Black women say an Amtrak project threatens their Baltimore neighborhood’s homes — and children
Black women say an Amtrak project threatens their Baltimore neighborhood’s homes — and children
Residents have worked hard to revive historic Reservoir Hill. A federally funded railroad project could jeopardize their progress and their health, according to a civil rights complaint.
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I'm sorry, they complain about emissions from trains? The electric Amtrak trains? From within a tunnel? While they're surrounded by streets will all kinds of car traffic? Freight trains are routed the long way around the city btw.
From the article:
Directly across from the elementary school Amtrak plans to build a ventilation facility to “provide protection for train passengers in the event of an emergency,” according to the Amtrak website. This structure will include emergency fans that “could extract smoke from the tunnel in the unlikely event of a fire.”
If something goes wrong, they vent the bad air coming out of that tunnel across the street from a black elementary school. Their planned management of hazardous emissions is what’s in question.
This urban planning stuff is really important to get right. And continuing to shaft black communities is not how you do it right.
That said, if it's just smoke ventilation in case of an accident, that is almost certainly never going to happen. It's unclear to me exactly what the concrete impact of this tunnel will be. How deep is the tunnel? Is it deep enough that noise will not be a problem? Will new tracks on either side of the tunnel cut off this neighborhood somehow? They mention the existing tunnel goes under an affluent white neighborhood; how does that tunnel compare, and what side effects do residents of that neighborhood experience?
This stuff is really important, but I think the article does a really poor job articulating the concerns or providing comparisons.
I doubt it’s /just/ smoke ventilation. Sure, it’s primarily there for fire safety.
But it probably provides ambient ventilation for the tunnel too. Tunnels with trains get hot. Most things, living or inanimate don’t like heat.
And if it’s always ventilating, it’s also might be expelling brake and metal dust from passing trains.
But all speculation. I’m not a train engineer, so I’m probably wrong.
I don't know the specifics of this project, but not all Amtrak trains are electric, they also run diesel and dual mode (diesel/electric) trains (I'm pretty sure, but not certain that the northeast corridor is all electric)
There's also other things worth considering like emissions from construction or maintenance vehicles, some lines are used for freight and passenger rail, construction might stir up any crap that might be in the soil, I suspect there's some amount of metal dust created by the constant grinding of wheels on rails, plastics from brakes and such, leaks from any hydraulics onboard the train, refrigerant leaking from the air conditioning, etc.
In the grand scheme, even if they're running straight diesel trains, leaking fluids, asbestos brake pads, etc. it's probably all negligible in emissions compared to just living in Baltimore, maybe even offset if it leads to more people using Amtrak instead of driving but all of it is still worth considering.
This project is exclusively electric. But overall, yeah, I think trains are way way less worry than the cars that are already there
Just to add of awareness, people are underestimating the micro plastics from tires.