Originally posted on The Daily Caller.
The recent derailment of a BNSF Railway train near a small town in North Dakota has reignited the debate over railcar safety — a debate which has sparked contentious new rules governing oil tank cars.
But new regulations for oil tank cars don’t actually solve the problems of train derailments, according to a former federal regulator. The recent slew of derailments have largely been caused by problems with the tracks, not the fact that trains are carrying oil.
“We wouldn’t be talking about this stuff if we didn’t have derailment,” Brigham McCown, the former head of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration under President George W. Bush, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.