Apocalyptic footage shows a Canadian train crew trapped in their locomotive as it’s devoured by a wildfire.
Through the engine’s windows, the towering inferno can be seen raging through the treeline just a few feet away from the unmoving train, the world around them rendered completely orange. Some of the flames come close to licking the glass, as the wildfire blows across the tracks.
“This could potentially overtake us here, this has gotten a little scary,” one worker filming the video said, sounding surprisingly nonchalant. “Holy s***.”
“Y’all need to hurry up here. Like, seriously, we’re encased in flames now,” the cameraman adds.
“This has got to move f***ing quick here,” he added, after communicating with someone on the radio.
The incident took place near Armstrong, Ontario, said Sol Mamakwa, an Ontario lawmaker who uploaded the video. Wildfires have been scouring their way across northern Canada this week, with at least 54 fires active in the country, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center. Some 4.7 million acres of land have been burned by wildfires this year.
The blazes have forced dozens of communities to evacuate, including First Nations communities. Downwind of the disaster, Toronto, the largest city in the country, has been choked by wildfire smoke, turning the sky orange and plunging air quality levels to the worst in the world.
The train engineers in the video reportedly made it out safe. The Canadian National Railway Company (CN) confirmed that the train was stopped in Armstrong, telling Global News that all employees in the area were evacuated overnight Monday.
How they got stuck is unclear. It appears that they’re waiting for another train to pass them, which is seen later in the video, so they can proceed on the single track ahead. A thread on the r/railroading subreddit has a more dramatic telling, claiming that the engineers had crashed into the train cars that they left behind after going back to rescue a foreman, causing the engines to shut down. Allegedly, they then tried to escape on a hi-rail, a truck that can drive on both roads and train tracks, but it caught on fire, forcing them to make it out on foot. A movie-worthy story if true, but we couldn’t independently verify this account.
Even with the hellish conditions bearing down around them, the engineers were able to find moments of levity. When the other train finally emerged through the inferno and lumbered past them, the camera man couldn’t help but exclaim.
“Woo! That’s a meet and a half, eh?” he said.
More on the environment: A Staggering Number of People Are Dying Because of Record Heatwaves
The post Terrifying Video Shows Locomotive Engulfed in Wildfire Flames appeared first on Futurism.
