Ecological disasters are nothing to mess with. About 30 years ago, a railroad chemical spill killed off a river from the Siskiyou County of Northern California. On Friday afternoon, twenty rail cars derailed near the same location, according to The Sacramento Bee.
Fortunately, nobody got hurt during the incident. Susan Stevens, who is a spokeswoman for the Union Pacific railroad, says that none of the train cars that derailed spilled any chemicals.
An investigation is ongoing
The cause of the derailment remains unknown for now, but the investigation continues.
The ecological disaster from three decades ago caused the leak of 19,500 gallons of herbicide turning the water neon green and killing all of the aquatic life. The estimation is that over 1 million fish died because of the disaster. Even residents and workers who responded to the ecological accident developed some health problems caused by inhalation of the fumes.
Peter Arth, who was the top attorney for the California Public Utilities Commission, declared as quoted by sacbee.com:
The notion that you can chemically sterilize a river down to Shasta Lake, it really dealt a body blow to the little city of Dunsmuir.
Unfortunately, natural disasters occur pretty often. According to DoSomething.org, natural disasters occurring between 2000 and 2012 caused damage of $1.7 trillion and affected a number of 2.9 billion people.
The same source says that 2012 was the third consecutive year of natural disaster damage that exceeded $100 billion worldwide. Also, the previous year reached a record high: $371 billion.
According to McAleerLaw, the US Department of Transportation reveals that there are roughly 5,800 train-car crashes every year in the USA. Most of them occur at railroad crossings, and such accidents cause 600 deaths and injure roughly 2,300 people.
