Runaway Train

[n2doc]

AT 1 A.M. ON JULY 6, 2013, sixty-three aging tank cars filled with crude oil derailed and exploded in the heart of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing forty-seven people. A remarkable number of things had to go wrong for this tragedy to occur, and the ongoing million-dollar investigation into the company that ran the rail route raises a series of nagging questions. What if Montreal, Maine & Atlantic had used a newer, safer tank car to transport the oil? What if two engineers had accompanied the train rather than one? What if the engineer had parked the cars on the siding instead of on the main line that went through the centre of town? What if the volatile Bakken crude oil from North Dakota that the tank cars contained had been properly identified? The more we learn, the closer we come to two inescapable yet irreconcilable conclusions: this was a preventable tragedy, caused by a toxic mix of regulatory failure, greed, and human error; and it involved a cascade of freak accidents that no number of good laws or good people could have avoided.

Lac-Mégantic is a stark reminder that the world we live in is full of risk, whether the concern is oil transportation, predatory mortgages, exotic pets, or genetically modified foods. In the face of risk, we turn to regulation—and, to hedge our bets, insurance—for the optimal means of mitigating it; but the way we choose to do this says a good deal about how we view the human condition.

Let’s say we want railways to use the cars with the thickest shells rather than the older, thinner ones MMA used to move oil through Lac-Mégantic. One way of achieving this end is to require it: Transport Canada could make it mandatory that only the safest tanks be permitted on the country’s rail lines. This approach assumes that since companies seek out the most profitable, and not necessarily the safest means of moving oil, the state should make safety choices for them (or, more accurately, for us).

Approximately 80,000 of the 97,000 DOT-111 tank cars currently moving flammable liquids in North America are still of the older variety. Some rail companies are already phasing in newer cars, in response to voluntary regulations issued in 2011. In April of this year, Transport Canada announced that pre-2011 tank cars had to be retrofitted or replaced within three years. The cost could be as high as $10 billion, a massive bill that could be passed on to consumers, and could bring with it higher prices, reduced service, or both. Some observers wonder if companies will even be able to meet the government-imposed deadline, because the required supply of new tank cars does not yet exist.

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http://thewalrus.ca/runaway-train/