Oil by Rail?
Submitted by Rev. Holly Hallman
Am I my brother’s keeper? Gen 4:9
Let’s say you have a lot of oil and you want to sell it. To do
that you have to get it from where you are to where the people are who will
refine it so you can get your money. To move it you need a long tube-one
that stretches from you to the market. The natural choice would be to
connect sections of tube to each other and lay them end-to-end from here to
there. The wrinkle comes when someone wants a lot of money for their right
of way, or to a spot where something special happened and the land is
sacred. In frustration, you might just decide to take an old pipe and
make it bigger. You might buy property outright for your tube. Or,
you might look around and see that you can use short pieces of tubing set on
wheels and roll your oil from A to Z. Boom, that’s it! Brilliant!
There is something wrong with this idea of oil in a moveable
tube! Perhaps you had never heard of Lac Megantic where an oil train exploded and killed 47people. There are lots of small towns all across this country
and Canada that I haven’t heard of that are endangered by this pipeline on
wheels.
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| Great Northern Tunnel in Seattle Photo by Alex Garland |
In Seattle, “The Great Northern Tunnel is a one mile double
tracked railroad tunnel under downtown,
completed by the Great Northern Railway in 1905, and now owned by the BNSF
Railway.”[i] Not far from the northern portal of that
tunnel is the Salmon Bay Bridge that was opened in 1914. It has a single track and carries all the rail traffic that moves up the coast to northern Washington and British Columbia. Those lines were built to carry passengers and freight but now carry all of the northbound coal and oil that comes from Montana, North Dakota and Alberta, BC.
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| Salmon Bay Bridge in Seattle |
Don’t think for a moment that your town is exempt! On
Valentines weekend three trains had derailments, one in Alberta, one in Ontario
and one in West Virginia. More and more, we are learning that where
there are tracks there is potential for oil transport disasters.
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| West Virginia exploding oil train |
When our great rail systems were built over 100 years ago they
were intended to carry a much different cargo. Today the nation’s grain
still moves by rail. Beside nearly every silo there is a train
track. These long trains carrying crude are making insufferable delays for people and perishable foods.
Rail lines split towns and cities in two,
often leaving the need for emergency services and those who supply them on the
opposite sides of slow, mile to mile-and-a-half long oil (and coal) trains.
New documents, videos, and news stories pile up in email inboxes
every single day. To enumerate all the wrongs that this “new” pipeline
creates would be difficult, tedious and depressing work. Instead, let’s go
back to the opening scripture. Am I my brother’s keeper? The
Bible/God’s answer is in the affirmative. Furthermore, we know our kinship
extends to every species on our planet. Noah was commanded to bring
pairs of all things to the ark so they could continue to flourish. Our
brothers and sisters walk, swim, fly, creep, and more. Together we make up
the whole. And, yes, we are caretakers!
PEC honors this caretaking of our brothers and sisters!
Whether the oil is coming through a pipeline or by rail, its use is desecrating
God’s good earth, clear skies and sacred water. We are advocating on many
fronts for discontinuing the extraction and use of fossil fuels, for stronger
rail safety standards, for no new export terminals, and for clean air and
water. Not this (see below). We hope you will join us!
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| Crude oil trains in North Dakota |
Rev. Holly Hallman
PEC Vice Moderator and Co-chair Advocacy Committee
Prayer: Creator of all things bright and beautiful,
guide us as we examine how our use of energy and our use of money might turn
the tide away from the darkness that fossil fuels are spreading across your
earth. Amen
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