Comments

1
Well, if this, along with rhe explosions that have happened elsewhere don't demonstrate how fucked it would be to have to oil trains continue to go through Seattle than I don't know what does.
2
Two weeks ago 350.org, Raging Grannies, the Sierra Club, and other environmental groups held a rally to protest oil trains coming through Seattle, and to fight for divestment from fossil fuels. Who was there? Jess Spear. Who wasn't? Frank Chopp, not even a staffer. Who's side are you on? Who will fight in Olympia for our safety and for the environment, and who will make excuses for inaction?
3
An explosion at Magnolia could take out Amgen. A little further on and it could take out Amazon. Amgen and Amazon are the future of our city. Being a waypoint for shale oil is not.
4
Tacoma is battling fires today

One lightning strike and the city burns
5
"a buffer car loaded with sand"

What the fucking fuck what?!?

If you were looking for a public declaration that the concept of an oil train is inherently dangerous, there it is. The crew needs to be protected from the potential of a crash and fire by having an entire boxcar full of sand between them and the cargo!
6
I hope it didn't block the bike trail.
7
@5: precisely! My first thought as well.
9
energy companies are hell bent on destroying this planet.
10
Forgive me my ignorance, but could someone answer some questions for me about this? A) Where was the oil heading? B) What other routes could the oil take from North Dakota to wherever it's headed besides this one, and would they be any safer?
11
Thankfully, and luckily, this wasn't a DOT-111 tanker car but the new model. I'm not sure we would have had the same result if this was the much more common DOT-111 type car.
12
Isn't that bridge basically the only way in or out of Magnolia? And wouldn't 30,000 gallons of burning crude more or less destroy that span?

I wonder how many of Seattle's litigators live in the Magnolia neighborhood?
13
@12 you can also get to Magnolia via Dravus, Emerson and the locks. But access is quite limited.
14
@10 Here's a P-I blog post about oil trains from earlier this year: http://blog.seattlepi.com/seattlepolitic…

The blog says the trains are going to Tesoro in Anacortes and BP at Cherry Point in Bellingham.

I think I will let others tell us where the oil trains could go!
15
@5,

Is there a method of transporting oil that isn't inherently dangerous to the environment, human life, or both? Transport on fixed rail still strikes me as being safer than transporting it on highways.
16
@15 -- Pipelines are by far the safest and most efficient way to move fossil fuels around. But the fact remains that pipelines also leak and sometimes burn. Even more importantly, just pumping up and burning the stuff is gradually incinerating our future. But we wouldn't want to stop driving and flying everywhere or moving our consumer crap around (and food!) in petroleum powered transit/transport would we.
17
@10, the answer to A) is in the article, which says Anacortes, to a refinery.

The answer to B) is "Yes, sort of, but not really". There's a more northerly rail route that bypasses Seattle to get to the refineries at Anacortes, Cherry Point and Ferndale, that passes through the Cascade Tunnel and over Stevens Pass instead of Stampede Pass. The problem is, that route is already beyond capacity; it can't take any more trains. The Stampede Pass route is way under capacity. The freight lines would like to avoid Seattle too, but they can't always.

The solution is obviously to increase capacity, but that is very difficult and very expensive. The Cascade Tunnel is the longest rail tunnel in the US; how much would a new one cost? The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is supposed to be $10 billion. That's certainly affordable, but remember that we live in a country that doesn't give a damn about infrastructure.

@9, the persons hell bent on destroying this planet are you and me, not the energy companies, who are trying to meet OUR need. We use something like 20 million barrels of oil a day in this country, which is approximately 29,000 of these rail tanker cars. Every day. That's another 29,000 cars tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that. This train here is about 0.003% of that.

@2, well, I guess I'll have to give Spear credit for stopping the trains then! Problem solved! I would LOVE to see a debate between Frank and Jess on freight issues in Washington, because he would chew her to pieces. Do you think she even knows what Stampede Pass is? I doubt it very much. I'm sure Spear could write some proposed legislation, in all caps and with hundreds of exclamation points, but I don't think anyone in Olympia is going to give a crap.

Freight is not going to go away. There are efforts underway to force increased safety regulations on rail lines through state and federal DOTs, such as the one mentioned in the article- banning DOT-111 cars. There are 92,000 of these cars in service today carrying crude, 78,000 of which are "legacy" cars that don't even meet the current voluntary standard of the rail industry. The current discussion is not over whether to replace them, but what with; the rail industry is also recommending a tougher safety standard than the current one, but other groups including the NTSB want more. These things get addressed by people who know what they're talking about in really boring places like Senate committee rooms, not by people yelling in the street.

