New York Consul General Blames CP Rail for Wildfire That Destroyed Lytton, BC, in 2021

A pyrocumulus cloud, also known as a fire cloud, rises in the mountains above Lytton, B.C., on Aug.15, 2021. (The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)

New York Consul General Tom Clark says Canadian Pacific Railway (CP) is to blame for a wildfire that burned the town of Lytton, B.C., to the ground in 2021.

“In British Columbia there was a town called Lytton, and a train went through and sparks came off the rails,” said Clark in a July 14 interview with WXXI-TV in Plattsburgh, New York. “The town was destroyed, burnt out. It was turned into oblivion. There was nothing left of Lytton. So that concern is very real.”

Clark, a former CTV announcer, did not reveal any source for the claim, but a federal investigation conducted in 2021 contradicts his statement to an American interviewer, according to Blacklock’s Reporter.

There is no official cause of the Lytton fire, which is still being investigated by the RCMP and challenged in the B.C. Superior Court. The Epoch Times reported in May that Lytton was suing both Canadian National (CN) Rail and CP along with Transport Canada, alleging they were negligent by allowing trains to pass through the town at the peak of the 2021 heat dome temperatures.

The fire in the town was reported at 4:38 p.m. PST on June 30, 2021, amid “extreme hot and dry conditions combined with high velocity winds,” the Transportation Safety Board said. On June 29, the village saw the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada at 47.7 degrees centigrade.

A report by the Safety Board on Oct. 20, 2021, dismissed the train theory.

“The Board has not identified any link between railway operations and the fire,” said the report.

Evidence revealed that a 157-car CP coal train passed through the village at 40 kilometres an hour almost 20 minutes before the Lytton fire was reported. The investigation included soil sample testing, train crew interviews, scrutiny of satellite imagery and onboard video camera footage, and the train’s event recorder data, as well as the inspection of track and train components.

“No rail grinding activities or track work had taken place in the area that day or in the days before the first report of fire on June 30, 2021,” wrote the Safety Board. “The Board’s investigator inspected the train after it had been offloaded and was secured in Burnaby, B.C. looking for signs of hot bearings, burnt brake heads, built-up tread and other potential fire-creating causes. No anomalies were noted.”

“Interviews were conducted with railway employees engaged in operating trains in the area or in maintenance activities,” the report continued. “No anomalies were observed or reported.”

“There was no occurrence reported to the Safety Board by either Canadian National or Canadian Pacific, nor were they aware of any such occurrence when specifically asked by the Safety Board.”

The board dismissed the timing of the fire and freight train passing as a coincidence.