Shipping oil by train is too dangerous
This is not supposed to happen even once, never mind twice in the same area.
But last week, for the second time in two months, roaring flames and thick black smoke threatened the good people around the hamlet of Guernsey, Sask., after a Canadian Pacific train loaded with crude oil from Alberta derailed. What if the 104-car train had been passing through Saskatoon and derailed? Trains like these regularly roll through downtown Calgary.
In 2015, a Canadian National Railway oil train derailed and ignited into a roaring fire and thick smoke near the Gogama and Mattagami First Nations in northern Ontario.
And what about all those reassurances after the catastrophic explosion of a runaway oil train in Lac Mégantic in 2013? We were told then that the oil in those tanker cars was a highly flammable type of crude particular to the Bakken oilfields in North Dakota. Whereas most Canadian oil transported by rail, the story went, comes from the Alberta tarsands and it’s too heavy and thick to be flammable. Well, apparently, that’s not the case. We don’t know yet what type of crude oil was loaded into those tanker cars that went off the tracks and exploded on the Saskatchewan prairie. Or which oil company produced it. But there’s a good chance it was diluted bitumen, which means lighter petroleum products had been added to the tarry bitumen so it would flow more easily.
But whatever it was, it was highly flammable. It took fire crews more than 24 hours to douse the blaze.
Given that, over the past two years, the amount of oil exported by rail has almost doubled because of strained pipeline capacity, this should be worrisome to people across the country.
It was around this time last year that a CP train derailed in the mountains west of Lake Louise. Three crew members were killed when a runaway 120car train hurtled down the tracks and then derailed on a snowy, freezing cold mountainside next to the Kicking Horse River.
That train wasn’t loaded with oil or other petroleum products, but many trains heading west, passing through towns, passing by rivers and lakes, are carrying that kind of load.
That fatal derailment is still under investigation by the federal Transportation and Safety Board. But meanwhile, CBC’s “Fifth Estate” has raised some serious questions about CP’s attention to safety procedures and the internal investigation it conducted into the incident.
The train that derailed in Saskatchewan last week was likely carrying oil destined for refineries in the Great Lakes area in the United States — Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois.
A new pipeline — Enbridge’s Line 3 — is slated to replace the pipeline that has served roughly the same route into the U.S as the railroad for more than 50 years. The Canadian section has long been given the go-ahead. Former Alberta premier Rachel Notley dug in the symbolic shovels just outside Hardisty 18 months ago.
But it is being held up in Minnesota amid long-standing opposition by environmental and Indigenous groups.
The proposed pipeline replacement would ship 760,000 barrels of oil a day, which, according to Enbridge, is the equivalent of more than 10,000 loaded rail cars a day.
As the loaded oil trains and pipelines prove, oil is still in demand. How long that will last is anyone’s guess. But for now, pipelines are much safer than trains when it comes to transporting oil. Right after the latest explosion and fire in Saskatchewan, federal Transport Minister Marc Garneau ordered all trains carrying hazardous materials to cut their speed limits by half for the next 30 days.
At least someone with authority is paying attention. But will it be business as usual after that?
Or will CP, CN, the Transportation Safety Board and the federal government step up their game and actually face the fact that potentially dangerous oil trains are criss-crossing the country every hour of every day? Until the Line 3 Replacement, Keystone XL (both are being held up in the U.S), or Trans Mountain actually starts shipping oil, that number will surely rise over the next two years.