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Yolo County Supervisors send letter to Benicia critical of Draft EIR

Repost from The Sacramento Bee
[Editor: This story is also covered on the Woodland Daily Democrat.  – RS]

Yolo supervisors challenge Benicia on crude oil train plans

By Tony Bizjak, Jul. 15, 2014
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Steve Helber / The Associated Press | Several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire along the James River near downtown Lynchburg, Va., in May. Emergency officials are pressing railroads for more information on oil train schedules and routes so they can be prepared.
ad more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2014/07/15/6558895/yolo-supervisors-challenge-benicia.html#storylink=cp

In a letter to be sent this week, Yolo County officials accuse the city of Benicia of failing to adequately review the potential for oil spills and fires resulting from a plan by the Valero Refining Co. to run two daily trains carrying crude oil through the Sacramento region to its Bay Area refinery.

A recently published environmental report by Benicia concludes the project will not cause any significant negative impact to cities and habitat up the rail line. That finding was based on an Illinois professor’s analysis saying a train incident causing an oil spill might happen only once every 111 years between Roseville and Benicia.

The Yolo letter, approved Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors, calls that analysis inaccurate and irrelevant because it doesn’t explore the potential magnitude of oil spills. A crude oil train crash and explosion last year in Lac Mégantic, Canada, killed 47 people and leveled several blocks of downtown.

“A catastrophic explosion and spill in a populated area is different from a 100-gallon spill in a shipyard that is quickly cleaned up,” the Yolo letter states. “Without considering the second half of the risk analysis, the (report) cannot conclude that the risk of a spill is insignificant.”

The Yolo board was split, 3-2, on sending the letter. Yolo Supervisor Matt Rexroad opposed the letter, saying he believes the risk of a spill is small and the county should focus its time on issues where it will have more impact. “There is only so much we can have an impact on,” he said. “You allocate resources (based on) how big you think risks are. I don’t know this one is worth fighting.”

Board Chairman Don Saylor took the opposite tack, saying the issue presents clear safety concerns for communities, businesses and people alongside the railways. “The fact is that a single spill or fire in Yolo County in areas such as downtown Davis, the campus of UC Davis or the many other communities in our region could result in significant property damage and injuries,” Saylor wrote in an email to The Sacramento Bee.

Other local cities and counties are expected to issue comments challenging the Benicia rail plan environmental analysis, which was published last month. Benicia officials have set a Sept. 15 deadline for receiving reactions. If its plans are approved, Valero officials have said they plan to begin train shipments early next year. The transports are among the first of what California officials say is an expected boom in crude-by-rail shipments through the state, prompted by the lower cost of North Dakota and Canadian crude.

KQED: Benicia Extends Public Comment Period on Bay Area Crude-by-Rail

Repost from KQED Science

Benicia Extends Public Comment Period on Bay Area Crude-by-Rail

Molly Samuel, KQED Science | July 11, 2014

Benicia city officials are giving people more time to comment on a proposal to bring crude oil by rail to Valero’s refinery there. The Benicia Planning Commission made the decision on Thursday night after hearing two hours of testimony. All but three speakers were in favor of extending the comment period, citing summer vacations and the complexity of the project’s draft environmental impact report.

Valero is looking to take advantage of the North American oil boom by bringing the crude in by rail, instead of overseas by ship.

The Valero refinery in Benicia is one of five refineries in the Bay Area. (Craig Miller/KQED)

The project has raised safety concerns in the community. There have been several fiery oil train derailments in other parts of the country in the past year, and last summer a train carrying crude oil exploded in the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.

“That is not going to happen here,” said Dan Broadwater, business manager for the Napa and Solano County electrical workers union. He pointed out that Valero’s Benicia refinery is one of only two refineries in the state that are recognized by the California Voluntary Protection Program for its safety record. (The other is Valero’s refinery in Wilmington, a neighborhood near Long Beach.)

Other speakers said that it’s not just about safety at the Valero plant.

“We believe this is actually a regional issue,” Lynne Nittler, of Davis, told the commission. “Your decision here has a profound impact on those of us who live up-rail.”

If the project is given the go-ahead, two 50-car trains a day would travel on Union Pacific tracks through the Roseville rail yard near Sacramento. Combined, they would deliver up to 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day to the Valero refinery, offsetting crude delivered by ship. The refinery also receives crude from the San Joaquin Valley via pipeline.

