Oil - Pipelines

Several tanker cars caught fire after a Canadian National Railway train carrying crude oil derailed in Northern Ontario, prompting officials to advise nearby residents to stay indoors and avoid consuming water from local sources.

CN said its crew reported the derailment to emergency services at about 2:45 a.m. ET Saturday. Police said the train was 30 to 40 cars in length and 10 cars went off the track four kilometres northwest of Gogama, Ont. There were no reports of injuries.

Some of the rail cars that caught fire entered the Mattagami River System, CN and police said.

No records, no agenda, no minutes, no briefing notes. That's what Vancouver-based economist and former ICBC CEO Robyn Allan learned from a Freedom of Information (FOI) request on senior-level meetings between the federal government and Texas-based oil giant Kinder Morgan. 

"It's not just bad administration," said Allan. "It's a betrayal of public trust." 

Three of the meetings involved then-Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver. 

A CSX Corp train hauling North Dakota crude derailed in West Virginia on Monday, setting a number of cars ablaze, destroying a house and forcing the evacuation of two towns in the second significant oil-train incident in three days.

Don’t think for a minute that this president isn’t proud of his climate-changing energy program.  To be clear, however, I don’t mean his efforts to check the advances of climate change.  Consider the introduction to the new U.S.

. . . The United Steelworkers, which represents 30,000 refinery workers in collective bargaining, tracks workplace deaths. It reports that 27 workers died at refineries in the past five years – more than five a year.

That’s intolerable. And it’s a big part of the reason that 5,000 USW oil and chemical workers, including me, are on unfair labor practice strikes nationwide. We believe not enough is being done to prevent our co-workers from leaving refineries and chemical plants in body bags. None of us wants to be the next to lose his or her life for no good reason.

A rally was held Feb 5 outside Ft. Langley on unceded Kwantlen Territory in response to Kinder Morgan drilling near the Salmon River @ 22926 Rawlison Crescent, home to endangered species, in preparation to build the proposed Trans Mountain Dilbit (Tar/Oil Sands Heavy Crude) Export Pipeline through the area.
A further march and rally is planned for Fort Langley, details TBA.

About 80 people took part in a roadside rally against the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion on Glover Road near the intersection with Rawlison Crescent in Fort Langley.

They carried signs that bore messages like "no Kinder Morgan surprises," "clean energy now" and "save the salmon."

The protest was near a test drilling site on Rawlison, where Kinder Morgan was doing geotechnical testing he week before.

One resident, who asked not to be named, told The Times that several large vehicles blocked off access to a community mailbox for five days.

The Guardian recently reported that Harvard University has increased its investments in fossil fuels by almost seven fold over the last few months.

Canada’s energy sector is more at risk from domestic environmental extremists than from religiously inspired terrorist organizations like Al Qaida, warns an RCMP report recently obtained via an Access of Information request.

“The Canadian law enforcement and security intelligence community have noted a growing radicalized faction of environmentalists who advocate the use of criminal activity to promote the protection of the natural environment,” alerts the document written by the RCMP’s infrastructure intelligence team. The 22-page report from 2011 was only recently released.

A pipeline rupture in Eastern Montana on Saturday, which spilled up to 50,000 gallons of Bakken shale crude oil into the Yellowstone River, has local residents worried that their water supplies may now be contaminated.

"I am not saying the water is unsafe. I am not saying it is safe." —Mary Jo Gehnert, Dawson County Disaster and Emergency Services coordinator