Firefighters in a small Quebec town have finally managed to put out a raging inferno sparked over a day earlier when a driverless freight train laden with oil derailed and exploded, killing at least five people.

“The flames, the fires all have been put out now. We did it,” fire chief Denis Lauzon told a press briefing on Sunday.

Quebec provincial police say five people have died and about 40 are missing.

The number of dead was raised after two more bodies were found in the ruins of buildings destroyed by the explosion and the fires that broke out after the derailment in the small town of Lac-Megantic, which has about 6000 residents and is located 250 kilometres east of Montreal.

About 30 buildings in the centre of town were destroyed.

Lauzon likened the charred scene to “a war zone”.

“This is really terrible. Our community is grieving and it is taking its toll on us,” Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche said.

Relatives and friends of the people who were in town at the time of the accident have created a web page with an eye toward determining the whereabouts of their loved ones.

Quebec authorities warned that the number of fatalities could rise substantially as rescue and recovery teams gain access to the central blast zone.

For the moment, authorities have not made any statements regarding how the accident could have happened.

The train included five locomotives and 77 cistern cars filled with oil.

The company that owns the train, Montreal Main & Atlantic Railway, said that it was parked without an engineer on the outskirts of the town awaiting a shift change but then – for reasons that are not yet known – it began moving.

Edward Burkhardt, the president and CEO of Rail World Inc, the parent company of Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, said the train had been parked uphill of Lac-Megantic.

The tanker cars then sped downhill into the town before derailing.

“If brakes aren’t properly applied on a train, it’s going to run away,” said Edward Burkhardt.

“But we think the brakes were properly applied on this train.”

Burkhardt, who was mystified by the disaster, said the train was parked because the engineer had finished his run.

“We’ve had a very good safety record for these 10 years,” he said of the decade-old railway.

“Well, I think we’ve blown it here.”

Because of limited pipeline capacity in North Dakota’s Bakken region and in Canada, oil producers are using railways to transport much of the oil to refineries on the East, Gulf and West coasts, as well as inland.

Myrian Marotte, a spokeswoman for the Canadian Red Cross in Lac-Megantic, said there are about 2000 evacuees and said 163 stayed at their operations centre overnight.

“There are those are still looking for loved ones,” Marotte said.

Marotte said many of the evacuees are staying with family and friends.

“Some people have lost everything,” she said.