GREENFIELD — “They say there’s no cause for alarm, oh, they say there’s no cause for alarm,” sang protesters Lynn Waldron and Tom Neilson, who played an acoustic guitar while he sang, during a vigil protesting oil trains Wednesday evening on the town common.
About 20 people stood on the sidewalk facing Main Street for about an hour and a half starting at 4 p.m., holding signs denouncing locomotives transporting crude oil, which protesters at the event called “bomb trains” and said travel through the town — although a spokesperson for Pan Am Railways says oil trains haven’t traveled through the region in a number of years.
But a few people at the vigil, which was organized by the 99th Monkey Affinity Group with help from Post Oil Solutions in Brattleboro, Vt., said they’ve recently witnessed oil trains passing through Greenfield.
“I’ve seen it, I’ve seen them on the tracks,” said protester Don Ogden, who was holding up a sign that read, “stop the bomb train.”
The vigil was held on the three-year anniversary of a train derailment and explosion in Quebec, Canada, that killed 47 people in 2013. Many at the event said they fear a similar event could happen again.
“This is the same oil on the same type of train that blew up,” said Nina Coler, a protester from Ashfield, in reference to oil trains passing through Franklin County. “And there was a recent explosion in Oregon.”
The second explosion Coler referenced happened last month on June 3 in Mosier, Ore. No one was killed and there was minimal damage to buildings in the explosion.
While the vigil was targeted at oil trains in Franklin County specifically, protestors at the event said the problem is bigger than trains. The root of the problem, said Ann Darling, who has worked in town for about 15 years, is climate change and a culture that doesn’t recognize the dangers of inaction.
“The economy that’s based on extraction,” Darling said, “is an extinction economy.”
“This is one piece in the puzzle of keeping fossil fuels in the ground,” said Northfield resident Julia Blyth, who was at the protest holding a sign that said “keep it in the ground.”
“It’s a transition we should make in light of what we know about climate change,” she said. “(Fossil fuels) are a thing of the past.”
Protestors said the vigil was organized not only to protest the transportation of fossil fuels, but also to educate people on the dangers of “bomb trains.”
“So many people in our communities don’t know about it,” said Sherry Maher, who was protesting the trains at least in part because of her family.
“We looked at maps and realized that our grandchildren who are in Maryland are well within the blast zone,” she said. “Pretty scary.”
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