July 22, 2014
An expose: The oil trains are even more dangerous than we thought but they don’t have to be dangerous at all, Global is planning to try to hide the trains, and a vigil for the victims of Lac Magantic
The oil trains passing through Albany don’t have to be explosive, they don’t have to be bombs that will eventually blow up again, and they don’t have to be packed with poisonous gas. But the oil corporations that are loading the trains with Bakken crude oil are turning the rail cars into bombs. Why? In the name of the Holy Bottom Line, the psychopathic America-haters who run the oil extraction corporations in North Dakota are refusing to make their product safe before running the oil car bombs past our homes.
It’s been known since the beginning of modern oil extraction back in the 1800s that one does not transport crude oil in a car or through a pipeline without first removing the light gases from the crude, explosive gases such as propane, ethane and butane. But that’s only part of the story. These train cars running through downtown Albany on their way to the Port are heavily loaded with a substance known as hydrogen sulfide, which is not only explosive but is also extremely toxic and extremely corrosive. So far the high concentration of hydrogen sulfide has been kept secret.
It appears that the frackers who have been extracting this oil from North Dakota have misidentified the nature of their product. So that they don’t have to cut their profits a bit to make their product safe enough to travel, they’ve told the American people that the oil in these tank cars is something that it is not, that it is a cleaner, less dangerous kind of oil. Even worse, the oil producers are not taking the necessary steps to make their oil safe enough to transport. In short, they have been lying to us.
Vigil For The Victims Of Lac Magantic On South Pearl Street In Albany With Train Oil Car Bombs Slowly Passing Behind
This past July 6 was the first anniversary of the rail explosion that destroyed the downtown of Lac Magantic, a lakeside town in Quebec which is a mere 22 miles from the US border. At 1:15 in the morning, when most everyone was asleep, an unattended 74 car train of oil cars somehow started rolling downhill by itself at top speed and derailed. The cars full of unrefined crude crumpled up against each other, and it is thought that sparks from the colliding metal tankers ignited the escaping gases resulting in what surviving eyewitnesses described as “ a river of fire” and “a tsunami of fire.”
47 people died in that fireball, many caught sleeping in their own beds. Or rather, the partial remains of 42 people have been found and their identities confirmed. Several of these individuals were so shredded that the remaining pieces of their bodies were identified only by painstaking genetic analysis, which took several months. The other five victims were so thoroughly obliterated by the fireball that no trace of their bodies have ever been found. They were simply vaporized.
Lac Magantic Explosion Fireball, July 6, 2013:
Yes, It Could Happen In Albany
The strangest thing about the blast was that there were hardly any wounded. Only a few victims suffered from burns or were partially asphyxiated by the deadly smoke that billowed from the burning tank cars. Those who came in contact with the explosion and survived were few. According to The Toronto Star:
Back at the hospital, reinforcements from neighbouring medical centres were standing by, ready to rush to Lac-Mégantic to treat what they expected would be dozens of injured residents. Hospital authorities were also ready to evacuate all their patients in case the wind shifted and blew the black, toxic smoke in their direction. But then nothing happened. The wind blew the smoke in the opposite direction and no patients with any of the serious burns and other injuries that might have been expected arrived at the emergency room. …One Red Cross volunteer who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media put it bluntly: “You have to understand: there are no wounded. They’re all dead.”