LATEST DERAILMENTS: 2 in Selkirk NY in a week, another same day in Selkirk, Manitoba

Repost from the Times-Union, Albany, NY
[Editor:  This June 29 derailment in the Selkirk Railroad Yard, Selkirk, NY (just south of Albany) should not be confused with derailment on the same day in Selkirk, Manitoba.  MORE IMPORTANTLY, this derailment should not be confused with another more serious derailment in the same Selkirk NY rail yard less than a week earlier, on June 24, involving six tanker cars — three of them filled with liquid propane . See also TWCnews, “SecondTrain Derailment in a Week.”  – RS]

Selkirk yard derailment minor, but concerns linger

Cars remain upright, but County Executive McCoy concerned about repeated incidents
Staff reports, June 30, 2016, 9:00 pm

TWC_Selkirk2ndDerailment2016-06-29No major problems resulted from a derailment of cars carrying petroleum gas Wednesday, but that didn’t appear to settle Albany County Executive Dan McCoy’s queasiness over such incidents.

“Those cars remained upright, but I have said it is just a matter of time before something serious, even deadly, could happen, due to the volume of trains transporting crude oil and other flammable and hazardous materials through our backyards, neighborhoods and right along the Hudson River,” he said in a statement.

McCoy renewed his call for stricter standards on rail lines and equipment in a press release sent out Wednesday evening — one that also included a list of several safety actions and recommendations he called for in 2014 and 2015.

Two cars containing the gas left the tracks at the Selkirk Rail Yard on Wednesday afternoon, according to McCoy’s office.

No leaks or spills were reported, and the cars remained upright. There also were no injuries, according to officials with CSX Corp., which owns the rail yard.

“The exact cause of the incident is still under review,” said Rob Doolittle, communications director for CSX’s Northeast Region. “I can say that CSX takes every derailment seriously. We review the cause to see if there are lessons we can learn to apply to prevent them from happening in the future.”

It took about five hours for rail crews to put the tankers back on the tracks, but since they derailed in the area where trains are assembled, it didn’t affect freight traffic, Doolittle said

Six cars, three carrying liquefied petroleum gas, derailed at the rail yard last week, though none leaked. The cars remained upright. Doolittle said the cause of that derailment also is under review. Investigations typically take several weeks to complete, he said.

HUFFINGTON POST: Top 5 Reasons To Ban Oil Trains Immediately

Repost from the Huffington Post

Top 5 Reasons To Ban Oil Trains Immediately

By Todd Paglia, Executive Director, Stand.Earth (formerly ForestEthics), 06/29/2016 01:32 pm ET

On Friday, June 3rd, a crude oil train traveled through the scenic Columbia River Gorge, a national treasure and one of the most beautiful spots in a country blessed with some of the most stunning places on Earth. It went slowly through the small town of Mosier, Ore. Children sat in class, no doubt looking forward to the weekend, people stopped by the post office, enjoying the rituals of small town life. Then the ground shook. Explosions rocked the area and a plume of thick black smoke snaked its way into the sky. The oil train had derailed a few hundred yards from that school, a few hundred yards from the city center. Four railcars spilled and caught fire — and tens of thousands of gallons of burning North Dakota Bakken crude created an inferno.

This disaster occurred as Stand and our many allies in the Crude Awakening Network were preparing for the third annual Stop Oil Trains Week of Action, planning dozens of events across the US and Canada between July 6-12 to mark the solemn anniversary of the tragic Lac Megantic oil train disaster on July 6, 2013. The Mosier derailment drove home, once again, why oil trains are too dangerous for the rails. And why Stand is asking President Obama for an immediate ban on oil trains.

Here are the top five reasons Stand, joined by hundreds of groups, community leaders, and elected officials, are calling for a ban on deadly oil trains.

1. 25 million Americans live in the oil train “blast zone”.
The US rail system was built to connect population centers, not move millions of gallons of toxic, flammable crude oil. But the oil industry is doing exactly that, sending explosive crude down the tracks right through our cities and by the homes of 25 million Americans. At Stand, we have mapped oil train routes with our Blast Zone map. You can use the map to see if your home, school, or office is inside the dangerous one-mile evacuation area. One clear finding from analyzing America’s blast zone: vulnerable populations like environmental justice communities and school children are clearly in harm’s way.

