THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

Railroads have always carried hazardous materials, its part of the job. With the opening of new oil fields in the Bakken and no pipelines to carry out the crude, trains are carrying more tank car loads of crude than ever before in a design that was once state of the art in safety but is no more.

Eight U.S. incidents involving DOT-111 tank cars in the seven years before Lac-Megantic could have warned federal regulators that the cars weren’t up to the task.

The NTSB expressed concern about the integrity of the DOT-111 cars as far back as 1991, and regulators had proposed studying whether the fleet could be improved at least a decade before that.

Karen Darch, the village president of Barrington, Ill., a Chicago suburb, has called DOT-111s the “Ford Pinto” of railcars, comparing them to the 1970s automobile vulnerable to fire. She and other mayors have expressed alarm as more hazardous shipments move through their communities, sometimes within feet of homes, schools and businesses.

A 2012 NTSB report singled out the faults of the tank cars as a major factor in a June 2009 derailment in Cherry Valley, Ill. One woman was killed and several other people were injured, including two firefighters, when a Canadian National Railway ethanol train derailed and caught fire at a road crossing after heavy rains had washed out the track.

“The release of hazardous materials likely would have been significantly reduced, mitigating the severity of the accident,” the NTSB concluded, had the DOT-111 tank cars been better able to resist puncture and rupture.

According to the Association of American Railroads, an industry group, railroads hauled 70 percent to 75 percent of the country’s ethanol production in 2012. In 2010, 325,000 carloads of ethanol moved by rail, up from 40,000 a decade before.

The growth of crude oil shipments is even more staggering. Railroads handled 200,000 carloads of crude in 2012, up from 9,500 in 2008. In October, 70 percent of the oil produced in the Bakken region moved by train.

Rail has helped North Dakota become the nation’s No. 2 oil producer, behind Texas. Alaska now ranks third.

What is curious about this problem is that the industry wants upgraded designs and others are delaying the process. Will this be another "tombstone safety" improvement?