Crude Oil Trains

This editorial is reprinted from The New York Times. ESP alerted the community to the danger of these trains in connection with McKinley Village. Several Sacramento groups are working to stop the movement of these trains through urban areas. Think about it. The cargo is more explosive because of the modern extraction methods, small accidents can ignite a whole train, the trains roll near houses, schools and highways. 350 Sacramento is leading the effort to prevent a disaster in Sacramento. Please let our council member, Jeff Harris, know about your concerns.

A DANGER ON RAILS

In recent years, small towns across the United States have begun hosting an increasingly common phenomenon: long trains, made up of 100-plus black cylindrical cars, rolling slowly past our hospitals, schools and homes.

Few who see them know what they carry: highly flammable crude oil from the shale fields around North Dakota.

I live in the Hudson Valley and see these trains daily; Albany is a major hub, and trains traveling south down the Hudson River toward mid-Atlantic refineries hug its shores. Every day on the East Coast, as many as 400,000 barrels of this explosive mixture travel through our backyardsover shaky bridges, highways and overpasses.

As this Op-Doc video shows, there are reasons to be very concerned about this increased train traffic, which is directly related to the boom in oil and gas drilling in the Midwest. These trains can be very dangerous, prompting some to call them “bomb trains.” There have already been horrific railway accidents in North America caused when these trains go off the tracks, some of them fatal.