rail transport
Union Pacific fired him rather than heed his warnings of dangerous rail conditions
Time and again, Johnny Taylor’s duty to keep the rails safe from disaster conflicted with his employer’s desire to keep its trains running as fast and as frequently as possible, putting his career and family in peril.
Norfolk Southern pays $1 million to Pennsylvania communities for relief after train derailment
Western communities affected by the February train derailment have received financial support from the railroad company to help with relief.
Bureau de la sécurité des transports du Canada/Flickrhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
Ten years after disaster, Lac-Mégantic is a model for a greener future
Rebuilding from scratch meant the Quebec community could become more sustainable than ever.
National Transportation Safety Board/Flickr/Public Domainhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
Rebuilding Lac-Mégantic: Decade after rail disaster, residents say downtown still a desert
Gilles Fluet narrowly escaped death in 2013, leaving the bar where he'd been with friends just moments before a runaway train derailed and exploded nearby. A decade later, he and other residents say what was once a lively downtown still hasn’t fully recovered. Rachel Watts reports for CBC News
In a nutshell:
More than nine years before there was an East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, there was the Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, rail disaster. On July 6, 2013, shortly before 1:00 AM, a parked freight train hauling highly flammable Bakken shale crude, broke free and, unpowered and unmanned, began to roll slowly towards the mostly sleeping town of Lac-Mégantic seven miles distant. When the runaway train jumped the tracks in downtown Lac-Mégantic, it was traveling more than 100 km/hour. The ensuing wreck, explosions and "tsunami of fire" leveled more than 30 buildings and killed 47 people.
Key quote:
"I was walking, and I felt something strange behind my back, and I turned around," he said. "I didn't even have the time to see the train pass. It was running at more than 100 kilometres per hour. There was no light, no motor running and no sounds."
Big picture:
The growth in oil-by-rail shipments and a corresponding increase in rail accidents involving fossil fuels tracks roughly with the growth of hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking) and the need to transport crude to refineries in a timely fashion. The volatile crude from the Bakken shale in particular, relies almost exclusively on rail transport. A resulting increase in accidents culminating in fires and explosions have earned such trains the nickname "bomb trains" and few communities are equipped to deal with an accident involving large amounts of such hazardous materials. Recommended safety measures have been stalled and stymied by competing interests and needed reforms have largely languished as a result.
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In Denver, oil trains hit a fork in the road to Colorado's transportation future
COAL CREEK, Colo. — As trains heading east from the Moffat Tunnel take one last sharp turn along a ridge near Eldorado Canyon State Park in Boulder County, the scenery changes abruptly. After traveling hundreds of miles east through narrow river gorges and rugged alpine forests, the Union Pacific’s Central Corridor through Colorado emerges at […]
National Transportation Safety Board/Flickr/Public Domainhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/
Rebuilding Lac-Mégantic: Decade after rail disaster, residents say downtown still a desert
Gilles Fluet narrowly escaped death in 2013, leaving the bar where he'd been with friends just moments before a runaway train derailed and exploded nearby. A decade later, he and other residents say what was once a lively downtown still hasn’t fully recovered.
Lytton’s long road home after ravages of wildfire
The community is poised to rebuild. But the cause of its devastation remains shrouded in secrecy as the RCMP’s investigation continues.
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