[URBAN NOTE] "Crude awakening"

[rfmcdonald]

NOW Toronto's Cynthia McQueen writes about how the stretch of railroad in midtown Toronto--a stretch that roughly parallels Dupont Street and runs just behind my home, actually--is being used to transport processed oil. The potential for catastrophe is obvious, although I can say that going through my neighbourhood the trains move slowly, at least.

Ken Brown has lived near the Canadian Pacific stretch of tracks between Avenue and Yonge for 42 years.

Since the 72-railcar explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people last summer, he’s noticed something unnerving: an increase in DOT-111 tankers carrying oil through the neighbourhood. In fact, those railcars that derailed in Lac-Mégantic, carrying highly volatile Bakken oil from North Dakota, came through Toronto en route to that disaster.

Brown has counted at least two trainloads of oil with 100 cars each passing through Toronto every day.

[. . .]

Keith Stewart, a climate and energy specialist with Greenpeace, sees security concerns as “largely manufactured to decrease transparency.”

The difficulty with rail, he says, is that constitutionally it was “granted all these extraordinary powers because at that time building the rail lines was about constructing the country, and so right now they’re still almost completely impervious to outside regulation apart from the federal government.”

Stewart, too, has noticed an increase in DOT-111 tanker traffic on the CP tracks running through his Dupont-and-Dufferin neighbourhood in the last five years.

“There’s been a huge increase, and that’s been done with no oversight,” he says. “All you have to do is watch the train tracks. If you see the cars are DOT-111 tankers, you know they’re filled with oil.”

For 20 years, the TSB has commented on the vulnerability of DOT-111s because of their thin hulls, among other things. But a phase-out plan currently under way means they’ll be in use for another 10 years.