Editor: Picture this: instead of 99 grain cars spilling into the Kicking Horse River, there were 99 crude oil cars. The spilled oil would be spread over a couple of hundred kilometres of river, maybe more, before the flowing oil contained.
I don’t even want to think of the number of decades it would take to bring everything along those miles of river back to normal, if that would even be possible.
To the pipeline resistance movement, this question: what pipeline leak could ever come close to the magnitude of what I have described?
Last summer I travelled the old Trans-Canada Highway west of Kamloops along the Fraser River. There are rail lines on both sides of the river and something like this could happen there. Imagine once again the disaster if a similar derailment happened there, spilling oil into the Fraser River.
If such a disaster were to happen, heaven forbid, I would predict that the federal government would approve and start building the Kinder-Morgan pipeline within days.
Who could then argue that pipelines are more dangerous than shipping oil by rail?
Dick Burgman,
Canmore
