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in their private vehicles passing by would stop and hand you out something to eat or drink.
    Occasionally people would come by looking for their friends or relatives in the evacuated zones and were worried that they may still be inside. It was actually lucky that evacuation efforts took place at night and then over the course of a Sunday. Most parents were in the company of their children and other family members and were evacuated together. If this incident had occurred during a weekday when parents were at work and children were at school or with caregivers, the evacuations would have been much more chaotic.
    Such evacuations can run the risk of stay-behind looters. Later in the afternoon I chased down three teenagers in my evacuated zone and escorted them to the perimeter with a “don’t come back or else” warning.
    At midnight, another OPP officer arrived to relieve me. As I headed south on Highway 10 back to the detachment, it was eerie driving through the deserted main street of what had become a ghost town. After being on my feet for most of the last eighteen hours, I was beat and ready to head to my thankfully non-evacuation-zone home. It had been an exhausting yet exhilarating day on the job playing a very small part in emptying a city of 116 square kilometres.
    With just a few hours of sleep, I was back up for Monday’s day shift. Recently elected Mississauga mayor Hazel McCallion had officially declared the evacuated areas of her city closed for business until further notice. As I made my way to the office, I was soon part of the traffic chaos created by the QEW closing overnight. Toronto’s regional commuter rail transit system in the west end was closed as well. Traffic was gridlock. It would have been much worse if it were not that many commuters were off work for Remembrance Day. That day I was assigned to the north end of our detachment area covering Highway 401, the only other major artery into Toronto that was open to traffic. In the afternoon I was reassigned to another roadblock location. A number of evacuees were making their way back to the cordoned-off areas in which they lived, in the hope that we could assist them in returning to their homes. Most of my day was spent trying to calm down the people who had not yet been given authorization to return to their homes. The only ones who I allowed back in were those that had approval from the emergency operations centre to retrieve necessary medications. Many could not make alternative arrangements because their medical practitioners’ offices had also been evacuated.
    By Tuesday, chemical experts on site determined that the hole and leak in the chlorine tank was likely caused when it blew open. It seemed the resulting pillar of fire and heat sucked most of the chlorine to such a high altitude that it dispersed over a wide area. Allowed to return home that day were 144,000 evacuees. The rest of the 73,000 evacuees gradually returned home through to Friday as more and more areas were determined to be safe. Thankfully, the QEW was reopened in time for Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic. The city of Mississauga was officially reopened at 7:45 p.m., nearly six days after the derailment occurred. Mayor McCallion said, “If this had happened a half-mile farther down the track—either east or west—we would have seen thousands of people wiped out. It’s a miracle it happened here [in an industrial area].” 1
    Many agreed with the mayor that it was a miracle that there was no loss of life and few injuries resulting from an accident of such a large scale. Only one arrest was made during the incident, of a man trying to run a roadblock. At the time, it ended up being the largest peacetime evacuation in North America with over 220,000 people from Mississauga and nearby Oakville leaving their homes. (That record stood until 2005 when close to one million residents evacuated their homes in New Orleans to escape Hurricane Katrina.)
    Short-term assignments like