2. Oil trains can’t be operated safely.
Federal safety standards won’t improve oil train safety. Federal legislation, promises by the railroads, and federal regulations- weakened by years of interagency battles between the Federal Railroad Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board — have all come to very little. Former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board Jim Hall, in a June 2016 op-ed advocating a ban on crude oil trains, put it simply: “Carrying crude oil by rail is just not a good idea.” That’s because it cannot be done safely. Period.

Thorough reporting by DeSmog Blog on the weak existing federal regulatory standards and the oil and rail industry’s failure to meet them demonstrates there have been no improvements on the safety of the 100,000 unsafe tank cars in the US fleet. Only a few hundred of these 100,000 dangerous tank cars have been retrofitted, and cars updated to the newest tank car standard will still puncture at just a few miles an hour faster than the current tank cars.

After 2025, there may be marginal improvements in the tank cars and procedures associated with oil trains. But trains will still derail, and crude will still leak and ignite.

3. Oil train fires can’t be controlled.
When an oil train derails at any speed over the puncture velocity of roughly 10 miles an hour a dozen or so cars typically come off the tracks, decouple and are thrown from their wheels. Tank cars are easily punctured, and the crude (either Bakken or diluted tar sands, both highly volatile) can either self-ignite or be sparked by a nearby ignition source.

Once the spilled oil from an oil train disaster ignites, the primary task of emergency responders is to evacuate the area due to toxic plumes, fire, and potential explosions. We write more about the difficulties here, but Bruce Goetsch, a county emergency manager in Iowa, had this advice: “Make sure your tennis shoes are on and start running.” Or listen to the Washington State Council of Fire Fighters, which delivered a letter to Washington Governor Inslee on June 8 demanding an immediate halt to crude rail movement and stating that, “these fires are exceedingly difficult to extinguish, even under unusually ideal circumstances.”

4. We don’t need the oil these dangerous trains carry.
Oil trains in North America carry extreme fracked crude oil from the Bakken formation in North Dakota and Saskatchewan, or diluted bitumen from tar sands deposits in Alberta. We don’t need any of this crude oil. According to the most recent information from the US Energy Information Administration, shipments of crude by rail represent only 2.5 percent of the 19 million barrel daily US oil demand. At the same time, the US exports more than five million barrels of oil per day. So the US is exporting ten times more than the 513,000 barrels of crude that is moving by rail each day. The crude moving by train contributes nothing to our energy supply. If we stopped all oil trains tomorrow Americans would never notice the difference at the gas pumps – but we would all be safer, especially the 25 million Americans living in the blast-zone.

5. Oil trains are taking us in the wrong direction.
The dangerous, unnecessary, carbon-intensive crude oil moving by train through North American cities and towns is a new phenomenon. Before 2008, crude oil rarely, if ever, moved by train. Oil companies see this oil as the future. We see a future where we leave extreme crude oil in the ground and use decreasing amounts of conventional oil as we transition to 100 percent clean energy.

The climate accords in Paris followed by the April 2016 United Nations resolution put the United States and the rest of the world on a clear, inevitable path toward reducing fossil fuels from our energy supply. These dangerous oil trains carrying extreme oil are, quite simply, not part of that future: they fail the public safety test, the energy security test, and the climate test.

Forty-seven people died in the Lac Megantic oil train disaster three years ago. Only incredible luck prevented Mosier, OR from being another Lac Megantic. It was a dead-calm day in one of the windiest part of the US, otherwise the fire could have spread quickly to more derailed cars, to surrounding forests, homes, and even to the nearby school. This was another close call, one of more than a dozen major oil train disasters over the last three years that could have been much worse. We need to end this unnecessary and unacceptable threat before our luck runs out.

This is not a radical request. In fact, the Governors of Oregon and Washington have asked for a moratorium on oil trains. Join them — and Stand: Please join us in asking President Obama for an immediate ban on oil trains.

NTSB announces Roundtable Discussion : A Dialogue on What’s Next in Rail Tank Car Safety

Repost from National Transportation Safety Board

Roundtable Discussion : A Dialogue on What’s Next in Rail Tank Car Safety

NTSB Conference Center
429 L’Enfant Plaza, SW, Washington, DC
7/13/2016 9:00 AM
Press Release 6/29/2016 

NTSB Board Member Robert Sumwalt to host a Rail Tank Car Safety Roundtable Discussion: A Dialogue on What’s Next in Rail Tank Car Safety

Among the provisions of the 2015 Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act (FAST Act) are new requirements for improved railroad operating practices, more effective emergency responses, and safer and stronger tank cars. While tank car fleet owners must decide whether to replace or retrofit legacy DOT-111 and CPC-1232 tank cars over the next 13-years, we continue to investigate serious accidents with flammable liquids releases and fires.

