Benicia Planning Commission, Crude By Rail, Public permitting, Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), Sacramento CA, San Luis Obispo County, Santa Maria Refinery, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

Sacramento Bee Editorial: Oil train safety gets an important boost from area Planning Commissions

Repost from the Sacramento Bee

Oil train safety gets an important boost

By the Editorial Board, February 16, 2016 6:05 AM

HIGHLIGHTS
• Sacramento-area officials say the risks of transporting oil should be weighed in refinery plans
• The planning commission in Benicia and planners in San Luis Obispo County have rejected refinery proposals
• If officials want to approve plans, they must justify why public safety is outweighed

Workers tend to the scene of a oil train derailment in Watertown, Wis., last Nov. 9. Communities across California and the country are concerned about the safety of trains carrying oil.
Workers tend to the scene of a oil train derailment in Watertown, Wis., last Nov. 9. Communities across California and the country are concerned about the safety of trains carrying oil. John Hart Associated Press

Officials in the Sacramento region have every right to raise safety concerns about oil trains rumbling through. Now they have key allies in their cause.

Last week, the city of Benicia’s planning commission unanimously rejected a plan by Valero Refining Co. to take deliveries twice a day from 50-tanker trains that would roll through Roseville, downtown Sacramento, West Sacramento and downtown Davis on their way to Benicia. As The Bee’s Tony Bizjak reports, planners in San Luis Obispo County have also recommended against a plan by Phillips 66 for about 150 trains a year to bring oil to its refinery.

While local residents and environmental groups objected, some Benicia planning commissioners said they also heard Sacramento-area residents and officials loud and clear. “I don’t want to be the planning commissioner in the one city that said ‘screw you’ to up-rail cities,” Commissioner Susan Cohen Grossman said.

The Sacramento Area Council of Governments, representing six counties and 22 cities, had argued that Benicia’s environmental review was inadequate because it didn’t look at how to protect cities along the route. That analysis concluded the trains could create a “potentially significant” hazard to the public from oil spills and fires, but only once every few decades.

Yet, as Don Saylor, a Yolo County supervisor and a former SACOG chairman, points out, depending where a derailment happened, heavily populated neighborhoods could be in the blast zone.

He told The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board Tuesday that the best solution is for the oil to be stabilized at the source in the oil fields of North Dakota and elsewhere, and then transported in state-of-the-art rail cars. That, of course, would cut into oil and rail industry profits, and government regulators aren’t there yet.

Indeed, they have been trying to catch up to the boom in domestic oil production and rail transport. After more than two years of debate, the U.S. Department of Transportation last May issued new rules under which the oldest tank cars must be replaced by 2018 with thicker-shelled ones, and cars built since 2011 must be retrofitted or replaced by 2020.

Valero, which wants to build a rail spur and unloading station at its refinery, is expected to appeal to the Benicia City Council. The planning commission in San Luis Obispo is scheduled to vote in late March or April.

Officials could still overturn the recommendations and approve these trains. But at least now, they must justify why safety concerns are outweighed.

Benicia City Council, Benicia Planning Commission, Crude By Rail, Fairfield CA, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

Fairfield Daily Republic: Valero faces deadline for filing appeal to Benicia council

Repost from the Fairfield Daily Republic

Valero faces deadline for filing appeal to Benicia council

By Kevin W. Green, February 17, 2016
The Valero refinery is shown in Benicia. The company has until Feb. 29 to appeal a decision by the Benicia Planning Commission to deny its crude by rail plan. (Steve Reczkowski/Daily Republic file)

FAIRFIELD — Valero faces a Feb. 29 deadline for filing an appeal after having its crude-by-rail project derailed last week by the Benicia Planning Commission.

The commission voted unanimously Thursday to deny the controversial project after holding a public hearing last week that involved meetings over four consecutive days.

Valero has until the end of the month to decide if it wants to appeal the decision to the Benicia City Council, according to Amy Million, principal planner. City staff had recommended approval of the project.

The company has not indicated what it will do.

“We are disappointed that the Planning Commission did not agree with the staff recommendation to certify the project EIR and approve the use permit,” Valero said in a prepared statement after the commission vote.

“At this point we will evaluate our options for appeal with our management,” the statement said.

The project, which was before the city for three years, would have allowed Valero to transport crude oil to its Benicia refinery on two 50-car freight trains daily on Union Pacific tracks that traverse Solano County – passing through Fairfield, Suisun City and Dixon.

