In westbound oil trains, worries focus on the next big spill

Oregon Live covered the oil train threat to the Middle Fork Flathead River in a good article July 8 with quotes from local interests and comparisons to the disaster (230,000 gallons of crude oil) in Iowa and the firey spill in Mosier, Oregon in 2016.

“Beneath the Middle Fork lie several feet of pebbles and baseball-sized “cobbles.” “These underground areas are acting as filters, cleaning and cleansing the water as it flows underground,” explained Tom Bansak, assistant director of the University of Montana’s Flathead Lake Biological Station. “There’s this whole community [of organisms] that lives in the spaces between the rocks underneath the rivers.”

“If oil is spilled in the river, the flow paths that bring that water underground will bring the oil with it, and then the oil will get into that underground environment and stick to the rocks and contaminate that underground aquifer.

That could impact the entire local ecosystem – and the humans who depend on it.”

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In westbound oil trains, worries focus on the next big spill, Robbie DiMesio, Oregon Live