Monday Accident & Lessons Learned: Using Additional Safeguards as Corrective Actions

Whenever you deal with a hazard, someone has to decide how many safeguards are enough.

Moving oil by tank cars is probably not the safest method of transporting oil. Pipelines are probably preferable. But pipelines don’t go from every oil source to every refinery. (And getting new pipelines permitted can be difficult – as we know.)

Rail accidents bring up the question … Should we be working on preventing the root causes of rail accidents OR should we be coming up with better safeguards (better rail cars) OR should we be working on getting more pipelines built as a longer term solution? 

Here’s the article from the Journal News that got me thinking about this issue:

Safer tank cars on CSX oil train didn’t prevent blast

 What do you think? What corrective actions would be SMARTER and what is enough? Leave your comments here.