Another derailed oil train, another disaster as Congress shills for industry.

“I just want to make sure that we are all singing the same tune that we have a very safe industry and we want to work together on improving that industry.”

Those were the words of U.S. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Modesto, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials at a Feb. 3 hearing. He was directing this advice to Greg Saxton, chief engineer for rail tank car manufacturer Greenbrier.

Denham had a bone to pick with Saxton because before the hearing, The Modesto Bee ran an editorial suggesting the existing tank cars used to transport crude oil are unsafe. “The [Department of Transportation] should adopt rules for those cars, then set deadlines to replace every single tank car in America,” the editorial read. “Our elected representatives should insist on it.”

In Modesto, the elected representative who should be insisting on that is Jeff Denham.

Modesto is home to Greenbrier’s manufacturing facilities, and the editorial quoted Saxton on the need for new regulations now, not in 20 years.

This is not the tune that Denham wants everyone to be singing. “I’m making sure that the wrong people are not talking to the ed boards across the country that would give a wrong perception of our current situation,” he told Saxton at the hearing.

Apparently Saxton is one of the “wrong people” to talk to editorial boards because of his insistence on the facts. Denham explained what he wants the American public to hear, while taking a shot at the Obama administration:

“I want to make sure, as the administration drags their feet or reorganizes or does some shuffling, that there is not a misperception out there in the American public… that our current tank cars are not safe, that our industry does not have a safe record, and, most importantly, that there is not some magic quick fast track to get all of these new tank cars online very, very quickly.”

The American public may have noticed that a couple days after Denham’s talk, a train carrying ethanol derailed. Punctured rail cars caught fire and spilled ethanol into the Mississippi River. (Editor’s note: On Feb. 16, a 109-car delivery of crude oil derailed in West Virginia, setting at least nine cars ablaze, dumping crude oil into a river and forcing shut-off of local water supplies.)

As reported on DeSmogBlog almost a year ago, the reason the industry is fighting these timelines to replace the cars is that they need the cars to meet the increasing industry demand to move crude by rail. Instead of replacing the old unsafe cars, the industry wants to simply add new cars to the fleet that is moving crude oil.

In this debate – and the debate on what to do about the explosive nature of the Bakken crude oil moved in the unpressurized tank cars called DOT-111s – the industry and its champions in Congress, like Rep. Denham, continue to finger-point and obfuscate to make these claims seem reasonable.

“One hundred twenty-five thousand tanks cars in the fleet currently today,” he said. “You have the capacity to build how many – 8,000 a year?”

Saxton confirmed this was true. “So if you were building 8,000 a year,” Denham continued, “the backlog would be about a decade.”

The current industry capacity for new rail tank car production is 35,000 per year.

Meanwhile, the real discussions about the new regulations are happening in private meetings between industry and its regulators. In these private meetings, the industry lobbies against new tank cars, new braking systems, making the oil safer, and imposing train speed limits.

The reality is that the industry can replace the tank cars on the timeline in the proposed regulations, and there is no need to wait a decade to address this “unacceptable” public risk. But that would cut into industry profits, so the industry and its representatives in Congress maintain it’s “unattainable.”

They’re singing from the same songbook, and that should scare every American living near the bomb train blast zone.

New York-based JUSTIN MIKULKA writes frequently for DeSmogBlog. Follow him at twitter.com/justinmikulka