No Spill Reported After Train Cars Carrying Crude Derail Near New Orleans
Posted: 03/02/2015 12:11 am EST
Train derailment in New Orleans East at Almonaster Blvd. (Photo: Grant Yenni, WWLTV.com)
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The New Orleans Fire Department says two train cars carrying crude oil have derailed in the city but no oil has spilled.
The department said in a statement Sunday night that it received a report of the derailment around 6:15 p.m.
The statement says two New Orleans Public Belt Railway cars each carrying 30,000 gallons of crude went off the tracks. Fire officials found no leakage and say there’s no immediate threat to the public.
The department said a re-railing company was en route Sunday night.
The cause is under investigation. Representatives for Public Belt couldn’t immediately be reached.
Recent fiery wrecks of trains hauling crude oil, including one last month in West Virginia, have intensified pressure on the Obama administration to approve tougher safety standards for railroads and tank cars.
Repost from ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY [Editor: Professor Niman has written a thorough examination of crude-by-rail issues. The local (Buffalo NY) perspective is no drawback. This is an excellent reference article no matter where you are. For example, if/when Benicia approves a permit for Valero’s proposed Crude By Rail project, everyone uprail from here can expect to be the new Buffalo. – RS]
Buffalo’s Bomb Trains
By Michael I. Niman, February 26, 2015
With one third of Buffalo’s population living in a disaster evacuation zone, the local media’s silence is deafening.
They span over a mile long containing up to 140 tank cars and as much as 4.5 million gallons of some of the nastiest forms of crude oil on earth, pumped from “extreme” extraction operations in North America’s new oil boomtowns. They cross rivers and transverse open plains, wilderness forest and some of the most densely populated urban areas in the country. Occasionally, with alarmingly increasing frequency, they careen off into rivers, catch fire and explode, or both. When spilled in water, their heavy oil exterminates river ecosystems. When they blow up, they release the fires of hell, with one oil train accident in 2013 wiping out most of the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and gutting its downtown. That’s when folks started referring to these explosive steel snakes as “Bomb Trains.”
This is one of the dark sides of North America’s fossil energy boom—the backstory on cheap fuel. The uptick in oil production comes from using extreme means to recklessly drill oil, using carbon-intensive methods like fracking to extract environmentally dangerous low grade oils such as Bakken crude from Montana and North Dakota. This oil, pumped from the dolomite layer of the Bakken geological formation, which also underlies portions of the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, is more volatile than conventional oils, with a lower flashpoint for explosion. When rail cars started to blow in Lac-Mégantic, The National Post reported a blast radius of over one half mile.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board estimates that about 400,000 barrels a day of this oil make the trip to Atlantic Coast refineries, with 20 to 25 percent moving through the port of Albany. Much of this Albany-bound oil moves across New York utilizing rail lines passing though the hearts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Utica. Oil from Canada crosses the Niagara river, entering the US both in Niagara Falls, and via Buffalo’s 142 year old International Railroad Bridge, as well as taking a northern route, dropping down from Quebec on tracks passing through the Adirondack Park, including about 100 miles of Lake Champlain watershed shoreline. Non Albany-bound oil, such as some shipments from Buford, North Dakota to Houston, Texas, also take an unlikely route through Buffalo.
Though much of this oil winds up moving through New York State, federal law limits the state’s authority to regulate it. While crude oil can be stabilized to make it less volatile in transit, whether or not it receives such treatment is up to the discretion of regulators in the state that produces it—not necessarily the states through whose cities it will roll. Most of the explosive Bakken crude coming our way originates in North Dakota, where the energy industry all but owns the legislature, fertilizing the state’s anti-regulatory zeitgeist with a healthy dose of cash. The end result is, whatever passes for a state government in North Dakota fails to meet even Texas’s modest safety standards for anti-explosive fuel stabilization.
The Association of American Railroads reports that, thanks to the Bakken and Tar Sands oil booms, the amount of oil moving across the country by train has increased 45 fold (4,500 percent) from 2008 through 2013, with the volume continuing to increase through 2014 and 2015. As a result, more oil spilled from oil trains in the U.S. in 2013 than in the preceding 37 years. The number of accidents increased in 2014, and seems to be steadily increasing this year, with oil trains derailing and blowing up last week in West Virginia and northern Ontario. The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Department of Transportation now predicts an average of ten derailment accidents a year involving crude oil or ethanol tank cars over the next twenty years, “causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.” It’s no longer a matter of “if” there will a catastrophic oil train derailment.
