ABSTRACT
The spectacular fireballs resulting from the derailment of Canadian Pacific Railway Train 54 in Mississauga, Ontario, just before midnight on Saturday, November 10, 1979, evoked widely different reactions in people with different interests: The poet "A fiery orange ball turning midnight into noon and evoking images of Dante's Inferno”. Railway Train was born in Chatham, Ontario; its 106 cars included 44 tankers containing propane, butane, toluene, styrene, naphtha, caustic soda, and 1 tank car of chlorine, which, unfortunately, was surrounded by several propane cars. Although some might challenge the use of "disaster" to describe the event, for the 240,000 residents of Mississauga, the entire city, whose living patterns were disrupted, disaster is an understatement. Since estimates of the losses in the Miracle of Mississauga ranged upward of $100 million, it was inevitable that there would be problems of the law.
