Hauser Fueling Facility Makes Sense

There have been so many unfounded concerns and criticisms expressed publicly about the proposed Burlington Northern Santa Fe fueling station at Hauser that it is timely to put the project in proper perspective. What is needed is more light and less heat.

First, why does BNSF want to build this facility at Hauser?

At the present time, locomotives are fueled at a congested, inconvenient facility in the main switching terminal in East Spokane, where locomotives have been fueled for decades.

To cope with the increasing traffic on the railroad, a new facility is needed where engines can be fueled in an efficient and environmentally safe manner. It needs to be somewhere between Sandpoint and Spokane because Sandpoint is where the two main lines from all of the states between Minnesota and Texas converge. All trains then run on the single line to Spokane, where trains then diverge to either Seattle or Portland.

Further, a new facility should be as close to Spokane as possible because that is where the BNSF people who work on the trains and provide supporting services live. Hauser is simply the best place for a single well-designed facility to be located. The land is already owned by the railroad. It is zoned for industrial use, and trackage there has been used as a switching yard for many years.

Secondly, this proposed facility is designed to be environmentally friendly. Basically, it does just the same thing for trains as a truck stop on the interstate highway does for trucks. Hundreds of trucks that ply Interstate 90 every day use the truck stop in Post Falls that is only a short distance from Hauser.

One big difference is that the railroad facility will have every conceivable safeguard against spillage. The storage tanks would be above ground so that any leakage would be noticed immediately and contained without its entering the ground. Further, to put it in perspective, consider that in the Spokane area there are already storage tanks for over 90 million gallons of petroleum products, ranging from gasoline filling stations to tank farms. In none of these are the precautions against spillage as complete as those proposed for Hauser, where less than 2 million gallons at most will be stored - or only 2 percent of the total in the area.

It’s hard to understand why building a well-designed new facility would add any significant risk to the environment.

In the long run, speeding up rail freight service and reducing its cost works to the advantage of everyone. Each average-sized freight train moving through North Idaho and Eastern Washington handles a load equivalent to that of about 200 trucks that would otherwise be on the highways.

Let’s not stand in the way of taking care of the growing commerce of our area in a very environmentally friendly way.

I am retired and have lived in Spokane for the last 22 years. The 1,000 active and hundreds of retired railroad employees who live in the area are just as concerned about protecting the aquifer as anyone else, but we also urge that all concerned look into the facts of the matter.