Dr. Nicole Fabricant
speaker
124 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 6 Jul
Dr. Nicole Fabricant’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 2.
Appearances
All you can see from one end to the other end is number five.
Soon as I opened the back door, all you could see were flames.
It looked like our town was on fire.
I looked at my house and I honestly thought that was going to be the last time that I would ever see it again because I just thought the town was on fire still.
And I said, if my house catches on fire, please call me.
Please let me know what happens.
What happens.
And I'm Dr. Nicole Fabrikant.
I teach anthropology at Towson University.
I've been working for 15 years in an overburdened area of Baltimore, a community named Curtis Bay, where 70-plus toxic, polluting industries are housed in one residential area.
This zip code has some of the highest rates of respiratory illness in the entire country.
I became interested in questions of rail when a CSX, a class one rail line carrying coal to Curtis Bay, an export pier, their silo exploded in 2021, leading residents to ask why a coal pier was located a thousand feet from a recreational facility.
And why wasn't a billion dollar rail company protecting the community from fugitive coal dust?
But before East Palestine, there was Lac-Mégantic, one of the deadliest rail disasters in North American history.
On July 6, 2013, an unattended 74-car freight train carrying crude oil rolled downhill and derailed in the town center of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.
The train operated by Montreal Main and Atlantic Railway had been parked overnight on a slope in a nearby town.
The lone engineer had shut down the locomotive and gone to a hotel for the night.
A fire broke out on the lead locomotive while the train was parked.
Firefighters responded and, in the process of fighting the fire, shut down the engine, inadvertently disabling the air brakes that had been keeping the train stationary.
After they left, the train began to roll, gathering speed over 11 kilometers of downhill track before derailing at a curve in Lac-Mégantic's downtown core around 1.15 a.m.
Showing 1–20 of 124 · page 1 of 7
Next →