Lac-Megantic After the Blast

All Things Considered follows up on the Quebec town blown up by the runaway shale oil train that derailed in the middle of town in July:

Parts of the city were flattened by the blast. Underneath the remaining buildings, cleanup crews have discovered that much of Lac-Mégantic's downtown is saturated with heavy metals — lead, arsenic, copper — and that thick crude oil. Three months after the explosion, they are still pumping spilled crude oil and chemicals from underneath what used to be a gorgeous lakefront street.
In his office, Mercier spreads out a map on his desk, showing the vast scope of the cleanup.
"So, the petroleum mostly flew on the ground, on this side to the lake. So, the lake was burning for a big part," he says. "That was something to see, yeah? You can see here, all the landscape in this area is destroyed ... all these houses are gone now. Nothing there, nothing there."
A fleet of huge trucks and backhoes is laying the foundation for an entirely new downtown. Officials have decided that a new business district is needed to replace what's been destroyed or contaminated.
About $116 million has been pledged for that effort, but no one's sure what the final price tag will be. The province of Quebec and Canada's national government are feuding over how much to spend and who should pay.

They also go into some detail about the tanker cars, and their shortcomings:

But much of the scrutiny has fallen on the type of freight car that erupted that day — the big, sausage-shaped tank car known in the industry as a DOT-111A.
"It's rigid, it's prone to derailment, and when it derails because of the coupling design, they're prone to puncture," says Lloyd Burton, a professor at the University of Colorado who studies rail transport of hazardous materials.
It turns out DOT-111A's make up two-thirds of the tank cars used in the U.S. and Canada — they're like the workhorse of the rail industry.
Thousands of them roll through towns and cities across America every day. And Burton says they're carrying increasing amounts of increasingly volatile crude oil and chemicals produced by North America's booming energy industry.
"The most dangerous crude, the highest sulfur crude, the most explosive and most flammable materials are being carried in tank cars," he says, "And they're being carried in tank cars that are simply not equal to the task."
For decades, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has been issuing strongly worded reports about the safety of these very same DOT-111A's, calling them "inadequate" for carrying "dangerous products."
Despite those warnings, the rail industry has resisted replacing its tank car fleet.

However, that seems to be changing a little bit.  Pipelines have fewer accidents than trains, when transporting oil and petroleum products.  However, when they do have problems, they are usually pretty big:

Initial investigations following a 20,600-barrel leak on a Tesoro Logistics pipeline in North Dakota point to corrosion on the 20-year-old pipeline, state regulators said Friday.
The 6-inch pipeline was carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale play to the Stampede rail facility outside Columbus, N.D., when a farmer discovered oil spouting from it Sept. 29.
It is the state's largest oil spill since it became a major U.S. producer. It is also the biggest oil leak on U.S. land since March, when an Exxon Mobil pipeline spilled 5,000 to 7,000 barrels of heavy Canadian crude in Mayflower, Ark...
The pipeline, which runs 35 miles from Tioga to Black Slough in North Dakota, was built by BP in 1993.
It is a part of Tesoro's "High Plains" pipeline system in North Dakota and Montana, which gathers oil from the Bakken shale and delivers it to another Enbridge pipeline and Tesoro's 68,000 barrels-per-day Mandan refinery.
Tesoro bought the pipeline and the refinery from BP in 2001.
Farmer Steven Jensen said Thursday the smell of sweet light crude oil wafted on his farm for four days before he discovered the leak, leading to questions about why the spill wasn't detected sooner.
"These companies, they've got to step up to the plate and use better technology. There is no reason this shouldn't have come up somewhere," Jensen said.

Anyway, the Lac-Megantic disaster was a combination of numerous issues.  Hopefully, lessons were learned, but I have a feeling that not enough were.