INNISFAIL - Following repeated "super dangerous" games of chicken with trains by young school children, the town is redoubling its efforts to end the potentially deadly activity at a popular unregulated railway crossing area near the schools campus.
"It's mind boggling what these kids are doing, How long can you keep continuing to do that?''' said Mayor Jim Romane. "It's a very serious situation. We have got to do something.
"It's obvious education is not working," he added. "If anything it's making it more the thing to do. Trying to do it through education is not going to work."
Disturbing details of near-fatal chicken game incidents were released this week by town and local RCMP officials following a serious rail track incident three weeks ago at an unregulated crossing area called White Rock Crossing, located near the intersection of 52nd and 54th avenues. According to local RCMP and emergency service officials, the crossing area is illegally accessed by Innisfailians, mostly school children, up to 200 times each school day.
"Some kids said they saw kids start to go under the train when it had stopped. Super dangerous. They were yelling at the kids, 'don't do that. That's dangerous,''' said Innisfail RCMP Const. Craig Nelson, the detachment's school resource officer.
"When they saw the kids were going to go they turned and ran away because they did not know what to do. They were scared," he added, noting the children could have easily been killed in front of friends. "In front of all of their friends. Can you imagine that? I can't imagine that. That would be one of the most terrible things I have seen in 15 years of police work."
Nelson said there has been at least half a dozen documented serious incidents since last September, with the ages of children involved being between seven and 11-yeaars-old. While there has been no fatalities or injuries to date there has been an escalation in the level of danger, from just "playing" around the trains by the tracks, to tagging with moving trains, and most alarming of all - the chicken game.
"One kid was literally running across the train tracks right in front of the train," said Nelson of an incident last March that was caught on video.
It was a serious close call that led to a full Canadian Pacific (CP) Police investigation. That incident, along with others, also triggered a new sense of urgency with council, and even with many local youth, to have the disturbing phenomenon at the unregulated crossing aggressively addressed.
"I think it (chicken game) is stupid and maybe they should put, not a bridge, a safer way, like a go sign or stop sign, or maybe they (students) should have some common sense and not play chicken with the trains at all," said one 13-year-old Grade 8 student from Innisfail Middle School (IMS) following classes on June 25.
On June 24 town council was publicly presented with a verbal staff report that laid out the chilling potentially deadly train track incidents being played out since the start of the 2018/19 school year.
Please read a full special report on this story in the July 2 Innisfail Province.
