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‘Click:’ Beacon derailment is latest round of “bomb train Russian roulette”

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Photo/Sandy Saunders
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A CSX freight train derailed just south of the Beacon Metro-North station early Saturday morning, according to a story published in the Journal News/Lohud.com

Photo/Sandy Saunders

Photo/Sandy Saunders

The train was using Metro North’s tracks east of the Hudson to carry construction debris, though the majority of freight trains operating in the Hudson Valley travel on the CSX-owned tracks running along the river’s west bank, where the company hauls six million gallons or more of crude oil each day.

It’s a good thing this train wasn’t carrying the unusually volatile, environmentally devastating crude oil that has exploded and spilled from railcars on an almost weekly basis throughout the U.S. and Canada in 2015. With so much of that dangerous product already moving through the Hudson valley and its communities on “bomb trains” every day, we’ve been lucky so far.

Over the last two years, the series of catastrophic explosions and spills of crude oil from rail cars has proven deadly. Moreover, it has shown us that the effective recovery of spilled crude oil is impossible.

How long will the Hudson Valley be forced to play this deadly game of Russian roulette? How long do we have before lives are lost or an unrecoverable spill of crude oil by rail or vessel devastates our communities and deals a major blow to the Hudson River?

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