Residents of a town evacuated after the latest oil train derailment in the USA have been allowed home – as safety chiefs warned the vehicle was not up to modern standards.
More than a thousand residents were evacuated after Monday’s explosive crash, which took place outside the North Dakota town of Casselton.
The 1000-plus residents ordered to evacuate parts of the town due to smoke from the train have now been given the all-clear to return to their homes after smoke cleared from the site and firefighters contained the blaze.
“Air samples have been coming back great so we’re just trying to let everybody get back to their lives,” the town’s mayor, Ed McConnell, said.
Investigations into the crash are ongoing, but reports indicated the train derailed after striking a previously derailed grain transporter.
Robert Sumwalt, who is leading the National Transportation Safety Board probe into the crash, admitted last night that the oil tankers on the train were older types used to move crude oil which did not meet the latest industry safety standards.
See footage of the oil train explosion below
http://youtu.be/Ia0_3bL5TEQ
“Our preliminary information is that none of the cars were of the newer design,” he told a news conference.
The train, which contained 106 carriages of crude oil, was travelling from Fryburg in North Dakota to a storage facility in Missouri, 1300 miles away.
It is the latest incident to affect oil trains this year. Last month a train derailed in Alabama, causing fires that burned for several days, while 47 people were killed in Canada earlier this year after a crude oil train derailed and exploded in the centre of Lac-Megantic.
