The West Virginia and Illinois Oil Train Accidents Were No Fluke

Two major train spills in the last month – one in West Virginia, one in Illinois – have reinforced what has now become abundantly clear: Transporting large amounts of oil by rail endangers the health and safety of our communities and our environment.

Today, oil production in the U.S. and Canada is on the rise, and we are shipping 400 percent more crude oil in the U.S. than we did in 2005. The number of serious rail oil spills has increased accordingly:

Serious rail oil spills (1000 gallons spilled or more) are on the rise.[1]

From 2010 to 2014, there were 18 rail oil spills of 1,000 gallons or more – combining for a total of more than 620,000 gallons spilled. And in 2013 and 2014 alone, we saw stories like:

• A train derailment in Aliceville, Alabama, that spilled at least 455,000 gallons of oil. Oil continued oozing into surrounding wetlands for at least four months.
• A fiery train wreck off of a bridge in Lynchburg, Virginia, that spilled nearly 30,000 gallons of oil into the James River.
• Two spills in one year in Casselton, North Dakota. “Welcome to Casselton, again,” is how Casselton Fire Chief Tim McLean greeted reporters the second time around.
• A 10,000 gallon oil spill in Parkers Prairie, Minnesota, which left a disgusting aftermath.
• And the horrific oil train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, which destroyed a huge swath of the town and killed 47 people.[2]

These spills are often devastating, and yet they are just one symptom of our addiction to oil. (Other modes of shipping oil are no better.) The earth is warming, and oil’s toll on our environment, communities, and public health continues to rise. As we see the increasingly dire costs that the extraction, transportation, and combustion of oil impose on our country, we need to ask ourselves how far we willing to go to feed our addiction to oil, and what we can do to break that addiction once and for all.

Aftermath of the West Virginia train derailment. Source: U.S. Coast Guard

—

 [1] Data from the Incidents Reports Database of the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Database. We searched the database for rail incidents involving petroleum, and included spills of 1,000 gallons or more.

[2] Gallon figures are from the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Database.