Both the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and the United States Department of Transportation recommend evacuating a one half mile perimeter around accidents involving railroad tanker cars carrying flammable liquids. Karen Edelstein, a researcher and the New York Program Director for the FracTracker Alliance, mapped oil train routes across the state, adding overlays for this evacuation zone, and for schools and hospitals. Her data shows that statewide, there are 502 public schools situated within potential evacuation zones. In Buffalo, about one third of the population live within one half mile of these bomb train routes, and 27 public schools and eight private schools lie within potential evacuation perimeters as well. This includes PS 42, which serves students with disabilities, and is located adjacent to the track. Sister’s Hospital and the Buffalo Zoo are well within this perimeter, which skirts the Buffalo State and Erie County Medical Center campuses. If we freak out when it snows, how well are we going to handle what appear to be atomic fireballs, should one of these trains blow up?
While the profits from this oil boom have been privatized, much of the cost associated with reckless extraction have been externalized, meaning dumped on the public. Aside from the obvious environmental costs that we and future generation will have to bear, are the less visible emergency preparation costs that every school, hospital and municipality within a half mile of bomb train routes must now cover. In Buffalo, this means 35 schools need to work with local emergency services providers to develop plans to quickly evacuate students not just from buildings, but from neighborhoods, all with a possible backdrop of explosions, sirens and billowing smoke.
While it’s not statistically likely that a train will explode in Buffalo or any other specific place, it is a certainty that trains will keep exploding with increasing frequency across the U.S. and Canada. This means that cash strapped municipalities across the continent will have to develop plans to address a catastrophe we know for certain will befall some of our communities.
Addressing this risk involves not just planning to respond to it, and maintaining an emergency response network capable of responding, but also working to prevent such a catastrophe. A report from the Cornell University Community and Regional Development Institute points out that this involves a multitude of responsibilities, such as monitoring surface rail crossings to prevent vehicle train collisions that can lead to a derailment. Such responsibility, the report notes, usually falls to local police forces that often lack the personnel to do this. Likewise, federal regulators lack the personnel to inspect the nation’s rail infrastructure, and state Departments of Transportation lack the resources to adequately inspect bridges crossing railroad tracks. All of these costs fall not on the oil or railroad industries, but on government agencies, with much of this work not being done due to budget constraints.
What little planning there is to deal with an oil train explosion is alarming to read. A three car fire requires, according to the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control , 80,000 gallons of water for laying down a fire retardant foam blanket and cooling adjacent rail cars. Hence, the state recommends, if there is “NO life hazard and more than 3 tank cars are involved in fire OFPC recommends LETTING THE FIRE BURN unless the foam and water supply required to control is available” [sic.]. The wording here is ominous, with the availability of the required foam and water not being the default expectation, but instead, simply a possibility. This language is there for a reason, however. The Auburn Citizen, in central New York, quotes Cayuga County Emergency Management Office Director Brian Dahl, who, in response to a question about his county’s ability to respond to an oil train fire, unequivocally states, “The amount of foam and water you would need, there’s just not enough in central New York.”
While oddly inferring that maybe you should put the fire out if you have adequate foam and water, even if there is no “life hazard,” the state’s instructions don’t mention what to do if there is a life hazard, but no foam or water. Also troubling is their inference that if more than three cars are on fire you should just give up. Last week’s fires in Ontario and West Virginia saw seven and fourteen cars ablaze respectively, with each fire burning for over 24 hours. In all caps, the state’s instructions warn responders,
“All resources must be available prior to beginning suppression.”
It doesn’t give any suggestions as to what to do if you can’t move the water to the fire, or have the foam necessary to smother a dragon. None of the suggested responses are tolerable should an oil train explode in an urban environment.
Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at SUNY Buffalo State. His previous columns are at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com, and available globally through syndication.
McKeesport incident among derailments that prompt Casey to push ‘crude-by-rail’ rule
By Patrick Cloonan, Feb. 27, 2015, 5:26 a.m.
Train cars hang off the side of a railroad bridge at the site of a train derailment in McKeesport on Sunday, June 8, 2014. Stephanie Strasburg | Tribune-Review
A June 7 CSX freight train derailment on a bridge overlooking the Marina at McKees Point was one of at least three in the last 13 months on Southwestern Pennsylvania tracks.
That and other incidents — including last week’s West Virginia tanker accident — prompted U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr., D-Scranton, to call on federal officials to speed up implementation of a “crude by rail” rule governing oil shipments by freight trains.
“Crude oil shipments by rail have increased drastically over the past several years, largely due to the rise of oil production in North Dakota,” Casey wrote to Shaun Donovan, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, in a letter released Thursday. “Large quantities of this oil travel through Pennsylvania and other states on a daily basis and are shipped by older rail cars that are prone to rupture.”
That included a Feb. 16 derailment of a CSX train carrying 100 tankers of crude oil through Mt. Carbon, W.Va., 30 miles southeast of Charleston.
Nineteen cars caught fire, oil leaked into the nearby Kanawha River, one house burned to the ground and at least one injury was reported.
Standards for such shipments have been devised by the federal Department of Transportation, with help from freight carriers.
“This is a complex issue with railroads working with policymakers to set the rules and with oil shippers to properly classify tank car contents,” Association of American Railroads spokesman Ed Greenberg said. “The federal government’s long-awaited rules will not only provide certainty, but we also feel (it will) chart a new course for ensuring the safer movement of crude oil by rail.”
The proposal must be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, which said it needs until May to finalize the rule.
“We know that rail transportation is crucial to our economy,” Casey said. “Millions of Americans live near these rail lines and have a right to expect … every step to protect them.”
Casey said he was addressing the Democratic Obama Administration and Republicans who control Congress. He said he pushed hard for funding passed last year that opens the door to hiring 15 new rail and hazardous material inspectors and retaining 45 rail safety positions.
“And we can use more,” the senator said.
Others heard him including the Association of American Railroads, a policy, research and technology entity whose members include all major North American freight carriers and Amtrak.
“America’s freight rail industry supports tougher tank car specifications and, for years, our association has called for stronger federal standards for tank cars,” Greenberg said.
As the Department of Transportation formulated its proposal last fall, the association submitted to the department what it called a comprehensive safety package for stronger tank cars.
Greenberg said it addressed increased shell thickness, use of jacket protection, thermal protection, full-height head shields, appropriately sized pressure relief devices, bottom-outlet handle protection and top-fittings protection.
CSX spokesman Rob Doolittle echoed Greenberg, saying CSX collaborated with the association and other industry partners in developing comments on the proposed new rules.
“Railroads have dramatically improved safety over the last three decades,” Greenberg said. That includes an investment of more than $575 billion since 1980 into the nation’s freight rail network.
Greenberg said freight railroads project spending $29 billion this year on safety-enhancing infrastructure and equipment.
“That said, we recognize more has to be done to ensure the safe movement of this product,” Greenberg said.
That came to light at 10:56 p.m. June 7 when a CSX train headed from New Castle to Connellsville crossed the trestle alongside the Jerome Bridge. Ten of 88 train cars derailed.
Three hung for a time over the Youghiogheny River as well as boats docked at the Marina.
“You could tell the wheels were not on the rail, even before the crash,” said Ashley Bound of Elizabeth. “We were in a boat about 50 feet away and, when I saw all the sparks, I said: ‘I don’t think that’s supposed to happen.’ I was freaking out. It was scary.”
Officials said no one was injured, no chemicals spilled and most cars were empty or carried scrap metal. CSX said a car with “light petroleum” remained upright and did not leak.
Casey referred to derailments last month in Uniontown and Philadelphia as well as the Feb. 13, 2014, derailment of 21 Norfolk Southern rail cars hauling propane gas and Canadian crude oil through Vandergrift.
There cars crashed into the MSI Corp. specialty metals factory. One car spilled 1,000 gallons of heavy crude, but no spillage reached the nearby Kiskiminetas River.
On Jan. 22 in Uniontown seven cars filled with sand for use in the Marcellus shale industry turned over within 2 feet of homes along Locust and East Penn streets.
According to various reports, 11 cars in a CSX train came off the tracks in South Philadelphia on Jan. 31, but the cars remained upright and no chemical leaks were detected.
“Pennsylvania has borne the brunt of many of these derailments,” Casey said. “It’s important for residents to have the peace of mind in knowing that the necessary actions are being taken to improve safety on our nation’s railways.” Carriers serving area towns say they agree.
“Safety is CSX’s highest priority, and we are sensitive to the concerns of the communities where we operate regarding the increasing volume of crude oil that is being moved by train,” Doolittle said.
