Tag Archives: Track maintenance

Wall Street Journal: Federal Worst Case Urban Disaster Planning for Oil Trains

Repost from The Wall Street Journal

Disaster Plans for Oil Trains

Federal officials devise scenario involving a train explosion to prepare officials for the worst

By Russell Gold,  April 13, 2015 7:54 p.m. ET
Oil trains traverse Jersey City, N.J., where officials are concerned about the potential for a spill. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal

Imagine a mile-long train transporting crude oil derailing on an elevated track in Jersey City, N.J., across the street from senior citizen housing and 2 miles from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan.

The oil ignites, creating an intense explosion and a 300-foot fireball. The blast kills 87 people right away, and sends 500 more to the hospital with serious injuries. More than a dozen buildings are destroyed. A plume of thick black smoke spreads north to New York’s Westchester County.

This fictional—but, experts say, plausible—scenario was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in one of the first efforts by the U.S. government to map out what an oil-train accident might look like in an urban area. Agency officials unveiled it as part of an exercise last month to help local firefighters and emergency workers prepare for the kind of crude-by-rail accident that until now has occurred mostly in rural locations.

“Our job is to design scenarios that push us to the limit, and very often push us to the point of failure so that we can identify where we need to improve,” said FEMA spokesman Rafael Lemaitre. He said a second planning exercise is scheduled in June in a suburban area of Wisconsin.

WSJ-Widespread_Damage

Jersey City’s mayor, Steven Fulop, said the drill showed participants that they need to improve regional communication to cope with an oil-train accident.

“It would be a catastrophic situation for any urban area and Jersey City is one of the most densely populated areas in the entire country,” he said.

Railroad records show that about 20 oil trains a week pass through the county that contains Jersey City, and Mr. Fulop said the trains use the elevated track studied in the FEMA exercise. Even more trains hauling crude pass through other cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

Rail shipments of oil have expanded to almost 374 million barrels last year from 20 million barrels in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Although low crude prices and safety issues have recently led to small declines in such traffic, trains carrying volatile oil from North Dakota and the Rocky Mountains continue to rumble toward refiners on the East, West and Gulf Coasts.

Edgardo Correa, of Jersey City, N.J., beneath railroad tracks that pass by his home. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal

Several oil-train derailments have produced huge fireballs, including two in March in rural Illinois and Ontario. In 2013, a train carrying North Dakota crude derailed late at night in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.

Regulators worry more about a serious accident in a densely populated area. “The derailment scenario FEMA developed is a very real possibility and a very real concern,” said Susan Lagana, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Transportation. She said her agency was considering emergency orders to address such risks.

Firefighters at the FEMA workshop in Jersey City discussed the difficulty of battling a crude-oil fire, which can be explosive and hard to extinguish. One problem: limited supplies of the special foam required to smother the flames.

Jordan Zaretsky, a fire battalion chief in nearby Teaneck, N.J., who attended the presentation, said the scale of such an accident was sobering. “This isn’t a structural fire that we can knock down in an hour or two,” he said. “This is something we’d be dealing with for days.”

Ideas discussed at the workshop included devising a system to allow local officials to know when an oil train was passing through, developing public-service messages to tell residents what to do in case of a derailment and providing more firefighters with specialized training.

There have been many calls for changes to how crude oil is handled on the railroads, including new speed limits for trains and requirements to treat the crude oil to make it less volatile.

Earlier this month, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board urged the rail industry and federal regulators to move more swiftly to replace existing tank cars with ones that would better resist rupturing and fire.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for oil producers, said the companies are committed to “greater efforts to prevent derailments through track maintenance and repair, upgrades to the tank car fleet, and giving first responders the knowledge and tools they need.”

The Association of American Railroads recognizes that “more has to be done to further advance the safe movement of this product,” a spokesman said.

FEMA chose for the location of the derailment scenario a stretch of track adjacent to the New Jersey Turnpike and about a mile from downtown Jersey City. One side of the track is industrial and includes an electric substation. The other side is residential.

Edgardo Correa, a 59-year-old retired sanitation worker, lives in a house close to the tracks in Jersey City. He said he was aware that trains full of crude pass by his home. “It’s an alarming thing,” he said.

—Joe Jackson contributed to this article.

Fixing railroad tank cars gains traction after recent derailments

Repost from McClatchyDC News

Fixing railroad tank cars gains traction after recent derailments

By Curtis Tate, McClatchy Washington Bureau, March 30, 2015
US NEWS RAILSAFETY-CA 1 SA
Recently filled, a tanker truck drives past railway cars containing crude oil on railroad tracks in McClellan Park in North Highlands on Wednesday, March 19, 2014. North Highlands is a suburb just outside the city limits of Sacramento, Calif. RANDALL BENTON — MCT

— While some government and industry officials have repeatedly said there’s no silver bullet to improve the safety of oil trains, a persistent problem runs through every new derailment: the tank cars.