Valero representatives have said the trains will be scheduled so that they don’t interfere with traffic in Benicia during rush hour. Union Pacific is responsible for dispatching trains on its tracks, including Amtrak’s Capital Corridor trains, which travel the same route.

Valero has also said it will use upgraded tank cars, rather than older cars that have been involved in the explosive derailments.

The public comment period on the project now ends on September 15, a 45-day extension. Comments can be submitted to Amy Million, principal planner: amillion@ci.benicia.ca.us.  Fax and snail mail address are available here.

Open letter from Davis to Benicia: Stop crude by rail

Repost from The Benicia Herald
[Editor: A year ago, almost to the day, I wrote an Op-Ed for The Benicia Herald titled, “Valero crude-by-rail: ‘Down-wind’ and ‘up-rail’.”  A few months later, I was contacted by Milton Kalish and Lynne Nittler of Davis, and we’ve stayed in touch.  They – and their wonderful group of activist friends in Cool Davis, Yolano Climate Action and 350 Sacramento – have continued their CBR organizing efforts with great energy and creativity.  This open letter by Lynne serves as a detailed primer of all the reasons why CBR must be stopped.  A must-read.  – RS]

Open letter to Benicia: Stop crude by rail

July 10, 2014 by Lynne Nittler

IN RESPONSE TO JIM LESSENGER’S OPED OF JULY 4, “Open letter to the City Council: Support CBR,” I write today urging Benicia to deny the proposed Valero Refinery Crude-by-Rail Project until all safety measures listed below are in place.

I have been carefully following the proposed Benicia project, reading articles from a wide variety of sources including many reports and, most recently, the Draft Environmental Impact Report.

I follow a number of environmental topics closely, particularly those related to climate change. I am on the board of Cool Davis, a nonprofit organization that helps the city of Davis implement its Climate Action and Adaptation Plan.

I have an “uprail” perspective that is important to add to the conversation on the Valero proposal, as the impact of the daily trains would be significant in my community.

I have six reasons Benicia should deny the CBR project. They are as follows:

1. The project is far from contained within Benicia’s 3,000-acre Industrial Park.

Benicia is fortunate to have a buffer area of industries and vacant land around Valero Benicia Refinery. Valero has even promised that the oil trains will not cross city streets during Benicia’s rush hours (though neither Valero nor the city of Benicia can enforce that promise).

Davis and other uprail communities are not so fortunate. The trains will pass through downtown Davis, including residential neighborhoods, the center of downtown, university housing and the entire Mondavi Performing Arts Complex and Conference Center.

Train travel through Davis is made more dangerous because there is a curve with a 10-mph left-handed cross-over between the main tracks several hundred feet east of the Amtrak station, right downtown. All other crossovers on the line are rated for 45 mph. This 10-mph spot in particular is an accident waiting to happen.

While the trains would hopefully avoid rush hour in Benicia, that will surely not be the case for all uprail communities.

2. Valero owns the property but should not be allowed to set profits ahead of public health and safety.

No corporation operates in a vacuum. Valero’s decision to import North American crude has profound effects beyond its own improvement that cannot be ignored.

Valero’s change to crude by rail from crude by ship would allow it to import both Canadian tar sands and Bakken crude, and would add additional dangerous trains to the tracks all the way back to their points of origin, most likely in North Dakota or Alberta, Canada. That means the trains endanger and disrupt towns and cities across our country on their way to Benicia. These tracks are already impacted by oil trains taking precedence over trains transporting grain and other local crops and commuter trains. More importantly, people are endangered by the highly volatile Bakken crude — there have been 12 significant derailments since May 2013, with six explosions — and our precious marshes and waterways are threatened by the possibility of toxic spills of tar sands bitumen, which quickly sinks to the bottom and cannot be removed. The Kalamazoo River, Mich. cleanup of 1 million gallons of leaked tar sands dilbit is still unsuccessful after four years and $1 billion.

In California, the trains would come over the Sierra Nevada Mountains or wind through the Feather River Canyon (rated as a “rail high-hazard area” by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services), or possibly even come from Oregon down through Redding and Dunsmuir, site of a 1991 derailment of a fertilizer tank car that killed fish for 40 miles. In any of these routes, major rivers would be crossed where an accident could contaminate much-needed drinking and irrigation water.

