Canadian oil train explodes in small town At least five people died and 40 were missing on Sunday after a runaway train carrying crude oil exploded and destroyed the centre of a small Canadian town in a disaster that raises fresh questions about transporting oil by rail. The train had been hauling crude from North Dakota to eastern Canada, and was parked, without a driver, outside the town of Lac-Mégantic, Québec, when it began rolling downhill, gathering speed and derailing on a curve at 1am on Saturday. IN Canada Each tanker carried 30,000 gallons of crude oil. Four cars caught fire and exploded in a huge orange-and-black fireball that mushroomed hundreds of feet into the air and flattened dozens of buildings, including a popular bar. Police were investigating the disaster, and would talk to everyone involved. "Every time the Surete [Québec police] needs to investigate, we need to rule out any foul play," Benoit Richard, a spokesman, told reporters. Right now we cannot say it is a criminal act. We can only say we are looking at it as if it was. The transportation of oil by railway has skyrocketed in the past year as crude producers have sought alternatives to pipelines that are already full to capacity. Previous accidents led to messy spills rather than life-threatening explosions. Very few injured people were treated in hospitals, indicating those caught in the blast had either escaped or died. "It is a black-and-white situation," Rejean Hebert, Québec health minister, told reporters. It is not clear why the train began rolling down towards the town, or why the crude oil, not normally considered highly explosive, blew up. The rail line is owned by Montreal, Maine & Atlantic, which said the engineer had secured the train for the night and left. "That's the first thing I would think of: did someone release all the brakes?" asked Guy Landrio, a Warren, Pennsylvania, rail consultant with 37 years of industry experience. In my experience, a train doesn't just simply let itself go down the hill into a town. There's usually a cause behind it. Genevieve Guilbault, spokeswoman for the coroner's office, said the dead were burned beyond recognition and that DNA and dental records would probably need to be used for identification. "Given the size and intensity of the blast, you can imagine the condition of the bodies," she told reporters. White vapour still rose on Sunday from the town centre, which police have cordoned off. Photographs showed shattered buildings, burning piles of rubble and stumps of burnt trees. Residents said they were particularly concerned about people who had been inside the Musi-Café bar, which was close to the centre of the blast. Yvon Rosa said he and a friend had just left the Musi-Café when they saw the train hurtling toward them. As the town centre exploded, they ran to the lake, jumped in a boat and went out on to the water until morning. It was incredible. The smoke, the heat - fire everywhere. There were people running. . . It was like the apocalypse," he told Reuters news agency. About 2,000 of the town's inhabitants were taken to places of shelter after the blast - scores at a school. Outside the building, Louise Boulet, 65, looked at a local newspaper that had published an aerial view of downtown. One of the flattened buildings was the house where her 63-year old sister, Marie-France Boulet, lived. She is dead for sure. If she were alive, her car would not still be there," she said, pointing to a burnt-out vehicle in the picture. Lac-Mégantic, a town of 6,000 on the edge of a deep blue lake and ringed by forests of pine and birch, is about 255km east of Montréal and close to the ÙS border with Maine and Vermont. The disaster will focus attention on the merits of TransCanada Corp's proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands of Alberta to the Texas coast, a project President Barack Obama is considering whether to approve. Proponents of Keystone XL, which environmentalists strongly oppose on the grounds that extracting crude from the tar sands generates more greenhouse gas emissions than regular drilling, say shipping oil by pipeline is safer than using rail freight.