It seems the news was all over social media within seconds of the three CN rail cars rolling on their sides March 5 near the Westlock Terminals and spilling their contents.
Thankfully it was just grain.
“What if it was oil though?” many opined on Facebook, demanding a pipeline to ship Albertan crude oil be immediately built to the west coast.
The social-media crowd may generally be an ornery and opinionated bunch, but they may have a point. What if it was oil glugging out the top of those overturned rail cars instead of grain?
It’s not just a “what if?” scenario anymore though. Individuals and municipalities have to be prepared in the event of such a scenario nowadays.
You may have noticed a lot of news about train derailments lately, including one last month in Trail, B.C. that killed three railroad workers. There was one in Calgary last week as well. And lest we forget the 2013 rail disaster in Lac Megantic, Quebec, where nearly 47 people died as a result of a train carrying crude oil slipping its brake and rolling into the downtown core before exploding.
That happened. In Canada.
And with the Alberta government’s plan to spend $3.7 billion to increase rail capacity so we can get our oil to markets where it can fetch top dollar, the danger is that much more pronounced.
The plan is to lease 4,400 new rail cars to move up to 120,000 barrels per day by 2020, with shipments starting as early as July 2019.
All this while the federal government paid $4.5 billion for an old pipeline it doesn’t appear that’s going to be worked out any time soon. A successful expansion of the Trans Mountain Pipeline would increase capacity from 300,000 barrels per day to 890,000.
That’s a lot of product rolling through our communities and environmentally-sensitive areas.
The point is there’s no 100 per cent safe way to get our product to market. Stats would seem to indicate a pipeline is the safest, but pipelines leak too. Trains can get that product to the coast until the pipeline is approved, but how many derailments and spills are we going to have to deal with in the meantime?
If we’re going to insist on producing and transporting such a volatile substance, we have to be prepared for the consequences.
