Transportation Transformation

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This article by Jeremy Miller first appeared in the November 24, 2014 issue of High Country News.

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Trains carrying oil raise tough questions in Northwest

As crude oil rail shipments increase, residents fear derailments and explosions.

Jeremy Miller Nov 24, 2014 From the print edition

On a sunny weekend afternoon in early September, roughly a hundred protesters gathered on the Seattle waterfront. Some carried placards with images of mushroom clouds. To a jangling ukulele, two children sang a grim but catchy chorus: “Please don’t send exploding trains through our cities. We don’t think people dying is pretty.” A week after the Seattle protest, as if on cue, a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train hauling 100 cars full of volatile oil lurched off the tracks just north of downtown Seattle. There was no explosion or leak, but the derailment triggered new waves of protests across the state.

* oiltrains-jpg *
A train with 100 tanker cars of Bakken crude oil went off the tracks in northern Seattle last July. Nothing leaked from the four cars that derailed.
Washington Environmental Council

Driven by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, the rate of production in the Bakken oil field, on the border of North Dakota and Montana, has rapidly swamped the ability of pipelines and trucks to carry the crude to market. As a result, the nation’s rail lines are becoming essential. Between 2008 and 2013, the amount of oil traveling by rail from the Bakken increased nearly 20-fold; today, according to the U.S. Association of American Railroads, more than six out of every 10 barrels from the Bakken is hauled to refineries by rail. A sizeable portion is shipped to Washington, because it’s cheaper than sending it to the East Coast or even California.

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Comments about this article

Richard Schaffer Subscriber
Dec 03, 2014 11:13 PM
As our oil and natural gas production increases it puts significant pressure on a freight rail system which does not have the capacity to keep up. Add to this the Foreign Trade that our Ports transfer in and out of the country and we get a real problem. Also our rail system is all private unlike our roads so the Federal Railroad Administration and state rail administrations are limited by law as to governing the rail traffic around the country. We also have very dangerous cargo in tank cars as Jeremy points out. Until our Rail industry, FRA and states find the means and the regulations to upgrade our freight rail lines we will always be in a safety peril as well as limit the use of high-speed rail throughout the country.

Dick Schaffer
Westminster

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