The California Nurses Association (CNA) joined parents and students in a rally on May 19 outside of the Lucia Mar Unified School District’s board meeting to continue protests against the Phillips 66 rail spur project.
“As advocates for patient health, RNs have serious concerns about the health and safety implications of the proposed oil by rail project,” read a letter the CNA sent to Murray Wilson with the SLO County Department of Planning and Building. “This project presents significant and unacceptable risks to the health and safety of our communities throughout California and beyond.”
The rail project would bring train car shipments of crude oil directly to the refinery on the Nipomo Mesa in southern San Luis Obispo County. Currently, the refinery receives its oil via pipeline. Construction of a rail spur could increase oil shipments through San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara counties.
Those trains would pass by several schools, including seven Lucia Mar Unified School District campuses.
Phillips 66 company spokespeople told the Sun in January that Oil production in Santa Barbara County has been in decline since it peaked in the 1980s. The project is intended to diversify the sources of oil Phillips 66 uses to shore up its supply in the event of future shortfalls coming through the pipeline.
The project’s draft environmental impact report identified 11 different “significant and unavoidable” project impacts for the rail spur, many of them linked to the possibility of toxic emissions from oil trains and the potentially catastrophic effects of a derailment.
“It is only by chance that an oil train derailment has not yet occurred in the heart of a major city, causing a major inferno, or on the bank of a river, spreading thousands of gallons of tar sands crude oil through a watershed, doing permanent damage,” local Sierra Club director Andrew Christie said in a statement.
Salud Carbajal, supervisor for Santa Barbara County’s 1st District, also reached out to the SLO County Planning Commission with his concerns, saying that the trains would run through several cities in his district and posed a “significant risk to lives, property, the economy, and environmentally sensitive habitat.”