Derailed Oil Train Spills 230,000 Gallons of Tar Sands in Flooded Iowa River
On June 22, a train carrying Canadian crude oil derailed in northwestern Iowa, releasing an estimated 230,000 gallons of oil into a flooded river. As a result of the derailment, over 30 rail tank cars ended up in the water, with 14 cars confirmed to have leaked oil.
To put the size of this spill in perspective, an Enbridge pipeline that leaked in Michigan in July 2010 released roughly 1,000,000 gallons of tar sands oil into the Kalamazoo River. Cleanup for this spill, one of the largest inland oil spills on record, took years and more than $1 billion.
Like the Kalamazoo River spill, the train that derailed in Iowa was carrying tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada.
This crash, near Doon, Iowa, also is the first one involving the new, safer DOT-117R tank cars that promised to make oil safer to transport by rail. The accident reveals that these tank cars are not foolproof, considering the nearly quarter million gallons of oil released from them into an Iowa river.
Workers have contained nearly half of the crude #oil spilled near Rock River in northwest #Iowa over the weekend following a freight train derailment on Friday: http://ow.ly/zPVy30kEj6S
Oil Trains Likely to Spill Into Rivers and Lakes
The reality of rail transport is that train tracks generally follow rivers across North America. As a result, many oil train derailments also mean oil spills into rivers and other bodies of water.
The 2015 report “Runaway Risks” by the environmental nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity found that “within just a quarter-mile of existing and planned oil-train routes there are 3,600 stream miles and 73,468 square miles of lakes, reservoirs and wetlands, including iconic waterbodies such as the Puget Sound, Lake Michigan, Lake Erie, and the Columbia, Hudson and Mississippi rivers.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
