Cities need to know of hazardous rail cargoes
The Lac-Mégantic train disaster was in every way the opposite of a good thing, yet some good might come of it if it leads to new rules governing the transportation of hazardous goods by rail.
In the wake of that horrific conflagration, which destroyed the heart of a town and took 47 lives, minds in government have been concentrated and the matter of rail safety has moved to the forefront of public concern.
Its effect has been evident on the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, which has struck a rail-safety working group. It met in Montreal last week and issued a call for greater transparency with respect to the rail shipment of hazardous goods through Canadian towns.
It is not a new concern for municipalities. The group’s co-chair, Doug Reycraft, mayor of Southwest Middlesex, Ont., said it had been a long-standing FCM policy that municipalities should know what kind of dangerous goods are passing through communities on trains. But he noted this was the first time that the organization has articulated the demand for such information as a priority matter.
Similarly, a Senate committee report arising from a study launched well before both the Lac-Mégantic disaster and the derailment of a petroleum-carrying train during June’s flooding in Calgary has got more attention than it might have in the absence of these accidents.
The Senate committee called on the government to launch an independent review of hazardous-materials transportation by rail, as well as an accelerated retiring of old CTC/DOT-111 tankers of the sort involved in the Lac-Mégantic disaster. Experts had been warning for some time that the DOT-111s are prone to spilling their loads in derailments.
The FCM working group reasonably proposed that the federal government, which regulates rail transport, should require railways to share with all municipalities information on what is transported through their territories. Some, such as Canadian Pacific, already do so, but in the absence of a formal requirement to that effect, others (like the operator involved in the Lac-Mégantic tragedy) have not been keeping municipalities informed.
Apparently, the reason behind the policy of not forcing the divulgence of such information is that it reduces the risk of sabotage or terrorist attacks. However, the municipalities’ contention that the information is of vital importance to first responders in the event of a derailment should trump that concern.
Bringing municipalities into the rail-safety process would add a welcome level of checks and balances to a system that had been largely out of sight and out of mind until the frightful events of this summer.
It took these events to focus attention on lax railroad regulation and the dramatic spike in oil shipments by rail in Canada, from 500 daily carloads only four years ago to today’s 140,000. In the Montreal region, shipments are expected to increase by up to 30,000 barrels per day when Suncor Energy begins receiving Alberta crude at its east-end refinery by the end of the year.
The health of the Canadian economy is greatly reliant on the shipment of hazardous goods, but the health of communities through which they pass would be better served by the regulations their mayors are calling for.