More Chicken Little The Sky Is Falling Stories -- April 27, 2015

For archival purposes only. The Chicago Tribune is reporting:

As Aurora Mayor Tom Weisner watches mile-long trains of black tank cars full of crude oil from North Dakota roll through the heart of Illinois' second-biggest city, he wonders what would happen if they would derail, start to burn and even explode.

One train on the same line that runs through Aurora and Naperville, did that in a rural area near Galena in March. And one did it in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in July 2013.

Another one did it in West Virginia last year, and one did in Virginia the year before that.
"Lac-Megantic was a little town of just 6,000 people. Yet there were 47 deaths and an estimated $2 billion in property damage," Weisner said. "I can only imagine what the numbers would be if something like that happened in downtown Aurora. There has never been an oil-train wreck in a metropolitan area. Yet."

I doubt if the article noted that not one person has been killed in the US due to a Bakken crude oil derailment. The operators would be thrilled to be able to ship oil by pipeline if given the opportunity. But it is what it is.

More of the article:

It's a concern shared by leaders throughout suburbs with rail lines, particularly those along the BNSF, which is part of what industry officials call a rolling pipeline delivering oil from fracking operations in the west.

"As rail traffic picks up, that makes these things more and more of a risk," said Naperville Mayor-Elect Steve Chirico. "And besides crude oil, many of the other chemicals carried on trains, like ammonia and ethanol, can be very difficult to deal with."

If the writer really wanted to, he/she could find even worse examples of train disasters than this one, but while we're at it, let's pile on the reasons to be worried:

Chirico notes that a prominent monument stands as a reminder of one of the worst railroad disasters in the area's history. On April 25, 1946, a high-speed train named the Exposition Flyer rounded a curve near the Naperville station and crashed into another passenger train that had stopped there. The crash killed 45 people, many of them veterans returning from World War II who thought their lives had been saved by the coming of peace. But Chirico knows that if an oil train would derail at that same spot and explode, the toll could be even worse.

Trains derail, planes crash, and space shuttles disintegrate. Two of five NASA space shuttles had one more launch than landing. Not a very impressive record when one looks at that meaningless statistic.