Hazardous tank cars still ride crowded rails
The Sun's editors commendably fight to save Amtrak from the usual Bush administration budget slashes ("Missing the train," editorial, Feb. 25).
And the editorial is right to mention Amtrak's "modest" new armed police force effort to prevent the kinds of terrorist attacks that have already happened - bombings like those that killed 52 passengers in London and 192 in Madrid.
But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. vividly identified a few years ago the greatest single security vulnerability for Amtrak.
He rides Amtrak home nightly from Washington through Baltimore to Delaware, and says he regularly sees enormous chlorine and other poison gas and explosive tank cars traveling or parked on nearby parallel tracks.
He sponsored a bill in Congress to force a rerouting of the most dangerous railcar chemical shipments. But White House and railroad pressure forced a compromise that has left the railroads in sole charge of route selection.
So the well-intentioned new routing law won't protect Baltimore anytime soon, if ever.
And in the event of a massive toxic gas release from even one tank car, which the U.S. Naval Research Lab has estimated could kill 100,000 people in a half-hour in a crowded city, the only relevant question for the small Amtrak police force and for Amtrak passengers and citizens engulfed in the gas cloud is how fast and how far they can all run for their lives.
The members of Baltimore's City Council should wear tennis shoes daily and also insist that CSX reroute dangerous trains immediately.
Fred Millar
Arlington, Va.
The writer is a consultant on homeland security for Friends of the Earth.
Recordings the key piece of evidence
I believe reporter Matthew Dolan's account of the role of informants in the criminal justice system was incomplete and misleading ("Telling Tales," March 2).
I base my opinion on 25 years of experience as an FBI special agent assigned to Baltimore.
While with the FBI, I made frequent use of informants to investigate cases involving illegal drug organizations, attorneys involved in money laundering, public corruption and bank fraud.
In each and every investigation, I used informants equipped with voice recorders. The recordings of conversations with the target of the criminal investigation they made became the key piece of evidence in the case, not the testimony of the informant.
