Scared Monkeys Discussion Forum

The Canadian Royal Mounties believe that the mile-long runaway oil train that killed 20 people and left 30 missing in a small Quebec town may have been an act of criminal negligence for failing to set the brakes properly.

But the real criminal negligence is that oil from hydraulic fracking operations in booming North Dakota must be shipped by trains over a thousand miles to refiners in Nova Scotia. This occurs because regulators fought building American pipelines and refineries to protect and subsidize railroads, such as Burlington Northern Railway Company.

Every day, an average of ten trains with up to 100 tank-cars leave North Dakota carrying 3.35 million gallons of raw crude oil to journey over a thousand miles to refineries in Nova Scotia and Texas. Railroads carry 75 percent of North Dakota oil and are the prime reason oil hauled by U.S. tank cars rose over the last three years by 2,000 percent to a total of 6.5 billion gallons. Railroads claimed to average only thirteen spills per year for the last ten years, but 60 percent of oil shipments by rail occurred in the last two years.

 ::monkeyscissors::