Derailments and Spills and Protecting Clean Water

By Andy Fellows, Chesapeake Regional Director A CSX train carrying crude oil going off the tracks in Virginia is a news flash that grabs national attention for a moment, but for those involved and for the communities in which they happen, a derailment can be catastrophic, life changing and deadly.  50,000 gallons of oil are “missing,” as officials are uncertain as to how much burned in the blaze and how much ended up in the water.  Though no one at this time appears to be injured, the burning oil along the James brings to mind the image of the Cuyahoga River in flames in the late 60’s, a national embarrassment that led to passage of the Clean Water Act.  Yesterday’s disaster is likely part of the decision to ship crude oil from the Dakotas to the Virginia coast along a train route which had little if any discussion or notification of Virginia residents.  The right-to-know what chemicals, especially when they are deadly, are being transported through communities such as Lynchburg and Richmond, should be established and well-enforced law, but it isn’t. The explosion of a train carrying crude oil in Quebec that killed 47 people last July was only among the worst of a series of incidents involving train transport of deadly chemicals. The location of yesterday’s derailment is upstream of the drinking water intakes of Richmond, causing Virginia’s capital to begin to draw water from a backup supply, bringing to mind the recent coal ash spill into the Dan River and the West Virginia chemical spill.  A train derailment in 2007 caused tons of coal to spill into the Anacostia, also on a CSX line.  A pipeline rupture in 2000 near Chalk Point was devastating for the Patuxent River in Maryland.  Countless other petrochemical spills throughout the United States, are much more costly to clean up than developing the regulatory precautions that prevent the events in the first place. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe should seize this opportunity to establish a regulatory overhaul to the extent that he can with existing law, and propose legislation in 2015 that better protects Virginia citizens from the inevitable accidents that result from the extraction, refining, transport and storage of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas.