Late last month, the tiny northwestern Minnesota town of Callaway joined the growing list of Midwestern cities that no one wants to be on: the communities where freight train derailments have occurred. On March 24, a tanker truck apparently pulled in front of a Canadian Pacific Railway train at a road crossing, with the resulting truck fire causing the evacuation of Callaway's 230 residents.

Derailments have also happened over the past year in the Mississippi River towns of La Crescent, Minn.; Alma, Wis., and Galena, Ill. These accidents followed a December 2013 oil train derailment in Casselton, N.D., that sent a massive fireball roiling skyward. Thankfully, residents of these communities escaped injury.

While the railroad industry says that its accident rate has declined 45 percent since 2000, the steady drumbeat of derailments within a day's drive of the Twin Cities remains alarming. It ought to spur Midwestern policymakers to do everything possible to reduce derailment risks in the region — one crisscrossed by freight rail routes transporting hazardous materials such as crude oil, ethanol and anhydrous ammonia.

The Minnesota Legislature has a chance to take additional safety measures again this year, and it ought to seize the chance to do so after the latest accident in Callaway. While it doesn't appear the railroad was at fault, the situation does illustrate the risks posed by the state's 4,444 rail route miles and hundreds of road crossings. In addition, experts predict rail traffic will increase by 25 percent to 40 percent in Minnesota by 2030.

To his credit, Gov. Mark Dayton has pushed for substantial rail safety investments for several years, though his efforts have met with fierce opposition by railroads. Dayton's 2016 budget proposes a $32.5 million annual assessment on railroads to pay for safety improvements along crude oil rail corridors, for additional rail inspectors, for improved rail disaster coordination, and for "rail grade separations" that would build overpasses or underpasses at heavily trafficked road-and-rail intersections.

Despite rail officials' assurances about already investing more than $500 million in the state to improve safety and reduce congestion, Coon Rapids Fire Chief John Piper said this week that there's more work to be done. Piper said stopped trains and heavy rail traffic can still block his suburban community's emergency responders. Community concerns like Piper's should not be drowned out as rail lobbyists descend on the Capitol again.

The same holds true for a new request from the Association of Minnesota Emergency Managers (AMEM), whose members are typically county or city employees specializing in disaster preparedness. The group has teamed up with a handful of DFL legislators on a bill that would require the railroads to share specialized information — specifically, route hazard analyses — with local emergency response planners. Federal law requires the analyses when the industry transports certain hazardous cargo, but these detailed documents may not be available to local officials.

"This is important because the way the emergency response system is organized in our nation, local authorities rather than federal or state ones are responsible for planning for and responding to such incidents,'' said Eric Waage, who is AMEM's immediate past president and the Hennepin County's emergency management director. "This information must make it all the way down to the government levels that own the fire trucks, police squads and ambulances to have any practical usefulness at all. This is a life-safety critical need … because of fire, explosions, toxins or other conditions during which the failure to respond correctly in the first minutes to hours of an incident likely will cost lives."

It should be possible to heed this eminently sensible information-sharing request while managing industry's concerns about its proprietary information. Lives may be saved by striking this necessary balance.