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Railroad CEO Edward Burkhardt plans to travel Wednesday to the Quebec town that was laid to waste when a runaway train jumped the track and unleashed an inferno. Burkhardt said he has been getting hate mail. FULL STORY | PHOTOS | WAS IT A CRIMINAL ACT?

By Ben Brumfield and Paula Newton, CNN

July 10, 2013 -- Updated 1434 GMT (2234 HKT)

Train wreckage is pictured in Lac Megantic, Quebec, on Tuesday, July 9. Seventy-two tanker cars carrying crude oil barreled down the track before derailing and exploding in Lac Megantic on Saturday, July 6.

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Train derails, explodes in Canadian town

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

NEW: About 45 people listed as missing, official says
Railroad CEO Ed Burkhardt has been receiving hate mail, he says
He believes firefighters with good intentions may have made a deadly mistake
72 unsecured oil tank cars roared into Lac-Megantic Saturday, killing at least 15

Lac-Megantic, Quebec (CNN) -- "I hope I'm not going to get shot."

That's a quote from the CEO of the rail company responsible for the train that doused Lac-Megantic with flaming crude oil, according to Canadian broadcaster CBC.

Edward Burkhardt plans to travel Wednesday to the Quebec town laid to waste over the weekend when 72 tanker cars jumped the track and unleashed an inferno.

It killed at least 15 people, and 45 are still missing, feared dead, likely vaporized by the intense blaze, officials have said. The bodies recovered so far are at a lab in Montreal for identification, a health official said Wednesday.

Lac-Megantic Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche said she had had no contact from Burkhardt regarding his visit.

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When asked by a reporter in a Wednesday morning news conference if she would meet with him, she declined to answer. Capt. Michel Forget of the Quebec Provincial Police also would not say if he would talk to the rail chief.

Meanwhile, Burkhardt says he's been getting hate mail.

It didn't help when he told reporters where part of the responsibility lies.

"I think the fire department played a role in this," he said Tuesday. "That's incontrovertible."

Burkhardt said he does not blame firefighters who put out a minor blaze on the train some time before it began rolling downhill, but he believes that what they thought was due diligence may have actually helped turn the parked locomotive train into a runaway oil bomb.

The fire department in Nantes has rejected the notion.

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Crime and blame

In Lac-Megantic, investigators have asked fire crews to stop spraying down the still-smoldering wreckage to preserve as much of the remaining evidence as possible.

Some of it has led them to believe that a "criminal act" may have contributed to the train crash, Forget said Tuesday.

The investigation into the cause of the disaster has shifted its focus to possible foul play.

"We are no longer treating this as just an accident," Quebec police spokesman Benoit Richard said Wednesday.

However, Forget said, law enforcement officials will lay no blame until the evidence and investigation shows exactly what happened.

The gutted center of town and the crumpled hulls of the tanker cars are now a crime scene. Firefighters are still monitoring hotspots in the wreckage, a fire official said Wednesday.

Getting back to business

All businesses and factories in the affected region that are able will be reopening Wednesday morning, Roy-Laroche said.

Tuesday, some 1,200 residents were allowed to return to their homes in the area. Another 800 were still being kept away due to the investigation and safety issues, authorities said.

The mayor said the Red Cross would begin distributing vouchers Wednesday to those returning home for food and other essential items. The funds for the vouchers were donated by people in the community and businesses in the region, Roy-Laroche said.

And the mayor urged tourists not to cancel their reservations in the area, noting that some 300,000 people visit the region between May and October every year.

Roy-Laroche also thanked people from around the world who sent messages in the aftermath of the tragedy.

"All these messages give us the strength to face this catastrophe," she said.

Fire officials also remarked on the help pouring in. They said firefighters had been coming to the area from across Quebec and even from Maine, where a fire department sent ladders and trucks the crews in Lac-Megantic desperately needed.

Where there's smoke

Nine black tanker cars filled with crude oil still stand silently in the town of Nantes.

They remained behind when the rest of the train they were attached to broke away and began rolling early Saturday down an incline, seven miles uphill from Lac-Megantic.

A short time earlier, a fire broke out on the train, and firefighters came to extinguish it. They alerted the railroad trackman, Burkhardt said.

That man, whose job it is to attend to the integrity of the rails, went down to have a look and phoned Montreal Maine and Atlantic Railway to tell the company what he saw, Burkhardt said.

"The train was still there," Burkhardt stated.

One firefighter remained behind. The fire crew had "shut down" the train, the rail chief said.

Burkhardt thinks that was a mistake, because it may have included the engine that controlled the brakes.

But by the time the railway company found out about the shutdown, it was too late, Burkhardt said. The train was gone.

"I'm of the opinion that the train rolled away rather quickly after being shut down," he said. It must have been right after the trackman left the site. He said he hopes the investigation will shed light on that.

Firefighters not train experts

Burkhardt does not think the firefighters are at fault. They are not experts on trains, he said. He wishes they'd have involved the train's engineer, who was sleeping at a nearby hotel.

"It's easy to say what should have happened," Burkhardt lamented.

Besides, the firefighters' shutting down of the the engine's brakes should not have been enough to cut the train loose.

The locomotives and cars also have handbrakes. That should have been enough to hold the train, he said.

"Either a sufficient number were not set on the train," Burkhardt said, or the standard procedure for the number of brakes to be set was not enough for a train that heavy.

His engineer reported having deployed the hand brakes on a number of tanker cars and on the engines. The brakes on the locomotives eventually held, he said.

They stopped a quarter of a mile away from their original parking spot in Nantes, he said. They did not make it to Lac-Megantic.

He could not explain what happened with the brakes on the 72 oil cars that did.

March of death

What remained of the train picked up speed, because the track between Nantes and Lac-Megantic lies on a 1.2% downward slope, which is relatively steep, a Canadian rail safety official said.

The train rolled into town much faster than a train under an engineer's control would have.

"Usually they're traveling between 5 and 10 miles an hour," said Richard. "On that night, this train was going at least between 30 and 40 miles an hour."

Rail traffic controllers can spot runaway trains on major rail lines, said rail safety manager Ed Belkaloul. But the line between Nantes and Lac-Megantic is not one of them.

The town's residents were the first to find out about it.

One who lives near the track said she had never heard a train rumble through town that loudly. It shook her entire house.

Then came the fireball.

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CNN's Holly Yan, Umaro Djau, Jonathan Mann, Pierre Meilhan, Joe Sterling and Deanna Hackney contributed to this report.