Letter to the editor: Near miss

We’re still alive.

My heart goes out to the people of Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The loss suffered there should have been the end of this. It has been almost three years since 47 people died in their sleep that morning. A mile wide blast destroyed their downtown, their home.

I’m sure all of us here in the Gorge made the connection then, or at least I hope we all do now.

They say we were lucky, perhaps we were if you believe in that.

I say we were lied to. At a Mosier City Council Meeting on 12/10/14, Brock Nelson, a Union Pacific Rail Road Representative, while pitching a project to extend a second track that exists east of Mosier through downtown and beyond to the west, tried to assuage our fears of mile-long coal and oil trains by stating that they (UP) do not run unit trains of oil on their lines (unit train meaning that the entire train is hauling a single type of cargo).

In their presentation later in the meeting, Friends of the Columbia Gorge showed the community a picture taken from the Mosier Plateau of a unit train of oil cars passing through Mosier’s downtown just weeks prior to this meeting.

Brock Nelson’s response paraphrased: “Well… we do not ship Bakken crude on our lines, the oil on our tracks is coming from Utah and is not as combustible as the Bakken crude” (fun fact by the way, that oil from Utah sinks, so is probably worse if it ends up in/under the river).

And then this weekend we had 16 cars from a unit train of Bakken crude derail off of the Union Pacific line in our small town.

Yes, it could have been so much worse, and I’m incredibly thankful it wasn’t, but the fact is that the tragedy that this could have been has already happened. People have died.

Mosier “dodged a bullet,” but who’s downrange.

Andrew Merrit

Mosier