December 23, 2013

Freight trains hauling crude oil out of the Northern Plains are growing more frequent by the day, mile-long processions of black tank cars that rumble across the continent.

 

As common as they have become across the U.S. and Canada, officials in dozens of towns and cities where the oil trains travel say they are concerned with the possibility of a major derailment, spill or explosion, while their level of preparation varies widely.

 

Stoking those fears was the July crash of a crude train from the Bakken oil patch in Lac Megantic, Quebec — not far from the Maine border — that killed 47 people.

 

"It's a grave concern," said Dan Sietsema, the emergency coordinator in northeastern Montana's Roosevelt County, where oil trains now pass regularly through the county seat of Wolf Point. "It has the ability to wipe out a town like Wolf Point."

 

The number of carloads of crude oil hauled by U.S. railroads has surged in recent years, from 10,840 in 2009 to a projected 400,000 this year.

 

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is providing important guidance to school administrators and maintenance personnel on how to properly maintain and manage fluorescent lighting with ballasts that contain polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Many older ballasts contain PCBs that can leak when the ballasts fail, leading to elevated levels of PCBs in the air of schools. While the elevated PCB levels should not represent an immediate threat, they could pose health concerns if they persist over time. Leaking ballasts must be removed and properly disposed of along with any part of the fixture that has been contaminated with PCBs. In schools across the country, most PCB-containing fluorescent light ballasts have exceeded their life span and are beginning to leak and smoke. The guidance is part of the EPA’s ongoing efforts to address potential PCB exposures in schools. 

 

 

A group with some impressive credentials claims that tar balls are being found downstream from the site of the Enbridge oil spill. The same kind of tarballs found after the Gulf Oil spill.

 

We have heard this allegation before during hearings over the dredge pad in Comstock. This week Chris Wahmhoff presented a tar ball in a jar to Kalamazoo City Commissioners, found in the river near the city’s Ball park.

 

Enbridge has denied their existence and the EPA has never mentioned that there are tar balls rolling down stream from the site of the Enbridge oil spill, but they did order dredging worth millions to keep submerged oil from moving downstream.

 

 

The Pacific Ocean hides chemical weapons, such as mustard gas, dumped after World War II. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently documented one of these dumps using diving robots.

 

The MBARI mission found rusting 55-gallon drums filled with unknown substances, but no artillery shells. Instead of instruments of death, the chemical weapons dump sites harbored life, including sponges, crabs and anemones. The animals clung to the sides of the barrels filled with unknown substances.