The fallout from Friday’s crude by rail crash in the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon is intensifying after numerous local elected officials called for a temporary halt to the so-called “bomb trains” through the area until the cause of the crash is known and wreckage cleared.
However, the company involved, Union Pacific, has blataently ignored their concerns and started running trains again, even though the clean-up of the crash site is still ongoing.
The safety of crude by rail trains looks set to rocket up the political agenda again after a Union Pacific train carrying volatile Bakken crude derailed and exploded in Oregon’s beautiful Columbia River gorge on Friday.
Despite the spate of recent crude by rail accidents, the oil industry is lobbying against new safety measures.
There is growing evidence that transporting tar sands oil maybe as inherently dangerous as carrying the volatile Bakken shale oil.
A state of emergency was declared late yesterday in two counties in the south of West Virginia after a crude by rail train oil derailed and exploded, in what is the latest in a long string of accidents in North America.
The oil industry’s public relations arm, the American Petroleum Institute (API), has reached new lows in its attempts to twist the on-going debate about the safety of crude-by-rail trains in the US.
Last Sunday was a grim and painful anniversary for the people of Lac-Mégantic in Quebec. It was a year ago that a crude by rail train, which was carrying highly volatile crude from America’s Bakken fracking fields, derailed and exploded, effectively incinerating 47 people.
