2020: Custer, WA
While all the accidents in this story involved chemicals, the elephant in the room is the some 140,000 miles of freight railroads used to transport millions of gallons of oil across the country. Minor oil spills into waterways and the environment are relatively common; the government doesn’t even keep statistics on spills that don’t reach up to hundreds of thousands of gallons. And there have been several large spills of oil from train derailments over the past decade. One of the most recent happened in December 2020, when a derailment north of Seattle, Washington spilled 30,000 gallons of oil and caused a massive fire.