The rail shipments would have replaced up to 70,000 barrels per day of crude oil currently transported to the refinery by ship, according to the plan. The Valero refinery would have continued to also receive crude by pipeline, the plan said.

The project sparked plenty of reaction, with much of the concern focused on a need for increased safety and possible mitigation measures.

The city received 20 letters from government agencies with substantive comments on the draft environmental document, 11 letters from organizations, four letters from planning commissioners and 135 letters from individuals, according to the final report. In addition, comments were received orally at three Planning Commission meetings.

Of the approximately 1,800 substantive comments received on the draft environmental document, about 550 discussed hazards, 260 focused on air quality and greenhouse gas emissions, 80 dealt with transportation, 60 discussed biological resources, 50 focused on hydrology and geology, and 40 discussed noise, the report said.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Positive Train Control, Train braking systems

Positive Train Control, Critical Rail Safety Improvement, Delayed for Decades

Repost from DeSmog Blog

Positive Train Control, Critical Rail Safety Improvement, Delayed for Decades

By Justin Mikulka, February 16, 2016 – 03:58
Image credit: National Transportation Safety Board – Preliminary Report: Railroad ​DCA15MR010 (released June 2, 2015), Public Domain

In the recent New York Times article “The Wreck of Amtrak 188” Federal Railroad Administration leader Sarah Feinberg explained the advantages of the rail safety technology known as positive train control (PTC).

“I’ll describe it to you this way,” Feinberg said. “If a train is traveling in an area where P.T.C. isn’t in place and working as a backstop, you’ve got a situation where an engineer has to execute everything perfectly every hour, every day, every week. All the time. Because the slightest, smallest lapse can mean disaster.”

The general consensus is that the Amtrak 188 train crash — which caused eight fatalities — would have been avoided if positive train control was in place. The system would have slowed the train automatically so that it didn’t head into a hard curve going much too fast.

But despite the fact PTC was first recommended as a safety measure by the National Transportation Safety Board in 1970, the railroads have failed to install positive train control. So the smallest lapse can mean disaster.

In 2008, after decades of making no progress in getting the railroads to install PTC, Congress mandated that the rail industry implement positive train control by the end of 2015.

However, after having seven years to install PTC, the rail companies threatened to shut down at the end of 2015, claiming the mandated timeline was impossible. So Congress granted a three-year extension.

At the time, Sarah Feinberg made it clear that the Federal Railroad Administration intended to “aggressively enforce” the new deadline for installation of positive train control.

Despite this tough talk, only a couple of months later several rail companies have now asked for an additional two years to implement PTC. This coalition pushing for the status quo includes two major oil-by-rail shippers — CSX and Norfolk Southern.

In response, Feinberg stated that, “We remain concerned that several other freight and passenger railroads are aiming for 2020.”

So we have moved from “aggressive enforcement” to “concern” and more delays.

As reported by the Associated Press, Feinberg’s efforts are limited because “the industry’s allies responded by quietly slipping a provision into a transportation bill in November that limits her ability to deny waivers.”

So while Feinberg promised to aggressively enforce the three-year extension, “industry allies” in Congress took away that option.

Just as they used the same transportation bill to potentially remove the new regulations requiring oil trains to install modern braking systems by 2021.

This is just one more instance making it clear that regulators in Washington really aren’t the ones calling the shots. That helps explain why a safety technology first recommended in 1970 won’t be in place until 2020 at the earliest.

A recent report on rail safety by the Association of American Railroads comments on the status of positive train control:

“The additional time afforded by Congress is critical, because when it is up and running, PTC must operate flawlessly. If it does not, it has the potential to bring freight rail operations to a halt. At present, there is much work to do to iron out the kinks.”

Of course it mentions that there is the potential to shut down the railroads. This is the industry’s standard trump card when it wants to delay or deny responsibility for common-sense safety improvements.

Don’t be surprised to see the industry play this trump card again in 2018.

And how about those “kinks” that need to be ironed out?

This technology was first recommended almost 50 years ago. Shouldn’t the kinks have been addressed by now?

While it looks like we can forget about “aggressive enforcement” when it comes to rail safety, we all probably should “remain concerned.”

Especially as crude oil “bomb trains” continue to roll through communities and cities with inadequate safety measures in place to stop another Lac Megantic-scale disaster.

