April 16th kicked off the calendar week with the Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) making headlines across the US after yet another train derailment. This time it was in Rockwood, ME. The train derailed and caught fire as the track had allegedly washed out.
According to a Facebook post from the Rockwood Fire & Rescue: “Train derailment with fire north of rockwood, please stay clear!” with a warning of hazardous materials on board, but later removed that information. In the need for transparency though, the CPR stated that hazardous materials were in fact onboard, but they were not a part of the fire. Instead, it was only the locomotive at the front and some lumber cars that had caught fire.
Unlike previous incidents, the CPR is working hand in hand with local first responders to ensure the public knows they are not at risk and keep the people from town away. Bringing in their own hazmat team to help with the safe removal and re-transportation of the materials is an incredibly difficult but necessary task. CPR has been setting the standard for how a response to an accident should look.
Located in northern Maine on the west side of Moosehead Lake, the small town of Rockwood is just 45 miles south of the Canadian border, and is a heavily wooded community. With the logging industry making up much of the employment in the area, the Maine Forest Service (MFS) gave some of the most intricate comments about the season.
“Additional rail cars transporting hazardous materials did not derail…The assessment of officials on the scene is that these hazardous materials are not at risk of leaking and are not at risk of catching fire.” MFS also provided the initial theory about what caused the derailment. From what they saw “an early assessment indicates that the derailment may have been caused by a build-up of melting ice and debris that washed out part of the railroad track.”
With three rail workers being transported to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries according to MFS, this was a rather uneventful accident. Nevertheless, the town’s residents and the woodland critters have been horrifically poisoned by the fumes from the fires. This kind of accident leaves untold damages from fuel and oil runoff, and it leaks into the local water table. Being so close to Moosehead Lake puts much of the area at risk of poisoning and long-term health damage.
Given the dependency on the natural resources that this accident damaged, this is one of those slow-burn incidents. The damage was significant initially, and while it is lower now, it will continue to stay enhanced until some significant time has passed, or some serious remediation of the soil and the water table has been done. In decades past, many railroads have refused to be a part of this, and their refusal to step up has caused lingering problems for generations.
This sign of our crumbling railway infrastructure runs much deeper than these accidents, but this is also the first indication of just how horrifically it has been suffering. The American people’s taxes have been shelled out to keep the railroads clean and in sufficient repair. As we have seen in recent months, they may be “clean” but they are not safe. Instead, they are rife with problems and are incredibly susceptible to attack.
As a result, many are beginning to wonder if this is a ploy by Biden and the liberal left to being the destruction of the country to weaken the people from being able to defend themselves and provide for themselves. In that situation, we as a nation would be more susceptible than ever to attack from foreign entities, and given Biden’s relationships with other nations, we are in horrible shape.
