Carol Linnitt of
DeSmog Canada and Steve Horn of DeSmogBlog discusses oil spills, pipelines and
train bombs associated with transporting oil between Canada and the Untied
States - March 4, 2015
Last week, President
Obama took a jab at the Republicans by vetoing the acceleration of the Keystone
XL pipeline bill. While that has been getting a lot of media attention, other
pipelines are being approved without much oversight or deliberation. The U.S.
Department of Transportation's records show that at least 73 pipeline-related
accidents took place in 2014, 87 percent of an increase over 2009. Now, the
figure for 2014 might actually be much higher, as companies are lagging in
their reporting, says the department.
But even without
pipelines, oil transportation is causing much havoc in our environment. Bitumen
oil, which is also continuing to be transported by rail in large quantities, as
it turns out, this is highly explosive and has caused accidents that resulted
in the explosion, for example, in West Virginia, in what local media called the
train bomb incident, which dumped a bunch of oil into the Kahnawa River on
February 16.
We should also note
that Bakken oil from North Dakota was also being carried by train tankers that
exploded in Lac-Mégantic disaster that killed 47 people.