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A runaway freight train loaded with crude oil rolled unattended into the center of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in the early hours of July 6, 2013, jumped the tracks and exploded, killing 47 people and destroying much of the small town's downtown. It was one of the deadliest rail disasters in Canadian history.

The 73-car Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway train had been parked for the night on a descending grade at Nantes, about seven miles uphill, according to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada. Investigators found that too few handbrakes had been set to hold it. The train began to roll on its own and reached roughly 65 mph before it derailed near the town's main intersection at about 1:15 a.m.

Dozens of tank cars filled with volatile Bakken shale oil ruptured and ignited, sending fireballs and rivers of burning oil through streets lined with bars, shops and homes. More than 30 buildings were leveled. Many of the victims had been inside the Musi-Cafe, a downtown bar that was crowded when the fire reached it.

Residents flooded the regional 911 center in nearby St-Georges-de-Beauce with calls in the minutes after the blast. The recordings, released the following year, capture French-language emergency traffic as call-takers struggled to grasp the scale of the fire and relay word to firefighters. A compilation aired by Radio-Canada strings the calls together minute by minute between 1:16 a.m. and 2:38 a.m.

In its final report, issued in August 2014, the safety board listed 18 causes and contributing factors, spreading blame across the railway's operating practices and weak federal oversight. "Accidents never come down to a single individual, a single action or a single factor," board chair Wendy Tadros said.

Three former railway employees, engineer Thomas Harding, manager Jean Demaitre and rail traffic controller Richard Labrie, were charged with criminal negligence causing the 47 deaths. After a trial that ran into 2018, a Quebec jury acquitted all three on January 19 of that year. "I am deeply sorry," Harding told reporters afterward. Montreal, Maine and Atlantic had sought bankruptcy protection within weeks of the disaster.