Letters to the editor May 4

Railroad safety

1999: A Montana Rail Link train derailed between Paradise and Plains spilling hot asphalt, corn syrup and an estimated 8,000 12-packs of Coors Light into the Clark Fork River.

2013: Twenty-three cars of a 66-car Montana Rail Link train derailed into the Clark Fork River. Nineteen of the cars were empty.

2014: A Montana Rail Link train derailed and left crews trying to remove three Boeing 737 fuselages from the Clark Fork River.

April 2, 2023: A Montana Rail Link train derailed dumping several cars into the Clark Fork River near Quinn’s Hot Springs. The cargo included thousands of bottles of Coors Light and Blue Moon beer.

Despite the fact that this stretch of one of Montana’s premier rivers seems to be a popular spot to dump excess bottles and cans of Coors Light, we cannot depend on the next derailment dumping nothing more toxic than America’s favorite refreshment into one of our treasured waterways.

BNSF Railway moves 100-car tank trains down the Middle Fork of the Flathead River between Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshal Wilderness. Those 12-18 trains per week carry mostly Bakken crude oil headed for refineries on the West Coast and eventually to Asia. Should one or more of those carloads of toxic oil spill into the Middle Fork, it would be game over for the foreseeable future for recreation on this stretch of one of America’s first Wild and Scenic rivers.

When questioned about the safety of the tracks through this steep canyon, the standard reply from BNSF goes something like, “Don’t worry, we are ready to clean up the mess should a disaster occur.”

For many of us, that answer is just not good enough. We can assume that there is a plan to keep our worst nightmare from happening, but the railroad will not release their Prevention Plan, nor will it release their Response Plan, pleading National Security concerns.

Given the frequency with which we see rail cars in our rivers and the toxicity of much of their cargo, Montanans need to know what BNSF is doing to prevent a mega-disaster and keep the toxic oil in the rail cars. We can no longer just accept the “trust us” answer.

­— Dan Short is president of the Flathead Valley Chapter of Trout Unlimited