A freight train derailed in northwest Iowa on Friday, leaking crude oil into flooded fields flanking the tracks and raising concerns about the possible contamination of residential water supplies downstream, officials said.
No one was injured when 33 oil tanker cars from Alberta, Canada, derailed at about 4:30am just south of Doon in Lyon County, BNSF railroad spokesman Andy Williams said.
Some of the tankers were compromised, causing the oil to leak into floodwaters and eventually into the rain-swollen Little Rock River, but officials did not have an exact number of tankers that leaked oil by late Friday afternoon, he said.
BNSF had hazardous materials and environmental experts on the scene, and had begun cleanup within hours of the derailment, Williams said.
“We are containing the oil that was spilled as close to the incident as possible using containment booms and recovering it with skimmers and vacuum trucks,” he said.
Williams said he did not immediately know the train’s destination.
Between 30 and 40 semitrailers containing cleanup equipment had arrived at the scene near Doon, Iowa, by Friday afternoon, Lyon County Sheriff Steward Vander Stoep said.
Officials at the scene said that floodwater from the swollen Little Rock River played a part in causing the cars to leave the tracks, but added that they were not yet sure whether the waters compromised the track, physically pushed the cars off it or played a part in some other way.
The river on Wednesday rose rapidly after 13cm to 18cm of rain fell and a further downpour on Thursday.
A broadening sheen of oil spread near several of the tankers, which had piled up across the track and earthen berm, some submerged in the water.
Drinking water in Doon and the immediate area did not seem to be in danger of contamination, Vander Stoep said.
However, news of the spill was enough to prompt officials in Rock Valley, a small city about 8km southwest of the derailment, to shut off all the city’s drinking water wells.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS