On a quiet July morning in 2013, a 72-car freight train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, population 5,932. The explosion obliterated the downtown, killing 47 people.
It was no isolated event. Accidents involving trains hauling crude oil have surged in the past three years — four just within a one-month period in North America earlier this year, causing fires and poisoning the air and ground.
Yet if Phillips 66 gets its way, mile-long trains carrying 2 million gallons of crude will roll on aging tracks through Milpitas and San Jose five times a week. The trains will pass through Diridon Station, the heart of San Jose’s downtown, past schools and through populous neighborhoods until veering out toward Highway 101 to their destination, a refinery in San Luis Obispo.
Fortunately, leaders throughout the Bay Area are rising in protest. The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday joined Alameda and Monterey counties and the cities of San Jose, Oakland, Fremont, Berkeley and San Leandro in opposition to the plan.
The simplest remedy would be for the San Luis Obispo Board of Supervisors to reject the refinery proposal.
If it doesn’t, then this region’s congressional delegation will need to push for a moratorium on crude oil transport through populated areas until safety can be assured. That assurance today is as reliable as a China-roiled stock market.
According to the Associated Press, the Department of Transportation has estimated that an explosion in a densely populated area could kill hundreds and cause hundreds of millions of dollars damage. Can anyone seriously be considering rolling these trains through the East Bay and San Jose?
A spokesman for Union Pacific Railroad told this newspaper Monday that it has to allow the trains on its tracks if they conform to federal Department of Transportation requirements.
But the DOT never anticipated the surge in crude oil shipments from fracking operations in the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Canada. The lack of pipeline infrastructure, including the proposed Keystone Pipeline, has resulted in a 400 percent increase in rail shipments of crude in the past decade.
As a result, the industry can’t quickly acquire enough new tank cars, so it continues to use older cars with thinner walls that puncture more easily than new ones. These unsafe cars (DOT-111s) carry about half of the crude oil shipped by rail in the United States. Canada and the United States have called for a halt of fuel deliveries in DOT-111s by 2017. In populous regions like the Bay Area, a lot of people could die by then.
Mile-long trains carrying 2 million gallons of explosive crude oil in aging tanker stock have no business passing through places like downtown San Jose. If San Luis Obispo officials won’t eliminate this threat, Congress has to step in.
