Every day, on average, nearly 200 tanker cars carry close to 6 million gallons of crude oil through Spokane. Each one of those cars can hold as much as three tanker trucks' worth of some of the most explosive crude in the country. Spokane serves as a bottleneck into the state for trains traveling from the east across the northern U.S., largely from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota. "Those [tracks] go straight through our infrastructure: our water, our Spokane River ... the hospitals downtown, all of our business center," says Spokane Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer.
So far, nothing bad has happened. But at least three times in the past three years, city and county officials have played nightmarish games of "What if?"