Coal from derailment beginning to combust
It’s been a month since a Montana Rail Link coal train derailed along the Clark Fork River, near Heron, Mont., dumping coal into the river and along its banks. To date, MRL has yet to clean up its mess. Piles of coal still litter the shoreline near an ecologically sensitive river that has overcome decades of mining pollution.
By failing to clean up the coal it dumped, MRL isn’t just being irresponsible, it’s putting local communities in danger. This week, the coal began to combust, risking a potential wildfire given the extremely dry conditions in Montana and Idaho. And although recent rains will hopefully extinguish the heat, the water running off the coal may wash harmful byproducts like mercury, lead, and arsenic into the river and surrounding Kootenai National Forest. MRL’s unwillingness to clean up its coal is negligent and irresponsible, and belies the rail and fossil fuel industries’ claims that transporting coal and oil by rail is good for North Idaho.
Courtney Wallace, a Seattle-based BNSF representative, issued a guest opinion recently, extolling BNSF’s safety record and emergency response while minimizing the risk coal and oil trains create in our railside communities. But following four significant derailments near sensitive waterways in North Idaho just this year, these assurances ring hollow. To her, transporting coal and oil by rail through Idaho may be a good deal because it doesn’t put her home or water at risk, but for those of us living here, clean water and public safety are our first priorities, not the coal and oil passing through our communities.
Seeing the coal lie along the Clark Fork River over a month after the spill is a disturbing reminder of the historic trend of industries not caring for the places they do business. Silver Valley communities have suffered industry negligence and irresponsibility for years because mining companies refused to clean up their mine waste, leaving it for the EPA and the State of Idaho to clean up later. These communities have found out the hard way that some contaminants are impossible to ever fully clean up. Even now an estimated 83 million tons of contaminated sediment lurk on the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene, after being washed down the Coeur d’Alene River from mine waste in the Silver Valley.
The bottom line is cleanup and emergency response plans don’t justify the risk that coal and oil trains pose on our water and public safety, especially when the spills never get cleaned up. We’ve witnessed other communities get burned by risking their public health and water in favor of business profits. We shouldn’t let BNSF and the other rail companies do the same to us. For starters, we shouldn’t permit BNSF to add another rail bridge over Lake Pend Oreille and increase the odds of a coal or oil train derailment like the one along the Clark Fork.
If one of MRL’s or BNSF’s trains derailed over Lake Pend Oreille, do you think either of these rail companies would clean up after themselves and restore the clean water our community relies on? Take a drive east on Highway 200, toward Heron. You’ll find the answer to that question there.
Matt Nykiel is a conservation associate with the Idaho Conservation League.