Track Inspections And Oil Trains

Simple steps could have prevented last month’s fiery derailment of an oil train in the Columbia River Gorge. Had inspectors from Union Pacific railroad or government regulators walked the stretch of track in the weeks or months prior, they might have spotted broken bolts. But no one did. As Tony Schick of our EarthFix team reports, those missed bolts in Mosier expose the flaws in the current system for railroad inspections.