McCallion said,
“If this had happened a half mile farther down the track, either east or west, we would have seen thousands of people wiped out. It’s a miracle it happened here.”
And for residents like Rob Johnston, the disaster became a “where were you when?” moment in their lives.
But what happened, when life went back to normal?
[TRANSITION]The Mississauga Train Derailment has been studied by many other cities and became a model for emergency plans.
In the United States and Canada, regulations changed so that any rail line carrying hazardous goods into or near a major populated area had to have hotbox detectors.
These detectors can identify a problem like the one that occurred in Mississauga, before the wheels literally fall off the train.
The evacuation of 250,000 people also remained a record until Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005
The City of Mississauga sued Canadian Pacific to recoup costs of the massive emergency services bill.
The city eventually dropped the suit after Canadian Pacific agreed to drop its opposition to passenger service on its tracks near Mississauga.
This allowed for GO Transit to open the Milton line only two years later.
Mississauga band, Death from above 1979, immortalized the event in their 2014 album The Physical World with the song Trainwreck 1979.
Larry Krupa, the hero who prevented a further disaster, was awarded the Order of Canada for his bravery and inducted into the North America Railway Hall of Fame.
As for Hazel McCallion, t. She was elected mayor of Mississauga for the next three decades, until her retirement in 2014 at the age of 93.
On the 40th anniversary of the disaster, McCallion said,
“I don’t know of any other thing that has happened in my 36 years as mayor that was as serious and as demanding and as stressful as the Mississauga derailment.”
Hazel McCallion died on Jan. 29, 2023, at the age of 101.
And thanks to her, and many others who fought the flames and assisted evacuees, thousands of other people got to live long full lives after the disaster as well.