3. The project will clearly affect the environment.

A wider view of “environment” raises serious concerns. California considers the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of products. Extracting, refining and burning heavy, sour crude is a nasty job, start to finish.  That’s why tar sands is called a “dirty” fossil fuel, noted for its energy-intensive carbon footprint. This deserves a full discussion which is beyond the scope of this letter. The recently completed Valero Improvement Project was intended to allow the refinery to handle refining the heavy, sour crude as efficiently as possible, which is laudable, but that is not to say it is a clean process. Setting aside the forests destroyed and the unlined toxic tailing ponds leaking into the waterways in Canada at the point of extraction, we must note that processing tar sands bitumen will produce more of the byproduct petcoke that is so polluting it cannot be burned in the U.S. (It can be sold abroad and burned for energy there. Ironically, when it is burned in China, some of the smog blows back across the ocean to Southern California.)

The heavy crude is high in sulfur and toxic metals, which corrode refinery pipes. The Richmond refinery fire in 2010 was traced partly to corrosion from refining tar sands. Emissions must be carefully monitored to ensure toxic fumes do not escape to neighborhoods or endanger workers.

The 2003 “improvement” project enabling Valero to refine heavy crude opened the door for California to refine more of the world’s dirtiest bitumen, running contrary to our state goals under AB 32 to conserve energy and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by moving to renewable energy sources. In fact, according to California Energy Commission figures, California reduced its total consumption of oil from 700 million to 600 million barrels in the last year, primarily through conservation — i.e., adopting lower-emissions vehicles and Energy Star appliances, changing transportation habits to walk-bike-public transport, and making our buildings more energy efficient. We are moving away from our dependence on oil by reducing our consumption of it.

4. The project will be safer, but not safe.

The outgoing chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has some strong words for the rail industry and the way certain hazardous liquid is transported.

Deborah Hersman’s strong remarks are tied to older-model rail tank cars known as DOT-111s, which carry crude oil and ethanol through cities across the U.S. and Canada. Hersman told an audience that DOT-111 tank cars are not safe enough to carry hazardous liquids — in fact, she said her agency issued recommendations several years ago. “We said they either need to remove or retrofit these cars if they’re going to continue to carry hazardous liquids,” Hersman said on April 22, 2014.

Right now, four California legislators are urging the Department of Transportation to take action on critical safety measures. After a hearing of the joint houses of the Legislature on June 19 chaired by Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, Congressmembers John Garamendi, D-Davis, Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, Mike Thompson, D-Napa, and George Miller, D-Martinez, sent a letter to Anthony Foxx, secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, stating that “we cannot allow communities to be in danger when viable solutions are available.”

The summary of their requests, dated July 1, 2014, is as follows:

• Provide a report on the level of compliance by the railroad and petroleum industry to the May 7 Emergency Order.

• Issue rulemaking that requires stripping out the most volatile elements from Bakken crude before it is loaded onto rail cars.

• Expedite the issuance of a final rulemaking to require the full implementation of the Positive Train Control (PTC) technology for all railroads transporting lighter crude, and provide a status report on the progress of PTC implementation to date.

• Expedite the issuance of rulemaking that requires phasing out old rail cars for newer, retrofitted cars.

The Benicia decision comes at a critical moment. Benicia’s approval of the Valero proposal before DOT takes action would undercut what our legislators are trying to do to protect not just Benicia citizens, but all uprail citizens all across the U.S. Regulating that the volatility of crude be reduced will force the industry to build small processing towers — aptly called stabilizers — that remove natural gas liquids (a product that can be saved and sold) from the crude before it is loaded, as they do in other parts of the country (Eagle Ford shale reserves in Texas, for example).

Obviously, creating this necessary infrastructure will increase the cost of Bakken crude. The industry will no doubt balk at the additional expense, as will the refineries. On the other hand, it’s immoral to expose many millions to explosive trains of Bakken crude when there is a remedy! One Lac-Mégantic tragedy is enough.

