78 dead as a high-speed train leaps off the tracks.

In Spain.

Video footage showed carriages crumpled and lying on their side. Almost all those who perished were found dead on the scene, in an indication of the force of the derailment. A local official likened the scene to Dante’s "Inferno."

I'm blogging this because it's not an atypical incident and because too many people in America have unrealistic, idealized notions of the goodness of trains and their capacity to whisk everyone around everywhere at high speed. 

Read More

"Police say there's evidence Canada train was tampered with."

And here's the highest-rated comment at the link:

Not to go off on some "conspiracy "deal but, Speaking as an experienced[heavy duty] mechanic, this cant happen, the "maxi-brakes" don't need air to stay on, they need air to release,,something does not compute with this,.Even if the engine was still running?, these type of brakes cant!! "self release", someone has to push the "maxi button" to make them come off,...and crude is not,in general, "explosive" per se,.. unless there are lots of fumes present[unlikely in a fully loaded car],..methinks there is more to this than meets the eye and I for one, am glad that this is being investigated etc,..Condolences to those who have experienced losses,.. we! are thinking of you all,..I know, it is not much, but it is good in the whole,,

Here's my post from yesterday observing the motivation for sabotage.

Read More

"Why Catastrophic Airline Crashes Have Become More Survivable."

"Over the many decades of commercial air travel, the airlines have learned more and more about why airplanes crash and how passengers survive."

Airplane manufacturers, for instance, are building passenger seats much stronger — they're able to withstand 16 Gs of force. So they don't rip off the floor and go flying through the cabin, injuring passengers, as they did years ago....

"A lot of effort was put into slowing down the spread of fire after a crash landing, making the materials in the interior of the cabin more fire resistant and also changing the materials such that they wouldn't emit very highly toxic fumes," [says Hans Weber, president of TECOP International].

People are doing a great job too:

After Flight 214 broke apart, flight attendants were able to quickly deploy the inflatable slides and get everyone off the plane before the fire erupted.

Credit to the flight attendants and to the passengers getting up and out of there. You'd never know, watching the crowds shuffling about in the airport and drinking and drowsing on board that ordinary people can move in such an efficient and coordinated manner.

Imminent death — as the old saying goes — concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Ah! What we could do if we faced a sudden stark threat, as our ancestors did in evolutionary times! We inherited the capacities they needed then, but we've got so little use for them these days. We go to action movies and ride roller coasters or paraglide to activate the antiquated bodily systems. It's not that we're nostalgic for danger, but built into our depths, there's a need for something that we — in no conscious sense — desire.

Still, if the moment comes, no matter how drunk or obese or debilitated you might be, you will get up out of that seat and — exactly when it's your turn, following the orders of the very flight attendant you may have complained to over nothing 10 minutes ago — plunge down that slide.

Read More

Why did that train explode in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec?

It's a mystery, but consider this clue:

The train was carrying crude from the region that has spearheaded the revival in the use of oil trains in North America: North Dakota's Bakken shale.... Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, has enabled North Dakota to quickly become the No. 2 oil producer in the United States, but the state has few pipelines to carry its new product to market.... So the oil industry has turned to rail to move crude to refineries on the East, West and Gulf coasts. The train that derailed at Lac-Mégantic was bound for a refinery in New Brunswick, east of Quebec....

An important factor keeping the cost of train transport down for oil producers has been the practice of sending the crude in trains made entirely of tanker cars of oil, like the train that crashed in Lac-Mégantic. Shipping in these "unit trains," long lines of black tankers that look like a moving above-ground pipeline, is cheaper than the traditional "manifest train" that is a mix of boxcars, flatbeds, grain hoppers, and coal cars (an operator needs a "manifest," or list, to keep track of what's aboard.)  New onloading and offloading stations are being built especially for all-oil trains.

Sabotage?

If it was sabotage, what interests did the saboteurs have in mind? They could have been opponents of fracking, but they could have been proponents of pipelines — radical environmentalists or radical opponents of environmentalism.

Read More