The Works

City Maps Show Who Lives Closest to Dangerous Blast Zones

A crowdsourced mapping tool of oil train routes shows who should be most concerned about potential explosions.

A warning placard on a tank car carrying crude oil (AP Photo/Matthew Brown, File)

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Rail lines moving explosive crude oil through densely populated California cities must now disclose their routes, according to a recent assembly bill. While the new regulation may sound like a no-brainer, it fills a gaping void; despite federal orders, rail companies like BNSF have been anything but forthcoming, agreeing to share information with first responders only if they sign confidentiality agreements, which conflict with some states’ open record laws.

With little public information available, activists, municipal governments and even data analysts have scrambled to fill in the gaps. As headline after dire headline pointed out over the last year, North America’s crude oil boom has a number of steep downsides, and the most spectacular is exploding trains. Because Bakken crude from North Dakota is especially volatile, and because it often travels in outdated DOT-111 cars and, worst of all, because it follows regular freight lines through cities and towns, the threat is very real. A derailment in Quebec last year killed 47 people, and five high-profile accidents have followed this year.

One particularly ambitious project used a magazine article, GIS technology and crowdsourcing to create an imperfect but expanding map. Matt Krogh is one of the brains behind the Oil Train Blast Zone, published earlier this year. Krogh has a master’s degree in GIS mapping from Western Washington University and now works for the advocacy group ForestEthics.

The map shows “blast zones,” red and yellow lines that cut across North America like cracks in glass. They follow known crude-by-rail routes, showing potential evacuation and impact zones, and run through city after city: New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and many more.

“Our country is designed around rail, and the preferred routes that are the best maintained and smoothest just happen to go through all the population centers,” Krogh says.

He gleaned some information from an article in the magazine Trains, which identified a number of crude routes. His team synced those routes up to known terminals, then ForestEthics published the map — but that wasn’t the end. The next step was an ongoing process of updating in response to emails and phone calls from people reporting oil trains near their homes. Krogh looks for several things to be sure a train is actually carrying crude. It needs to be a unit train full of identical tank cars, identified by a red-and-white hazardous materials diamond with the number 1267.

Like most platforms that rely on DIY-sourcing, the map isn’t definitive yet. But with railroads’ continued silence, it’s much better than nothing. And it’s growing constantly, Krogh says.

“Every week I get several more if not a dozen concerned callers,” he says.

But in the process of mapping, Krogh has made another disturbing discovery. He’s currently working on a follow-up project, dissecting census data around the blast zones.

“I can guarantee you that we’ll find people of color, lower-income neighborhoods and renters to be highly, highly overrepresented,” he says.

The old “wrong side of the tracks” adage is both cliche and problematic, but it points to the fact that industrial districts, particularly with refineries, are often located near less affluent, historically segregated neighborhoods.

That’s not 100 percent true, Krogh says, using examples from Seattle. One route runs along the Puget Sound shore, cutting through prime real estate. But elsewhere in the surrounding counties, it runs through Hispanic communities and across tribal land.

To highlight the under-reported environmental justice aspect of this fiery issue, here’s a look at overlapping maps of two cities: L.A., where the new regulations will take effect, and Pittsburgh, a hotbed of activism following a close-call derailment in February. JusticeMap.org, which shows Census data related to income and race, is an ideal tool to visualize the routes.

As a simple snapshot of two cities, this won’t give a clear picture of the issue as a whole. Hopefully, though, it will inspire more research into this pressing public health concern.

Los Angeles

In L.A., the blast zone cuts through Burbank and Glendale to the northeast, then descends in the shape of a long, narrow oval through downtown, then to Huntington Park, Watts, Lynwood, Compton and finally Long Beach.

Los Angeles blast zone (Source: ForestEthics)

A look at JusticeMap.org, filtered for income, shows that while Burbank is financially mixed, the neighborhoods and cities farther south are lower income. Huntington Park is deep red at the center (meaning its income is under $28,000) with some salmon color around the edges (income between $45,000 and $51,000). Watts is also colored by deep-red squares. Lynwood has several blue chunks designating higher incomes on its eastern end, and a swath of track closer to Downey and Lakewood also has higher earners. Compton is primarily red, Bixby Knolls is mostly blue, and at the line’s southernmost end, around Long Beach, the map again goes red.

Los Angeles by income (Source: JusticeMap.org)

Los Angeles County has historically been characterized by suburban white flight, so it’s no surprise that the areas most impacted, through a narrow corridor running south from downtown, are primarily Latino and African American. And many of the cities to the south have large Hispanic populations as well, including Huntington Park, Lynwood and Watts.

Los Angeles by race (Source: JusticeMap.org)

Pittsburgh

In Pittsburgh, the route follows the Ohio River in a U-shape, while also descending southwest.

Pittsburgh blast zone (Source: ForestEthics)

A look at Justice Map’s income setting shows most of the dark and bright red concentrated along the river, in several patches of very low and extremely low income. They’re interspersed with the light blue of higher earners here and there, especially as the route veers south, but again, a large portion of the region’s lower-income households are within the blast zone.

Pittsburgh by income (Source: JusticeMap.org)

Likewise, Pittsburgh has a much higher percentage of black residents than its surrounding counties. The blast zone cuts through a number of black-majority neighborhoods on the north side of the river as well as the eastern side of the city.

Pittsburgh by race (Source: JusticeMap.org)

The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.

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Rachel Dovey is an award-winning freelance writer and former USC Annenberg fellow living at the northern tip of California’s Bay Area. She writes about infrastructure, water and climate change and has been published by Bust, Wired, Paste, SF Weekly, the East Bay Express and the North Bay Bohemian

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Tags: los angelestrainspittsburghenvironmental justice

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