When is a small Quebec town (pop. 5,932) nearly as bright as Quebec City (pop. 516,622)?

[DreamGypsy]

The area of Quebec City is 186.9 square miles, Lac-Mégantic is 8.41 square miles.

Inferno from Quebec train derailment seen from space:

When a runaway oil train derailed and exploded in a small town in Quebec over the weekend, it sparked an inferno that was visible from space.

The disaster in Lac-Mégantic, near the Maine border, flattened dozens of buildings and left at least 15 people dead early Saturday. As of Tuesday, authorities were still searching for 35 people who remained missing, according to Canada's Globe and Mail.

The powerful Earth-observing Suomi NPP satellite captured an image of the region at 2:59 a.m. local time (6:59 GMT) on July 6, less than two hours after the deadly derailment. A giant blaze was picked up by the spacecraft's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), though cloud cover at the time of the accident slightly blurs the image, according to NASA's Earth Observatory, which released the picture.

<snip>

VIIRS can pick up the glow from auroras, wildfires, city lights and reflected moonlight with its "day-night band," which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared. This band is primarily designed to allow scientists to collect detailed data on cloud, snow and ice formations during nighttime hours, but it's sensitive enough to pick up light from a single ship in the ocean.

We can deploy satellites to observe our every disaster, but we can't deploy fail-safe brakes on trains.

By which I don't mean to imply that we should stop launching satellites...just that we should fix things here below as well.

[Suich]

1. Wow!

Amazing...thanks for the post, DreamGypsy!