Oil industry groups maintain that railroads should do a better job of maintaining track to prevent derailments, while the rail industry has called for more robust tank cars that are better equipped to survive accidents.

Although there’s almost universal consensus that improvements are required in both areas, there’s one key difference.

Railroads have already spent heavily in recent years to improve their track for all kinds of freight and have pledged to spend more. Meanwhile, the companies that own and lease tank cars for transporting oil and other flammable liquids have been waiting for regulators to approve a more robust design to account for the exponential increase in energy traffic on the rails before they invest an additional cent.

The railroad industry petitioned the U.S. Department of Transportation in March 2011 for a more robust tank-car design. Rather than wait for an answer, the industry adopted its own upgrades later that year. But several recent derailments involving different types of crude have suggested that those cars don’t perform significantly better than those they replaced.

The DOT-111A tank car

About 92,000 DOT-111s are in use; 78,000 lack extra safety features. Most tank cars are leased by oil companies or other firms moving products by rail.

TheDOT-111TankCar (FRA)And unlike the controversy that surrounds other proposed solutions or doubts about their effectiveness, tank car upgrades have the support of lawmakers, regulators, mayors and governors, community and industry groups, and the National Transportation Safety Board.

“We certainly have been distracted from doing what is the most obvious safety improvement: the cars,” said Peter Goelz, former managing director of the NTSB.

The White House Office of Management and Budget is reviewing a package of proposals that include an improved tank-car design. But the new rules aren’t scheduled to be published until May, frustrating many who’ve pushed for better tank cars for years.

In January, the NTSB included tank cars on its “Most Wanted List” of safety improvements.

For more than two decades, the NTSB has called for improving the most common type of tank car, the DOT-111. But those calls were largely ignored until railroads started carrying dramatically larger volumes of domestically produced crude oil and ethanol.

The minimally reinforced cars proved vulnerable to punctures in derailments, spilling their contents, which quickly caught fire. Such fires could compromise other cars by heating their contents to the point where they burst through the tank walls with explosive force.

“Once you get a leak and fire, that can spread to other cars,” said Greg Saxton, chief engineer for the Greenbrier Companies, which is already building a tank car to tougher standards. “That’s the No. 1 thing we want to do. We don’t want to have a leak.”

After a July 2013 oil train derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killed 47 people, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board found that none of the cars in that incident was equipped with thermal protection. The cars that sustained only minor impact damage ultimately ripped open after fire exposure, violently releasing their pressurized contents as large fireballs.

The rail industry made a few modifications to DOT-111 cars manufactured since 2011, including shields that protected the bottom half of each end of the car and more reinforcement for valves and outlets. But an outer steel jacket to provide extra puncture resistance and insulation to protect the car’s contents from fire exposure were optional.

In recent derailments in West Virginia, Illinois and Ontario, the newer cars, called CPC-1232s, lacked those extra safeguards.

“Do we need a new standard for tank cars? Absolutely,” said Ed Hamberger, president and CEO of the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s principal advocacy group.

Those existing cars could be retrofitted with jackets and thermal insulation until new ones are built. But even those improvements are waiting on the White House for final approval.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., along with three Democratic co-sponsors – Patty Murray of Washington state, Dianne Feinstein of California and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin – introduced a bill last week that would require an immediate ban on crude oil shipments in DOT-111 and non-jacketed CPC-1232 tank cars. It also would force new cars to meet a standard that exceeds any current requirement.

“No one wants to pull the trigger and say they should be removed,” she said in an interview. “We can’t wait to see a more aggressive plan.”

The redesigned tank car may look like the one the Canadian government proposed this month. It includes full-height shields on both ends, thermal insulation and an outer jacket.

Last year, railroads voluntarily agreed to limit oil train speeds to 40 mph in a select number of densely populated areas and 50 mph everywhere else. But six of the most recent derailments cast doubt on the effectiveness of reducing speeds as a mitigation measure.

All the trains in the four most recent U.S. derailments that resulted in fires or spills were going under 40 mph. Three were traveling at less than 25 mph and one at just 9 mph. In the two most recent Canadian wrecks, the trains were traveling at 38 and 43 mph.

The Federal Railroad Administration wants railroads to install electronic braking systems on trains that carry crude oil. But the industry opposes new braking requirements, and they wouldn’t address the vulnerabilities of tank cars to punctures and fire exposure.

Even those who support an “all of the above” approach to dealing with the problem say tank car improvements are a crucial step.

“It’s unfortunate to have the NTSB investigating the same accident over and over again,” said Jim Hall, a former NTSB chairman. “We’re overdue in addressing this issue with the DOT-111.”

