With the recent incident involving a semi-truck hauling hazardous material rolling off Highway 39, we are left with the standard concerns and a rather common thread of questioning: What if it had been worse?
When all is said and done, the incident between Estevan and North Portal on Sunday afternoon is a minor accident in which nobody was seriously harmed, and it doesn’t appear any environmental fallout is in the future. We don’t wish to inflate or sensationalize this scenario.
Our emergency crews responded promptly and appropriately. The mess was cleaned up, the highway re-opened and everyone who found themselves in the middle of the event has gone back to their regular schedule.
While we don’t wish to sound alarmist, we also feel incidences like these must not be ignored. When it comes to the transportation of hazardous materials, it’s our communities, our land and, ultimately, our lives at stake. We all have a say in how these materials are shipped and to where.
The Energy City sees a lot of traffic, and a lot of the trucks and trains using Estevan as a throughway are transporting goods that would be harmful were they to escape their sealed containers. That doesn’t mean there’s reason to close the borders of the city to any traffic with hazardous material. Though much of it is just travelling through, there is still plenty of material coming to Estevan for use by the city’s healthy industrial district.
It’s no secret that hazardous material makes its way through our streets, though when, where and exactly what it is may be clandestine for a time. The rules of transportation say the shippers are under no obligation to inform a city about what sort of material will be moving through town until after the substances have transited. They may provide that information after the material has flowed through the avenues if someone is interested in asking.
It sure is nice to know, after the fact, what dangerous goods were driven through our backyards or what toxic material may have been sent via rail through the heart of the city.
What we can demand is sufficient regulation to ensure the right steps are taken to make sure a transportation industry that meets the appropriate safety and environmental standards is provided.
We can demand that shipping containers be engineered to meet a standard that can withstand a collision or a rollover.
In this instance, the driver of the truck was charged for driving with undue care and attention, and though police didn’t disclose exactly what that meant about the circumstances of the rollover, we can demand that commercial truck drivers, like pilots, have monitored sleep or rules set to dictate time behind the wheel and rest.
We have many such rules and standards, but it’s not enough to have rules. They need to be enforced. They need to be updated to meet the needs of our changing world. The public needs to have confidence in the system.
Every minor accident chips away at that confidence. Each mishap raises questions that require answers.
This particular incident reminds us that the system isn’t perfect, and though it probably never will be, we can still demand for it to be better.