“Norfolk Southern every day shoulders the obligation of being a common carrier, which means when a shipper gives us a hazardous materials tank car that meets current federal safety standards, we must haul it,” Norfolk Southern spokesman Dave Pidgeon said. “No matter what comes out of proposed new regulations, Norfolk Southern wants the safest tank car to be moving on our network because safety is our top priority — safety of our employees, safety of our customers’ products, safety of the communities in which we operate.”
Hundreds of illicit oil wastewater pits found in Kern County
By Julie Cart, 2/26/15 10:10PM
Pits containing production water from oil wells in Kern County. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Water officials in Kern County discovered that oil producers have been dumping chemical-laden wastewater into hundreds of unlined pits that are operating without proper permits.
Inspections completed this week by the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board revealed the existence of more than 300 previously unidentified waste sites. The water board’s review found that more than one-third of the region’s active disposal pits are operating without permission.
The pits raise new water quality concerns in a region where agricultural fields sit side by side with oil fields and where California’s ongoing drought has made protecting groundwater supplies paramount.
Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the water board’s Fresno office, called the unregulated pits a “significant problem” and said the agency expects to issue as many as 200 enforcement orders.
State regulators face federal scrutiny for what critics say has been decades of lax oversight of the oil and gas industry and fracking operations in particular. The Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources has admitted that for years it allowed companies to inject fracking wastewater into protected groundwater aquifers, a problem they attributed to a history of chaotic record-keeping.
“The state doesn’t seem to be willing to put the protection of groundwater and water quality ahead of the oil industry being able to do business as usual,” said Andrew Grinberg of the group Clean Water Action.
The pits — long, shallow troughs gouged out of dirt — hold water that is produced from fracking and other oil drilling operations. The water forced out of the ground during oil operations is heavily saline and often contains benzene and other naturally occurring but toxic compounds.
Regional water officials said they believe that none of the pits in the county have linings that would prevent chemicals from seeping into groundwater beneath them. Some of the pits also lack netting or covers to protect migrating birds or other wildlife.
Currently, linings for pits are not required, though officials said they will consider requiring them in the future. Covers are mandated in some instances.
The pits are a common site on the west side of Bakersfield’s oil patch. In some cases, waste facilities contain 40 or more pits, arranged in neat rows. Kern County accounts for at least 80% of California’s oil production.
The facilities are close to county roads but partially hidden behind earthen berms. At one pit this week, waves of heat rose from newly dumped water, and an acrid, petroleum smell hung in the air.
Rodgers said Thursday that the agency’s review found 933 pits, or sumps, in Kern County. Of those, 578 are active and 355 are not currently used.
Of the active pits, 370 have permits to operate and 208 do not. All of the pits have now been inspected, he said.
The possible existence of hundreds of unpermitted pits came to light when regional water officials compared their list of pit operators to a list compiled by the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources. The oil regulator’s list contained at least 300 more waste pits than water officials had permitted, Rodgers said.
His staff began inspecting the wastewater sites in April. Initial testing of water wells has not revealed any tainted water, he said.
The pits are an inexpensive disposal method for an enormous volume of water that is forced out of the ground during drilling or other operations, such as fracking. Rodgers said that just one field, the McKittrick Oil Field, produces 110,000 barrels of wastewater a day. According to figures from 2013, oil operations in Kern County produce 80 billion gallons of such wastewater — an amount that if clean would supply nearly a half-million households for a year.
More than 2,000 pits have been dredged over decades of oil operations in Kern County, according to water board records. Oil field companies have not always properly disposed of water, Rodgers said. As recently as the 1980s, it was customary to dump wastewater into drainage canals that line the San Joaquin Valley’s agricultural fields.
But using unlined pits to dispose of wastewater is becoming less common. Some states ban the practice, and many in the oil and gas industry do not consider it effective.
The water board’s long-term plan to address the problem includes requiring remediation of some abandoned pits so that contaminants left behind don’t pollute the air, Rodgers said.
In pits located near clean water sources, Rodgers said, operators will be required to install monitor wells to test water quality. The companies will pay for the testing and provide the results to water officials.
The water board will publish a series of general orders that he said will more tightly control the operation of wastewater pits.
“Our goal is to protect water quality,” Rodgers said. “Our goal is not to shut anybody down, but by the same token, they do not own the waters beneath them. Those waters are for the public good.”
