The Oct. 15 derailment near Pueblo spilled mountains of coal over I-25, collapsed a bridge, and killed a truck driver. This was tragic, but it could have been much worse. It could have been a two-mile-long train filled with crude oil–the kind that the Uinta Basin Railway would send through Colorado up to five times a day. … Julius T. Murray, speaking for his Ute Indian Tribe, urged federal taxpayers to finance the railway to make up for historical mistreatment of his tribe by the federal government. … While Mr. Murray reveres the Colorado mountains from which his people were moved long ago, he dismisses the threats to those same mountains which these oil trains pose — both the threat that inevitable derailments could ignite wildfires in Colorado’s inaccessible timbered canyons or spill crude oil into the Colorado River …
-Written by Malin Moench, a Utah resident, who spent 37 years analyzing the economics of public utilities and logistics at the federal level. ​