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Canada's Oil Trains Are on the Rise, and Some of Them Just Exploded

And five of them exploded. Canada is now moving 27,900% more oil by rail than it was five years ago—more wrecks are on the way.
Image: Jessica Dostie, Twitter

A northbound train carrying seventy-three oil tanker cars derailed last night, for reasons still unclear. Those cars slid like steel death sleds seven miles down a hillside before careening into Lac Mégantic, a quiet Canadian border town of 6,000. Some of them exploded in the process.

The event devastated the town center and sent a third of the population running for cover. A local watering hole was a the nexus of the carnage; five are dead and forty are missing. One survivor said the oil gave rise to a "river of fire" as it rolled forward. There was no one aboard the train as it derailed—a lone engineer had allegedly set the brakes and left it stationed overnight when they failed.

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Citizens, reporters, and aerial photographers caught the spectacular destruction on camera. It's like Michael Bay sat in for God for a while, in one of his more sadistic moods. Canada's prime minister said it looked like a "war zone." Authorities fear that some of the bodies may never be identified because the force of the explosion was so great.

It's tragic, it's brutal, and chances are that something like it is going to happen again. Canada is dramatically increasing the amount of oil it transports by rail. USA Today reports that this is the fourth disaster involving oil shipments since an investigation into a crash was opened at the beginning of the year. In other words, that's five crashes in six months.

Here's why. According to the

Canadian Railway Association

, 140,000 carloads of crude oil will be shipped through Canada this year. There were 500 carloads shipped in 2009. That's about a 27,900 percent increase in oil traffic by rail.

“We are seeing more and more petroleum products being transported by rail, and there are attendant dangers involved in that,” Thomas Mulcair, the leader of Canada's New Democratic Party, said in a press conference.

For the same reason, Canada's oil plutocrats and their cheerleaders are already positioning the disaster as an argument in favor of building more oil pipelines, which they claim are safer than rail. The biggest lightening rod in this battle so far, of course, has been the Keystone XL, which is ardenly opposed by environmentalists, farmers, and property rights advocates in the United States. That staunch opposition has held the pipeline in limbo for years now, as the State Department completes a second review of its impacts.

The bigger picture is that transporting fossil fuels is risky, period. Pipelines rupture—remember Exxon's recent Arkansas disaster? Oil trains derail. And tanker ships crash—remember Exxon's Valdez, the most famous oil spill in history, maybe? But let's not pick on Exxon. It's everyone. It's BP. It's Shell. It's the incredibly labyrinthine, eminently vulnerable and inherently dangerous system—it's the process of drilling, refining, and transporting this stuff.

No, this should give us another occasion to focus on the fact that we've got the resources, knowledge and technology required to change the terms of the debate itself. We should be considering how we're going to best move away from this outmoded system, one that relies on transporting volatile substances over vast distances. We should be debating alternatives—electric cars? Fuel cells?—not which method of moving more oil douses fewer cities in toxic pollution and fire.