As children across the country head back to school this week, a new report from public interest group ForestEthics reveals that 14,800 schools and 5.7 million students are within the “oil train blast zone”—the area that must be evacuated in case of a derailment or fire from an oil train.
Using its Blast Zone map, released last year, and data from the Department of Education, ForestEthics identified the five U.S. cities with the greatest numbers of students at risk from a potential oil train derailment and explosion: Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and El Paso.
“The federal government needs to protect the millions of students sitting in classrooms inside the blast zone,” said Matt Krogh, extreme oil campaign director for ForestEthics, which is calling for a moratorium on oil trains in the absence of publicly available information about their routes, their contents, and their safety.
Massive growth of oil train traffic—over 5,000 percent since 2008 in the U.S.—has led to more derailments, oil spills into waterways, and massive explosions. This year alone has seen five explosive derailments in the U.S. and Canada. In 2013, 47 people died when an oil train crashed and exploded in the small Canadian town of Lac-Mégantic.
In May, the Department of Transportation unveiled new oil-by-rail safety standards, which included a phase-out of particularly old and dangerous cars, as well as new mandates for thicker steel walls, tougher valves, and in some cases, electronically controlled brakes. Environmental groups were joined by some elected officials in saying the new rules didn’t go far enough.
David Turnbull, campaigns director of Oil Change International, described the new regulations as “yet another indication of how dangerous energy policies written by and for Big Oil are for our communities and our climate.”
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