Then there are other infrastructure problems. Look at the state of that bridge the train was running under. The Magnolia Bridge is going to cost a fortune to replace. I don't see a lot of activists out protesting that thing, though.
18
To add to what our dear fnarf said, to get a train from, say, Portland to Anacortes without going through Seattle, it would have to go up the Columbia River route to Spokane and then across to Stevens Pass (Cascade Tunnel)

A derailment/explosion in the Cascade Tunnel would be an economic and environmental disaster on par with anything that could happen in Seattle.
19
@17: Wrong, the solution is to tax oil to the point where it is no longer a desirable power source, and emphasize renewables. This will have the pleasing side effect to preventing explosions of also helping to mitigate global warming.

Fuck capacity, we have the technology to replace fossil fuels, we just need funding.
20
@19, there is no amount by which you could tax oil to make it disappear overnight, sorry. Tax it, to be sure, and emphasize renewables as much as possible, but you're still going to have oil.

Look at Germany, the world leader in non-hydro renewables. They still get 37% of their energy from oil and 24% from coal. Their aggressive renewables program is at this point replacing their nuclear dependence, which they have pledged to get completely rid of by 2022. Germany doesn't have a pack of rabid climate-change deniers standing in the way, either.
21
Good thing it didn't derail into that bridge support or the good people of Magnolia would be slip sliding away down Dravus and sitting on Elliot for an extra ten minutes on their way doontoon.
22
@21, you could probably knock over that part of the Magnolia Bridge by pushing on it with your hands. Good thing we already spent $3 billion on the tunnel that may or may not ever get finished.
23
We WARNED these corporate pig fuckers already! BP, Phillips 66, Peabody Coal, BNSF, Koch Industries, and SSA Marine have repeatedly proven themselves bad neighbors only out for record profits at the expense of the rest of us.
Not in our beloved state! Big Oil and Big Coal, get out now, and STAY OUT!
24
@23, uh huh. I'm sure they'll be shutting down Cherry Point tomorrow now that you've told them what's what.
25
@23: Excuse YOU--not. I actually have been writing my state legislators, city council members, congressman, senators, governor et. al., and guess what? The overwhelming majority of the registered voters and taxpayers where I live do NOT want coal and oil trains roaring through our city, either. This is a serious issue that is threatening to wipe out our very region, is an insanely bad idea for our economy, threatens existing jobs, and will destroy our ecosystem. Pull your head out of your stupid, malformed, trolling ass and get a clue.
26
@19 "we have the technology to replace fossil fuels" -- Not at current levels of energy consumption. There is simply not that much energy available to replace the millions of years of stored photosynthesis we've been living on for the last 100+ years. Not even nukes. (Fusion maybe, but the technology never gets to less than "available about thirty years from now".)
27
Tax consumption.

Reward energy smart and resource frugal design.

Houses that are built for quick construction and easy bank financing are not designed to be energy efficient and frugal with resources over the long term.

Every home and commercial building should be rated and taxed based on its energy consumption and equally rewarded for energy efficient design, solar power and recaptured/reused resources.

We have the technology to build mass transportation systems that would decrease the fossil fuel consumption per capita by orders of magnitude that would make Tesla look like an energy hog.

Every appliance in your house should be so miserly in its energy consumption that it is able to run on your own home's solar power.

Every neighborhood should have a community toolshed to share infrequently used tools instead of replicating the manufacture and storage of such tools in each household.

The key to reducing our dependence on fossil fuel is about changing our selfish culture of consumption and learning to share.

The self-serving ideology of "ME, NOW" must end.
29
Troll dear, in your dreary little utopia you have done nothing to reduce oil consumption. All you've done is "fix" electricity. Electricity, except in a few select cases, is not generated by oil or gasoline (although more and more of it is made by frackked natural gas). Until you fix transportation - and not just mass transit, which is already fairly efficient - all the neighborhood tool sheds and solar panels in the world won't help.
30
The new rules mean nothing if Bakken producers are still allowed to transport explosive NGLs, in the same tanker car as the crude. The threat to millions will continue, and the death toll will grow.
https://www.facebook.com/BombTrainBuckSt…
31
@30 rschalow: Thank you for the shared link.
Any remaining skeptics should read this. It is indeed what is really going on and needs to stop NOW!
32
What a bunch of hypocrites. Even the 'greenest' of posters here probably has a car, or hundreds of other products produced from oil sitting in their homes.
Leave the critical thinking on the subject to those that actually know about it and make it their business. NIMBYism is just a knee-jerk emotional response, nothing else. Time to change your pad.

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