Last Monday night, community and environmental organizations and residents of South Baltimore turned out to voice their concerns and objection to the Maryland Department of the Environment's consideration of Targa Resources' air pollution permit for a facility that will store and ship by rail, crude oil in and through the already environmentally stressed communities of South Baltimore and other parts of the city ("Baltimore residents speak out against proposed crude oil facility," Dec. 1).
Ships will unload millions of gallons of North Dakota Bakken crude oil, known to be highly explosive and volatile, onto rail cars in Fairfield Peninsula where they will begin a crisscrossing trip turning our neighborhoods in the south, downtown and parts of northeast Baltimore into de facto oil pipelines. The proposition is both dangerous and irresponsible. The prospects for either an accident or harmful impacts to health and the environment seem certain.
Crude oil-by-rail increased 423 percent between 2011 and 2012, and volumes continued to increase in 2013 surpassing 400,000 rail carloads. As crude-by-rail traffic has increased, so have accidents, posing significant risks to life, property and the environment. Even the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) has acknowledged the imminent danger crude-by-rail proposes and they were right.
In July 2013, a runaway oil train derailed traveling through a small Quebec town incinerating 47 people. Accidents have released crude oil into an Alabama swamp, hung a train from a bridge in Philadelphia, crashed one through a building near Pittsburgh and caused evacuation of over 1,000 people in North Dakota. The most recent April derailment in Lynchburg, Va., spilled and burned an estimated 50,000 gallons of crude, setting the James River on fire. These dangerous moments on the rails raise serious doubts about the safety of transporting crude oil in mile-long chains of tank cars, some of them decades old.
Crude oil-by-rail is transported by DOT 111 tank cars, also known as "Pepsi cans on wheels." They have no business carrying hazardous and flammable materials. The National Transportation Safety Board indicated that the DOT 111 tank cars can almost always be expected to breach in the event of a train accident resulting in car-to-car impacts or pileups. These cars are ill equipped to transport hazardous and volatile crude oil, and it's time to get them off the tracks and end the practice of crude oil-by-rail. Let's start here in Baltimore.
William Fadely, Baltimore
The writer is Baltimore program organizer for Clean Water Action.