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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsRailroads seek to limit disclosure on oil trains
SEATTLE -- Two railroad companies want to prevent the public from getting ahold of details about oil shipments through Washington state, a disclosure the federal government ordered be given to state emergency managers in the wake of several oil train accidents.
But restricting that information violates the state's public records law, so the state has not signed documents from the rail companies seeking confidentiality, said Mark Stewart, a spokesman for the Washington Military Department's Emergency Management Division.
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency order last month requiring railroads by Friday to notify state officials about the volume, frequency and county-by-county routes of trains carrying 1 million or more gallons of crude oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota, Montana and parts of Canada.
Federal transportation officials said they expected the states "to treat this data as confidential, providing it only to those with a need-to-know, and with the understanding that recipients of the data will continue to treat it as confidential." That includes emergency workers who need access to the information to form response plans.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/06/04/4158814/railroads-seek-to-limit-disclosure.html
neverforget
(9,445 posts)theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)Fracking companies have long worked under this same kind of confidentiality, refusing to share information with emergency management officials and first responders regarding the hazardous chemicals they employ in their operations. These fracking companies are, in some cases, finally being forced to disclose the nature of the hazardous chemicals of their operations. (See DU thread http://www.democraticunderground.com/1071801 as an example)
I see the situation with the railroads as similar to but not the same as that of fracking confidentiality. First of all, if folks were truly aware of the kind of dangerous cargo hauled every day by RRs through our cities and towns and neighborhoods, they wouldn't live anywhere near a railroad line. Yet people put up with it because they need that cargo, just like we share the roads every day with trucks hauling everything from petroleum to hazardous chemicals. We never question why this is allowed, even when horrendous accidents occur.
Security-wise, when it comes right down to it, our rail lines (like our infrastructure) are incredibly vulnerable to sabotage. They are relatively soft targets -- it's not like you have security cameras situated along the 230,000km of rail lines in this country. I do firmly believe that state and emergency management officials must be notified about trains hauling large quantities of crude oil but then you must trust that everyone working within the system will treat this information as confidential.
Hauling by rail is amazingly safe, all things considered, and some of the recent accidents like the tragic one in Canada can be attributed to operators violating the safety rules and regulations already set by the railroads. Ideally, I would like to see more laws enacted that would route hazardous cargo around populated areas but practically speaking that's just not possible. A lot of this country was intentionally built around RR lines before trucking ever came into being. You'd have to lay down countless thousands of miles of new track and that's just not possible.
In the meanwhile we can just hope that rail transport continues to be as efficient and safe as it has been in the past (miraculously), insist that railroads share with the proper officials the nature of their potentially hazardous cargos, and cross our fingers.