NTSB Most Wanted List graphic for Implement PTCRail tank car safety is of vital interest to the NTSB, and is on our 2016 Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements. Because of our concern over tank car safety, we are hosting a roundtable to better understand issues facing implementation of the Fast Act requirements. We hope to gain deeper understanding of the logistics of replacing the existing tank car fleet to transport flammable materials, as well as how government and industry can overcome factors that could impede timely implementation of the new tank car rules.

 More NTSB Links:

Has The Fracking Industry Already Won The 2016 Election?

Repost from DeSmogBlog

Has The Fracking Industry Already Won The 2016 Election?

By Farron Cousins, June 27, 2016 – 14:46

 

Image via Breast Cancer Action.

June has been a fantastic month for the fracking industry.

On June 21st, a federal judge ruled that the Interior Department does not have the authority to regulate fracking on federal lands because the agency lacks the overall authority to regulate fracking. The judge said that his decision was based on the fact that Congress had not given the agency that power, and therefore they overstepped their authority in attempting to regulate natural gas fracking activities.

A few days after that court ruling that gave the industry free rein over our federal lands, the Democratic Party handed them an even larger gift. At a DNC platform committee meeting on Friday, June 24th, the committee voted to NOT include a ban on fracking as part of the Democratic Party’s platform for the 2016 election.

The moratorium on fracking was proposed by 350.org founder Bill McKibben who was selected to join the Party’s platform committee by Senator Bernie Sanders. McKibben also introduced resolutions to support a carbon tax and prohibit new fossil fuel leases offshore and on federal lands, but these items were also nixed by a majority of the committee members.

The decision by the committee to roll over for the fracking industry is not only dangerous for the environment, but it also goes against the will of voters who identify as Democrats.

The most recently available polls on national support for fracking (from March 2016) show that 51% of Americans are opposed to it, versus only 36% who are in favor. In the poll, 13% of respondents had no opinion. Not surprisingly, the poll found that approval for fracking was higher among Republicans than Democrats, with 55% and 25% of each Party approving of the practice, respectively.

In the political world, polls are fairly easy to ignore, and both major parties are guilty of routinely ignoring polling data. But in early June, anticipating a showdown over fracking, environmental groups delivered more than 90,000 petitions to the Democratic National Committee asking for the Party to support a ban on fracking. Laying out fracking as both an environmental and economic disaster, these groups were hoping to head off the fracking fight and put an end to it before it began.

As Anthony Rogers-Wright, the policy director for Environmental Action, explained when the petitions were delivered:

This is the face of fracking in America: Latino, Native, African American and other communities are disproportionately impacted by the toxic effects of fracking and its infrastructure…It’s time for the DNC, a political party that is totally dependent on the participation of People of Color, to show that our health is as important as our votes. Including a fracking ban in the party platform is an essential step to demonstrate this.”

Not only did the leadership of the Democratic Party decide to ignore polls that spelled out the desires of their own Party, but they also completely disregarded direct pleas from their own supporters to stand up to the fossil fuel industry and put an end to the fracking boom in the United States.

As is often the case, the people in the United States lost out because of the influence that money has over our politics. Back in May, Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani with The Intercept pointed out that former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell — who is serving as the Chairman of the Host Committee for the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia — wrote a pro-fracking op-ed for the New York Daily News while he was a paid consultant for a firm with investments in fracking companies.

Getting beyond the actual convention, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, has been a huge proponent of fracking and has personally taken in more than $7 million from the oil & gas industries for her campaign. Even more troubling, according to reports, during her tenure as Secretary of State, she helped spearhead a global campaign to bring fracking to other parts of the globe.

President Obama’s attitude towards climate and energy has been an “all of the above” approach that has relied on both renewables and fossil fuels (with increased fossil fuel production becoming a hallmark of the administration.) But with climate change accelerating faster than previously predicted, the United States cannot afford another four years of “all of the above,” but it is increasingly looking like that will be the scenario after this year’s election.

If the fracking industry thought that June was a good month, they can expect a lot more good news in the future as long as they keep that corporate campaign funding flowing. The only thing that will suffer will be the future of the planet.