Benicia Planning Commission, Crude By Rail, Davis CA, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail

Daily crude oil through Davis… Averted for now

Repost from the Davis Vanguard
[Editor:  See also the February 16 follow up in the Vanguard by Elizabeth Lasensky, Phillips 66 and Valero – A Tale of Two Oil Train Projects.  – RS]

Daily crude oil through Davis… Averted for now

By Lynne Nittler and Jean Jackman, February 14, 2016
Protesters of Oil Trains in Benicia / Courtesy Photo
Protesters of Oil Trains in Benicia / Courtesy Photo

It has been an exhausting and dramatic week for Davis activists and those from Sacramento and other cities uprail from the proposed Valero Refinery expansion in Benicia.

Ten of us have traveled from Davis in two carpools to testify on the Valero Crude-by-Rail Project.   We have participated actively in the stages of a complicated public review process that began in 2013. Now a final Environmental Impact Report (FEIR) came up for a last public hearing before the Benicia Planning Commission.

A city of Davis official and a representative of the 7 regional Air Quality Management Districts also spoke.

We’ve been here before, and we were met with grateful hugs from our friends in Benicia, though we came to protect our own vulnerable city as much as theirs.

The Valero Refinery wants to bring two 50-car trains through Davis daily carrying highly volatile crude oil from North Dakota and other places. That would be 1.5 million gallons daily. It all hinges on whether or not Valero can get a permit to build a rail loading station.

Fortunately, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) gave our region legal standing, and our governmental agencies and individuals used it fully with letters when the draft EIR failed to include any mention of uprail impacts. The CEQA process protects people and the environment! Without it, the uprail communities like Davis would have had no voice at all. We will defend it fiercely from those who would weaken or dismiss this legal recourse.

The Revised DEIR recognized 11 “Significant and unavoidable Impacts” uprail but dismissed them all as “impacts without mitigations” by claiming “federal preemption” of the railroads.

For the third time, our Davis Council and Yolo County Supervisors sent letters and urged the Planning Commission not to certify the Final DEIR. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) which represents 22 cities and 6 counties sent a letter severely critical of the FDEIR, calling for the Benicia Planning Commission to “provide full and adequate responses to our comment letters,” and “to fully evaluate all measures to mitigate the significant environmental impacts that this Project will inevitably have on our communities and our residents.”

The sticky big issue is the interpretation of federal preemption. The contract attorney for Benicia insisted that it is illegal to raise objections to anything regarding the trains because that is all governed by the feds. The Benicia staff and the contract attorney recommended allowing the refinery to go forward.

Last week, the San Luis Obispo staff demonstrated a different take on the federal preemption issue. They recommended denying an expansion of the Phillips 66 Santa Maria Refinery stating that the benefits were outweighed by safety concerns. Their Planning Commission is now opposing the project.

Fortunately, among those who testified were two lawyers from Sierra Club, two speakers for the Stanford Law School representing Center for Biological Diversity and two attorneys from Adams Broadwell Attorneys on behalf of SAFER California. All six of them put forward strong cases that the FDEIR does not meet CEQA, cannot be certified, and that the Benicia staff interpretation of federal preemption is not correct.

A Washington Post article was titled “Trains are carrying — and spilling —a record amount of oil.” It stated that “more than 141 unintentional releases were reported from railroad tankers in 2014…a nearly six-fold increase over the average of 25 spills per year during the period from 1975 to 2012 according to records of the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Record.”  Neighbors who witnessed 14 tanker cars derailed and exploded near Mount Carbon W.V. likened the fireball to a scene from the apocalypse.  We are all familiar with the grizzly Canadian Lac-Mégantic wreck that wiped out the downtown near the Maine border and killed 47 people.

Public comment ended at 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday night. The Planning Commissioners listened politely and attentively to five-minute public comments by over 70 people, often personal, sometimes brilliant, and all but 6 opposed. They also allowed visual power points such as the one put together by Davis resident Elizabeth Lasensky which showed oil cars rolling past hordes of people at Picnic Day, tank cars traveling over the Sacramento River (a drinking water source for many communities), and the path of oil cars through downtown and next to the Mondavi Center. In Sacramento, 13,000 children attend 17 schools in the blast area—the area vulnerable to an accident. Our California State Capitol is also in the blast zone.

 After four nights of deliberation, the Benicia Planning Commission unanimously chose not to certify the FDEIR and denied a project permit. It is likely that Valero will appeal the commission’s decision to the Benicia City Council. For detailed reporting see benindy.wpengine.com.  Read our testimony at yolanoclimateaction.org.

We activists let out a big sigh of relief…for now. And feel immense gratitude to the public service, endurance and respect demonstrated by the volunteer Benicia Planning Commission.

For safe and healthy communities…