The Inquirer, Philadelphia, PA 8/2:
Mystery of the unexploded oil trainA BNSF train pulled out of a terminal in North Dakota's Bakken Shale region last month, hauling 106 tank cars filled with crude oil on a westward journey to a refinery near Ferndale, Wash.It didn't get far. Just 30 miles into its thousand-mile-plus trek to the Pacific Coast, the train derailed July 16 on a straightaway outside Culbertson, Mont. Twenty-two tank cars left the rails. Five were breached, BNSF says, spilling 35,000 gallons of Bakken crude. In the pile-up, a live power line was knocked down.
Then something curious happened, different from 10 other oil-train crashes since 2013: The oil did not ignite.
"You could smell it from over a mile away," said Chief Deputy Corey Reum, of the Roosevelt County Sheriff's Department. "With the crush of the tank cars and a live wire, it did not catch fire."
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