Your (Regina Leader-Post’s) editorial rightly highlights the danger of transporting oil by rail. But the Energy East pipeline – which would transport 1.1 million barrels of oil per day past the growing Harbour Landing subdivision – is not safer. According to U.S. data, rail incidents happened twice as often as pipeline spills from 2004 to […]
Comment: Pipelines vs rail cars
The fiery derailment of two trains carrying crude oil in the space of three days underscores the worrisome impact of such incidents. Images of huge fireballs from the crash of an oil train in West Virginia will have brought back memories for many Canadians of the Lac-Megantic disaster where 47 people died. Two days before the West […]
New testing standards set for crude being transported by rail in the U.S.
The oil industry’s lead trade group has come up with new standards for testing and classifying crude shipped by rail. As with earlier orders from the American government, the industry’s standards generally leave it to individual companies to decide how often to test crude in order to gauge its danger. Hazardous-materials shipments are supposed to […]