Trains That Go Boom

For most of the 14 years that Tinamarie Hatlee has lived in Ravena, N.Y., a small town south of Albany, she didn’t mind the trains that passed 50 feet from the back door of her house. They came only a few times a day and moved slowly, so the noise was bearable. But starting last summer, Hatlee says, the trains have been rumbling by every few hours, from early morning until well past midnight. And they go much quicker, as fast as 50 miles an hour, she estimates. Many are oil trains—hundreds of black tank cars filled with tens of thousands of barrels of crude, mainly from oil fields in North Dakota, on their way to refineries on the East Coast. “It’s terrifying to think of all that oil flying by so close to my house,” Hatlee says. “I don’t understand why they have to go so fast.”

They’re in such a hurry because there’s so much oil to move. Over the past three years, U.S. production has increased by more than 2 million barrels per day to 8 million, and railroads are hauling more fossil fuels than they have in a century. In the third quarter of 2013, trains carried 93,312 carloads of crude oil, or about 66 million barrels—about 900 percent more than in all of 2008. Almost all oil reaches its destination without incident. In recent months, however, an alarming number of oil trains in the U.S. and Canada have derailed, causing spectacular explosions that blackened the sky with burning crude. In July a 74-car train plowed into the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic in the middle of the night, igniting an inferno that killed 47 people. In October a tank train derailed outside Edmonton, Alberta, forcing an evacuation. In November an oil train crashed in Alabama, spilling thousands of barrels into a marshland. In December two trains collided in Casselton, N.D., one carrying soybeans, the other crude. Eighteen tank cars ruptured and burst into flames, spilling about 400,000 gallons of oil.