The province praised the Ontario Northland Transportation Commission on Tuesday for its fast response to a derailment last week that resulted in a huge spill of sulphuric acid into the Blanche River.

Ontario Northland tanker cars sit on their side about nine kilometres north of Englehart, Ont., on Tuesday following a train derailment that happened last Friday.
(Rick Owen/Northern News/Canadian Press)

Northern Development Minister Rick Bartolucci says he was "very, very pleased" with how quickly railway officials were on the scene and how quickly they contained the spill.

Bartolucci says people in the area should have confidence in the railway's ability to deal with accidents and make the necessary repairs and improvements afterwards.

Meanwhile, government environment crews continue working to neutralize 150,000 litres of acid dumped in the river. But people who live in the area question whether restoring the Blanche River to a pristine state is even possible.

George Moerman, who lives on the outskirts of Englehart, Ont., near where the train hauling the sulphuric acid jumped the tracks, believes the Blanche will never be the same.

"Once it's spilled, it's gone. Like, you can't retrieve this anymore," he said. "It's pretty awesome when you think what [the spill] might cause further down the line."

Lime is being added to the river upstream from the spill, which workers hope will combine with spring melt runoff to neutralize the acid spill, and eventually repair the environmental damage.

"Right now, we've got a team of experts in doing some daily monitoring, measuring all over the place," said Larry Lefebvre, a senior provincial environmental officer. "It'll take a while, but we'll be sampling every day for a while, until everything returns back to normal."

But for some Englehart residents, a return to normalcy is hard to grasp, especially with the knowledge that tankfuls of corrosive liquid have leached into the river.

Fish washing up on the banks

Talk in the town's coffee shops and gas stations is not only about how the derailment happened in the first place but also about how the environmental catastrophe will affect them in the long term.

"I just want to know a little bit more … if it's going to affect our water in town, or the fishing this season," Andrea Joiner said.

Dead fish have begun washing up on the banks and the 1,500 residents of Englehart are warned not to let their livestock drink the water.

"We're finding some small, three- to four-inch minnows that lived in that small stream on the banks of the Blanche, but nothing further south," Lefebvre told CBC News.

"It tells us that the environment within the creek was non-conducive to having fish live there; the pH was low to a point where the fish couldn't survive."

Drinking water in the town, which comes from a municipal well system, isn't thought to be threatened by the spill.

Lefebvre pointed out that the spill is contained, allowing crews to "treat right at the scene, right at the culvert."

Boxcars still stuck in the mud

Still, he acknowledged cleanup teams have their work cut out for them. What's left of the sulphuric acid is being transferred to new tankers while beat-up boxcars loaded with zinc and copper still lie in the mud.

Surveying the scene, Lefebvre said he's never attended the site of such a large spill.

According to the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, about 570 trains jump the track every year. More than a quarter of them are carrying dangerous chemicals or goods.

Ontario Northland Railway says it will investigate why the train derailed when the cleanup is complete.

The railway expects to have the tracks clear by Thursday.