I was watching my favourite documentary series, Jetstream, on the new Discovery Velocity channel when something hit me as being strangely out of place.
Jetstream, filmed in 2007 and aired in 2008, follows seven Royal Canadian Air Force pilots as they go through training to become fighter pilots on the CF-18.
In one episode, they took their first long-range flight into a busy airport, Los Angeles International, with a flight of four planes, flying all the way from Cold Lake. Once on the ground the cameras followed them during a brief layover and a little R&R.
One of the pilots hammed it up for the camera, talking on his cellphone while driving a car. Wait, what was that? Driving while talking on a handheld phone?
The practice was widely banned only a few years ago, but seeing it on TV was like being hit upside the head with a flip-phone. It was jarring.
Now, if anyone on this planet should be able to multitask, it would be a fighter pilot. If they can fly faster than the speed of sound, calculate air-to-air intercepts in three-dimensional space and drop bombs within a few feet of the intended target, all while pulling Gs and talking on the radio, they should be able to talk on a cellphone and drive a mere mortal car.
My rather lengthy point here is how quickly society’s attitude can change when it comes to unsafe practices once we collectively realize something is a dumb idea.
At first, it was no big deal. A car phone, wired into the car, no less, was a status symbol. When cellphones became widespread, everyone was talking while driving, and some began texting, too. Then reality sunk in, and people started dying.
Eventually distracted driving had become so commonplace that it was starting to make driving drunk look safe by comparison. Thus society collectively put the boots to distracted driving.
We’re starting to see the same with crude-by-rail, the practice of shipping vast quantities of crude oil by rail tankers to anywhere on the continent where it is needed. It became a way to quickly overcome the lack of pipeline capacity in the North Dakota Bakken area, a region that ballooned from 90,000 barrels per day to 1.2 million barrels per day of oil production in a few short years. While costing more, its flexibility allowed oil to be marketed to pretty much any refinery on the continent, as long as there was a track running to it. Pipelines, on the other hand, are dramatically more limiting. The oil goes where the pipe goes, or where the next pipe connected to it goes, and that’s it.
But as anyone with any experience in the industry knows, pipelines are not only more efficient and cheaper to transport oil, they are also substantially safer. This is inherent in a transportation system that is buried one metre underground from start to finish. It’s protected by a substantial cushion of dirt the entire route.
Trains, on the other hand, derail. It appears they are derailing with increasing frequency when it comes to crude-by-rail. And when they do that, they will often explode and catch fire. So many derailments, explosions and fires have happened in the past few months I’ve lost track, and it’s my job to know these things. There was one more on March 7 in Northern Ontario, following a similar event a few weeks prior in the same general area.
Lives have been spared in almost all cases, except the big one, the Lac-Megantic derailment that killed 47 people in a small Quebec town.
Just as it was with driving while talking or texting on a cellphone, it is becoming increasingly clear crude-by-rail is inherently unsafe, or at least not as safe as pipelines.
The environmental movement, Nebraska farmers, First Nations and President Barack Obama have collectively stalled most major pipeline projects on this continent, including Keystone XL, Northern Gateway and TransMountain Expansion. They are starting to sink their teeth into Energy East. The result has been more crude-by-rail, and subsequently, more derailments and fires. Some people need to reconsider if pipelines are such a bad idea after all.
Consider them a speakerphone for your cellphone. Less bad things are likely to happen.
— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected].
