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The Sun was right to call for greater public transparency about rail traffic through the Howard Street Tunnel, as the public is poised to provide even larger subsidies to renovate it (“ CSX back on track,” December 17, 2018). Our region’s railroads are critical to the health, safety, and economic development of Baltimore: a huge volume of commodities travel quickly and efficiently by rail, but bottlenecks like the Howard Street Tunnel restrict that flow. And, more importantly to Baltimore’s neighborhoods, aging infrastructure can create the risk of derailment. Already in Baltimore, we’ve seen

In Baltimore, Clean Water Action has been working for two years to prevent further oil train traffic from passing through our city and to make sure the City government, emergency services, and the public know all of the risks and health impacts that oil train shipments can cause. Our campaign is only a part of a nation-wide effort to stop oil trains, and the past few weeks have seen a lot of important victories and news across the country.

On August 9, the Whatcom County Council in Washington State passed an emergency moratorium on any new applications to ship unrefined fossil fuel through the

When Marylanders consider the risk of fracking in our state, we usually think of the Western Maryland counties – Washington, Alleghany, and Garret – that lie above the Marcellus Gas Basin. But smaller gas basins cross all parts of our state, including two in Frederick County. The Culpeper Basin stretches north from Virginia beneath Adamstown and Ballenger Creek to southern Frederick City; the Gettysburg Basin comes south from Pennsylvania beneath the Monocacy River touching Emmitsburg, Thurmont, and the northern edge of Frederick City including parts of Fort Detrick. All together, 19% of Frederick County has frackable gas beneath it – and that puts our farms, rivers, and drinking water at risk.