Pike Place Market vendors protest Seattle oil trains

Protests about trains carrying crude oil through Seattle continue to mount, with vendors and employees at Pike Place Market the latest to join the fray.

A handful of merchants and environmental activists gathered in Victor Steinbrueck Park across from the market Friday to voice their concerns about the trains that travel on tracks through a tunnel running directly beneath the market.

Sharon Shaw and her husband sell stained glass kaleidoscopes at the market. She insisted even though the turnout for Friday’s protest and press conference was small, the dozens of merchants and their employees are unified in their opposition to the trains.

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“It’s such a small thing it would take to derail a train and then it’s a massive explosion that could kill thousands and thousands of people. I mean it’s insane,” she said.

Approximately three trains carrying about 30,000 gallons of highly explosive Bakken Oil move through Seattle daily, according to the environmental group 350 Seattle, which has been staging frequent protests around the city for months.

“I set up my stall every morning and can see the exit of the tunnel,” said Dean Moller of Soul Cat Guitars, a longtime vendor at the market. “If there were ever an explosion, it’s very clear that I’d be in serious trouble. Why are our lives not worth more than the rights of the fossil fuel companies to make a quick buck?”

The protesters called on city, county, state, and federal officials to halt the trains, and to deny and revoke proposed and existing permits for oil-by-rail infrastructure.

“Each car is the energy equivalent of two million sticks of dynamite,” said longtime Pike Place Market vendor Hailey Land. “We can’t bomb proof our city, but we can stop the bombs.”