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Fourth oil train accident this month
Mar 10, 2015 12:03 am
A fourth oil train accident in the past month happened Sat., March 7 in Canada, and one local enviromental group is worried the next one might be along the Hudson River. The Wall Street Journal reports that the four accidents all occurred with newer tank cars, called CPC-1232s. "Each train was hauling the new tank cars, which weren’t able to prevent the crude from escaping, leaking into one river and exploding into several giant fireballs," Russell Gold and Paul Viera wrote in the Journal. March 5 there was an accident near the Mississippi River in Illinois, and there have also been other accidents in West Virginia and Canada. Locally, the accident along the Mattagami River in the Ontario upset Riverkeeper, an activist group. “We’re playing Russian roulette with our cities and environment, except all the chambers are loaded,” said Sean Dixon, a staff attorney for Riverkeeper in Mid-Hudson News. “Our state and local leaders need to use their emergency authority and act now.” Oil trains run daily along the west side of the Hudson River, with many sitting in the Albany yards between I-787 and the river. New York officials have called on federal officials to tighten regulations to prevent further accidents, but have not kept their own oil train spill fund up with inflation.