FAIRFIELD —  commemoration will be held July 11 for the 47 lives lost in the Lac Mégantic, Quebec, train explosion that occurred July 6, 2013. The memorial will take place at the gazebo in Monument Park in Fairfield. The derailment of an unmanned train carrying 72 cars full of Bakken Crude oil.

The observance was organized by 350 Waldo County, SEEDs for Justice, and Forest Ethics, as part of the Stop Oil Train Week of Action coordinated in more than 100 cities across the country. Forest Ethics calculates that nationwide, 25 million Americans live in an oil train blast zone.

Waldo County residents Read Brugger and  Bob Shaw will be among the speakers. They were among six people arrested June 27, 2013 for refusing orders to leave a scaffold erected across the railroad tracks near Route 201 and 139 in Fairfield. The civil disobedience was an attempt to blockade a train bringing Bakken crude oil from North Dakota through Maine to Irving refineries in New Brunswick. Many who participated in this action will be present July 11.

“Five times in the first five months of 2015 we’ve seen oil trains derail and send toxic fireballs into the sky,” said Heidi Brugger, in a press release. She is a  Freedom resident who is a member of SEEDs for Justice. "As we try to move our economy to clean energy and solve climate disruption, we can’t, at the same time, permit oil companies to bring Bakken and other fracked oil, the most dangerous and the dirtiest sources of oil, onto the market.”

Speakers will also include Jade Jurtzer, a student at Lawrence High School in Fairfield, which, along with two public schools and two day care centers, is within the one mile evacuation zone of a potential oil train derailment and fire.

Jade’s mother, Sass Linneken, said: “The new federal regulations do little or nothing to protect our communities and our children. Our first responders aren’t equipped for these dangerous trains carrying millions of gallons of the world’s most toxic, most carbon intensive, most explosive crude oil. These trains are too dangerous for the rails.”

Fairfield is approximately 100 miles from Lac Megantic, with rails that have carried Bakken Crude through the heart of town. To date, no crude oil has passed through Fairfield since the Lac Megantic disaster.