Long-Weekend Pastime: Look for Oil-by-Rail Disasters Near You

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/312-16/27230-long-weekend-pastime-look-for-oil-by-rail-disasters-near-you

It looks sort of like a collection of colorful gumballs, scattered across the U.S. Some parts of the country have more gumballs than others — the coasts of Louisiana and Texas have quite a collection going — but so does Bradford, Pa.; Purcell, Okla.; Belden, N.D.; and Camden, N.J. In other parts of the country you can see what looks almost like a pathway — tiny, colorful dots starting in North Dakota passing through Minnesota, and moving down through Illinois.

I’m going to break it to you now and say that this is not a map of gumballs. It was produced by the investigative reporting nonprofit ProPublica, and because investigative reporting is rarely a cheerful enterprise, what the map actually describes are crude-by-rail accidents across the country. Still, let us be grateful, because it’s a Thanksgiving miracle we have this data at all.

As with a lot of miracles, the release of this information is the result of a lot of hard work. Early this summer, the federal Department of Transportation made an emergency order forcing railroads to share information on hazardous cross-country cargo with emergency responders in towns en route. The railroads countered this by pressuring states to sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) that would prevent anyone else from getting the information, at which point the Federal Railroad Administration stepped in and clarified that no one had to sign an NDA in order to get information. Since then, news organizations have been using public-records requests to access that information, and put it into a usable format.

ProPublica’s looks to be the most comprehensive map so far: It takes data on accidents compiled by the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and plots out where the train that had the accident was going and where its journey began. While the routes criss-cross the country, there are only a few destinations — since, as ProPublica puts it, “only a handful of places around the country have the refinery capacity and infrastructure necessary to handle the massive amounts of oil being extracted from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale: Bakersfield, Carson, and Long Beach in California; St. James, Lake Charles, Lacassine in coastal Louisiana; Philadelphia, Paulsboro, New Jersey. Delaware City, Delaware in the Mid-Atlantic.”