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Keystone cancellation prompts emergency debate in parliament The fierce debate over cross-border pipelines is putting more Canadian oil and gas on trains destined for the United States — a country experts fear is ill-equipped for the potential consequences. It would take an oil-by-rail calamity of a scale comparable to the 2013 Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec before Americans wake up to the dangers, U.S. rail safety analysts say. “There’s a bullet whizzing past our head,” said Eric de Place, an energy policy expert and director at the Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based think tank focused on sustainability issues in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. On average, more than a million barrels of crude oil travel through Washington state each week, most of it from North Dakota but about 13 per cent from Alberta and Saskatchewan, according to the state’s Department of Ecology. The risks were punctuated late last year when seven tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire just outside Bellingham, Wash., a city of nearly 90,000 people not far from the Canada-U.S. border. “The only thing I can imagine is that there will have to be a significant loss of life before we get the regulatory attention that the […]
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