The trains rumbling into Benicia are the first trains to pass daily through our region to the Bay Area, but others will follow. The approval of this project cannot be viewed in isolation. This fall the DEIR will be available for review for the Phillips 66 Santa Maria Refinery Rail Spur Project that would bring another daily train through my community in Davis, through yours in Benicia, across the aging Benicia rail bridge, along the beautiful Carquinez Strait, through the East Bay and on down the Capitol Corridor to San Luis Obispo County. Based on California Energy Commission data, the Sacramento Bee says we can expect five to six trains daily in the next few years as California receives 25 percent of its crude by rail.

We put ourselves at grave risk to proceed with any rail projects now until we firmly lock in place the safety measures requested by our U.S. congressmembers. In this country, protection for the public must come first.

5. The CBR proposal makes no economic sense for Benicia and for the nation.

We live in a WORLD economy. Rather than destined for domestic purposes, the refined oil from all five Bay Area refineries is sold on the world market for greatest profit. That’s why gasoline rates at the pumps have not decreased during this oil boom.

Considered from the perspective of the weather of our planet, which will become a pivotal concern in the coming years, it makes no sense, financial or otherwise, to extract another drop of fossil fuel from the Earth. We need to put all our attention on renewables and conservation, and cut back drastically on our oil consumption. Realistically, this means refineries will need to produce far fewer products, and the oil extraction frenzy will die down.

6. The Valero refinery cannot befriend Benicia and then turn around and foul the air, risking the health and safety of our children.

Valero may mean well when it makes charitable contributions, but its intentions mean little if it then creates unsafe conditions for those who are in receipt of its generosity. It is not surprising that salaried employees, wage earners and grant recipients would stand up in favor of most anything proposed by the “friendly giant.” But it is incumbent on us all to look at the big picture — and a big picture that contains oil trains is not a pretty one.

In summary, I recommend a “no” vote on the Valero Crude-by-Rail Project until all safety measures requested by our four local congressmembers in Washington are firmly in place, and enough new tank cars are designed and produced to safely convey the crude oil from its source to Benicia, ensuring that no communities or waterways are in danger.

This “no” vote would send a strong message to DOT that their work is urgent, and that the regulations they make will be closely monitored. A “yes” vote, however, would undercut the important work our legislators are doing on our behalf.

Lynne Nittler lives uprail from Benicia in Davis. She devotes much of her time to Cool Davis, a nonprofit that focuses on helping Davis reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a changing climate and improve the quality of life for all. She has followed the oil train issue closely since last September.

Crude By Rail protest at rail station in Davis, CA

Repost from Fox40 TV Sacramento / Stockton / Modesto
[Editor:  Thank you, Davis!  Thank you, Assemblyman Roger Dickinson!  Thank you Fox40!  – RS]

Crude Oil by Rail Opponents Stage Protests

July 9, 2014, by Lonnie Wong

SACRAMENTO – Activists concerned about the danger of crude oil train shipments through populated areas took part in a national day of action Wednesday, including events in Sacramento and Davis.

Laurie Litman heads up 350 Sacramento, a group concerned about global warming. She notes that shipments of crude oil in California have increased 1,300 percent over the past four years.

Litman circulated a map at a rally outside a federal building in Sacramento showing neighborhoods and schools that would be affected by a fiery oil spill like the one that killed 47 people in Quebec, Canada a year ago.

“These are not fires that can be put out. They need to burn out, so if that happens when a train comes through the middle of Sacramento, we are in trouble” Litman said.

Sacramento Assembly Member Roger Dickinson addressed the gathering, telling them that emergency agency need to know what volatile oil shipments are being transported and when. He has authored a bill requiring rail companies to provide that information and have access to real time communications gear to get information to local officials.

Several rail spills occurred in areas where emergency responders had no little information of what was spilled.

“To assure that we get the information that we need, and the information that we need in a timely way,” said Dickinson.

Many at the rally were advocating a reduction in the use of crude oil as a long term solution to the threat of oil derailments.

“It’s not if, it’s when because it has happened before,” David Link, of the Sacramento Electrical Vehicle Association, said Wednesday.

Activists in Davis are particularly concerned about a plan to run 100 oil tank cars a day through Downtown Davis to a Valero refinery in Benecia. If approved, the trains would go from Roseville thorough Sacramento past Davis.

They handed out leaflets and circulated petitions at the Davis Rail Station.