Canada Transport Watchdog to Introduce New Tank Cars Ahead of Schedule

Repost from Insurance Journal (Reuters)

Canada Transport Watchdog to Introduce New Tank Cars Ahead of Schedule

By David Ljunggren | March 18, 2015
RTR4PZHU
IN PHOTO: Tanker rail cars burn after a crude oil train derailment 50 miles (80 km) south of Timmins, Ontario, in this picture from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada taken in Gogama, Ontario, February 16, 2015. Canadian National Railway Co is still cleaning up spilled oil and removing damaged rail cars after a weekend derailment on its line at a remote site. The company said 29 of 100 cars on the train heading from Alberta’s tar sands to eastern Ontario derailed late on Saturday and seven caught fire. There were no injuries. Picture taken February 16, 2015. REUTERS/Transportation Safety Board of Canada/Handout via Reuters

Canada’s transportation watchdog said that recent fiery derailments of trains hauling crude oil mean a new generation of stronger tanker wagons should be introduced ahead of schedule.

The Transportation Safety Board (TSB) is probing two accidents within the last month involving Canadian National Railway Co. oil trains which came off the tracks and caught fire near the small northern Ontario town of Gogama.

Both trains were hauling CPC-1232 crude tankers, meant to be safer than the older DOT-111 models that blew up in downtown Lac-Megantic, Quebec in 2013, killing 47 people. Canada last week unveiled tough standards for a new generation of tanker cars that would replace the CPC-1232s by 2025 at the latest.

“While the proposed standards look promising, the TSB has concerns about the implementation timeline, given initial observations of the performance of CPC-1232 cars in recent derailments,” the agency said in a release.

“If older tank cars, including the CPC-1232 cars, are not phased out sooner, then the regulator and industry need to take more steps to reduce the risk of derailments or consequences following a derailment carrying flammable liquids,” it said, but gave no details.

The agency said track failures may have played a role in each of the Gogama derailments as well as in the case of an oil train that left the tracks near Minnipuka, also in northern Ontario. No crude caught fire in that accident.

The TSB has issued a safety advisory letter asking the federal transport ministry to review the risk assessments conducted for the area.

“Petroleum crude oil unit trains transporting heavily-loaded tank cars will tend to impart higher than usual forces to the track infrastructure during their operation,” said the agency.

“These higher forces expose any weaknesses that may be present in the track structure, making the track more susceptible to failure.”

It noted trains traveling in the area were under orders to travel slowly to protect against various infrastructure and track maintenance issues.

CN spokesman Jim Feeny said the company “has enhanced its already rigorous infrastructure and mechanical inspection procedures on this northern Ontario rail corridor.”

The office of Transport Minister Lisa Raitt – which has overall responsibility for regulating the rail industry – was not immediately available for comment.

(Additional reporting by Allison Martell in Toronto; editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Marguerita Choy)

Related article:
Canada Proposes Tough New Oil Tank Car Standards

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board points to track issues in derailments

Repost from insideHALTON.com

TSB points to track issues in derailments

By Paola Loriggio, The Canadian Press, March 17, 2015
TSB points to track issues in derailments-Image1
A CN Rail train derailment near Gogama, Ont., is shown in a Sunday, March 8, 2015 handout photo. Canada’s transportation investigator says track infrastructure failures may have played a role in three recent derailments involving oil-laden trains in northern Ontario. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO – Glenn Thibeault

Canada’s transportation investigator says track infrastructure failures may have played a role in three recent derailments involving oil-laden trains in northern Ontario.

The Transportation Safety Board says it wants Transport Canada to review the risk assessments for a stretch of track known as the CN Ruel subdivision following the fiery derailments in Gogama and Minnipuka.

It says trains have already been ordered to travel slowly on the Class 4 welded rail track due to “various infrastructure and track maintenance issues,” but that heavily loaded tank cars often exert “higher than usual forces” on the track.

The board says that exposes weaknesses in the track and makes it more susceptible to failure.

The agency says its preliminary observations on the March 7 Gogama derailment also found the tank cars performed similarly to those involved in the deadly derailment in Lac-Megantic, Que., despite meeting upgraded safety standards for Class 111 tank cars.

Similar observations were made about a Feb. 14 derailment near the same community, which is about 80 kilometres south of Timmins.

The derailments have fuelled the debate over transporting oil by rail and prompted the transportation ministers of Ontario and Quebec to express concern to their federal counterpart.

Last week, Ottawa proposed tough new standards for rail tank cars used to transport crude oil that would phase out the much-criticized Class 111 tank cars by 2025.

The proposal would require the new tank cars to have outer “jackets,” a layer of thermal protection, and thicker steel walls.

The Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday the proposed standards “look promising,” but must be implemented more quickly than suggested “given initial observations of the performance” of the upgraded Class 111 in recent derailments.

“If older tank cars, including the (upgraded cars), are not phased out sooner, then the regulator and industry need to take more steps to reduce the risk of derailments or consequences following a derailment carrying flammable liquids,” it said.