What? Me Worry?

I go to Costco store number one.

That is the very first Costco anywhere.

It’s in a totally commercial and industrial part of Seattle.

So there are railroad tracks just off the Costco property.

Just on the Costco property is the Costco gas station.

That’s quite a number of three pump gas lanes.

Those gas lanes are always full of cars with lines snaking out behind where people wait their turn to gas up.

Quite frequently those railroad tracks have an apparently interminable line of black petroleum tank cars rattling and rumbling by those gas lanes where people gas up at the Costco pumps.

I guess they are rattling and rumbling on their way to the refinery in Anacortes.

But I don’t know that for sure.

But I have seen the same black tank cars rattling and rumbling on at the other end of Seattle, down by Builders’ Hardware.

So I guess they could be going to Anacortes.

That’s a lot of crude oil rolling through the city here.

And it rolls past a lot more petroleum product – gasoline – in the tanks of the Costco gas station, and the tanks of the cars gassing up and waiting to gas up.

Luckily the railroad assures us that there is no possibility of any of those cars being derailed.

Because if they derailed right there by the Costco gas station would be a bad place for a volatile petroleum tank car explosion and fire.

It also goes without saying that terrorists would never notice miles of unprotected petroleum rolling through a major city, past a reservoir of refined stuff.

A terrorist would never think of setting off the whole thing with a well place derailment bomb.

Or so, I am sure, the railroad would assure us if we had the temerity to ask them about that concept.

The railroads and their rolling stock have always been and always will be totally immune to problems and derailments.

Never had any problems.

That we want to remember or talk about.

That’s pretty comforting.