Early on July 24, while most residents in the quiet Seattle neighborhoods of Magnolia and Queen Anne were still asleep, an oil train derailed just a few hundred feet from their homes. Each of the train’s oil cars was carrying roughly 30,000 gallons of a notoriously explosive type of shale oil.
It’s exactly the same kind of train, loaded up with exactly the same kind of fuel, that resulted in a deadly explosion in Quebec in July 2013, as well as train derailments, oil spills and massive conflagrations in Alabama, North Dakota, New Brunswick and Lynchburg, VA. ...