Alabama: A 90-car train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in western Alabama in the early hours of yesterday morning, spilling oil and leaving eleven cars burning in the rural area.
No injuries have been reported, the train owner, Genesee & Wyoming, said in a statement yesterday.
Twenty of the train’s 90 cars derailed, the company said, of which eleven were still on fire. Those cars are being left to burn down, which could take up to 24 hours.
The accident appears to be one of the most dramatic in of its kind the United States since trafficking of crude by rail began to increase with the growth of shale oil production three years ago. A major derailment killed 47 people in Canada this summer when a train barrelled into the centr of the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic and exploded, fuelling a push for tougher standards for oil rail shipments.
Crude oil did spill yesterday, though it does not appear to be heading to nearby waterways, Genesee said.
Don Hartley, regional coordinator for the Alabama Emergency Management Agency, said three cars had a blevy, where pressure builds up and blows a hole, and that started the fire.
No evidence poet
Neruda was poisoned: Test
SANTIAGO: An exhumation and testing of Chilean Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda s body did not find any evidence he was poisoned, a forensic team said yesterday, despite accusations he was murdered 40 years ago by a military dictatorship.
Neruda, famed for his passionate love poems and staunch communist views, is presumed to have died from prostate cancer just days after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup that ushered in the brutal Augusto Pinochet dictatorship.
Around 3,000 people are thought to have been killed during the 17-year-long dictatorship.
The poet’s former chauffer says Pinochet s agents took advantage of Neruda’s illness to inject poison into his stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago.
We didn t find forensic evidence that allows us to think that ... Mr Pablo Neruda died of unnatural causes, said Patricio Bustos, the head of the Justice Ministry s forensic unit SML.
The team said it had done everything technically possible to determine whether he had been poisoned. Neruda s body was exhumed in April and his remains were analysed by international and local experts.
Agencies
