when they looked out their window and they saw this. he said the noise was so loud and the explosion was so big he was sure a full size jet line her crashed into the ground across the river from their house. he learned whether they got through to 911 that it had actually been a train derailment, an oil train derailment. a train with 107 tanker cars carrying crude oil had been flung off the tracks, 27 cars rerailed, 15 ruptured. only one person was injured in that huge explosion but 1,000 people had to be evacuated from their homes for days while that oil train fire burned itself out. the fire was too big and too hot to put out for days. they had to let it burn. that oil train derailment in west virginia was the latest a string of disasters like that across the country. a string of oil train apocalyptic crashes led the federal government to crackdown on things like oil train speed and beefed up standards for the tanker cars transporting the oil.
a string of oil train apocalyptic crashes led the federal government to crackdown on things like oil train speed and beefed up standards for the tanker cars transporting the oil. but this crash in west virginia turns out this was not about speed or the rail cars. turns out this one was caused by something more galling. the federal railroad administration released the findings of their investigation into that mt. carbon, west virginia derailment. and what they found was that what happened there was caused by the railroad tracks. it wasn t some mysterious problem. it wasn t some unforeseeable freak thing. it was something the railroad knew about. csx owns the tracks. they hired a contractor to inspect the raldz. the good news, i guess, is that contractor did detect something being wrong in the rails there. twice. not once but twice that contractor detected a flaw in the rail in the specific spot where that derailment happened. the contractor hired to inspect the rails said she did see a
bomb trains. we didn t make up that phrase. it is what people call those who barrel through their communities, hauling highly flammable cargo through their community. and here again is our senior correspondent drew griffin. every day thousands of rail cars caring tanker after tanker of bakken crude oil roll through the town and when accidents happen they can be devastated n. february in mt. vernon west virginia 107 tanker cars filled with crude oil from north dakota derailers and the oil cars split open and a fire ball erupted. miraculously there was only one
fireballs. railroads are not new technology, obviously. shipping oil by rail is not new technology. we are shipping so much of it more than we used to. we have very quickly proven that the old safety standards we had for doing that kind of thing at low volume are not good enough now that we are doing it high volume. the government really is scrambling to catch up after we have one after another of these huge explosions. last night, literally just last night on this show, we had the obama administration transportation secretary, anthony foxx, here live to tax about the brand new rules that were just announced to try to deal with the problem of oil trains blowing up all over the place. talking about secretary foxx, i think the government is happy to have some rule out at all given how hard the oil industry is pushing against it and how long it takes to roll these things out. what they have rolled out is, you know, kind of a mixed bag. on the other hand, they are setting new rules for str
setting new rules for stronger tanker cars that hopefully won t blow up so easily. on the other hand, these new mandatory standards for stronger cars won t go into effect for years. they are going to leave the current generation of unsafe cars on the rails for up to another five years. on one hand, the new rules say first responders and emergency crews should get more information with about these rolling mile long bombs that are pulling through cities and towns all across the country. on the other hand, the new rules say the general public should get even less access to information about those trains than we get now. so they are trying to come up with a fix to the problem. every step of the way, the industry, the railroad industry and the energy industry is pushing back and saying, oh, there is no problem at all. pay no attention to the apocalyptic fireball in the corner. that fight is underway. we had the transportation secretary here just last night talking about it. then, wake up th