Repost video from Vimeo
from Peter Menchini, September 5, 2014
Do bomb trains run through your neighborhood? Oil companies are illegally shipping highly toxic and explosive tar sands oil through residential areas, and try to keep them secret. On September 4th, 2014, activists entered Kinder Morgan rail yard in Richmond, CA and blocked the trains. The city’s mayor came and spoke to them.
Repost from CBS SF Bay Area, 5KPIX
[Editor: See this story also on Popular Resistance, the Richmond Standard, the San Francisco Bay Guardian and the Sacramento Bee. – RS]
RICHMOND (KPIX 5) — A dramatic showdown at a rail yard in Richmond on Thursday as protesters locked themselves to a gate to disrupt operations at the facility.
The yard is the only one in California that is bringing in 100-car trains full of potentially explosive fracked crude oil. Earlier this year, KPIX 5 was the first to uncover the operation.
A group of protesters chained themselves by the neck with bicycle locks to the gates of the Kinder Morgan rail terminal in Richmond.
“We are here to stop Kinder Morgan’s illegal activity here in Richmond, said Evan Buckner.
Their goal: To block tanker trucks from carrying explosive crude oil through their communities. It’s the same kind of shale oil from North Dakota that has caused deadly explosions in derailments in Canada and across the country.
“I will do everything I can to prevent that from happening,” said Katy Polony.
KPIX 5 discovered back in March that trains a hundred cars long are delivering the volatile loads to the rail yard every month, where it’s transferred onto trucks and driven to local refineries.
But nobody knew the trains were coming in because the operation never had to go through any kind of environmental review.
“They were granted a permit to bring in oil into this facility by the air district without any public process,” said Buckner, who belongs to an environmental group called ForestEthics.
Even Richmond’s Mayor Gayle McLaughlin said she was kept in the dark. “We hadn’t been aware of it in Richmond, but I am very grateful to Channel 5 for bringing this forward,” she said.
McLaughlin came by to show her support. “This has been a big issue in Richmond. I brought a resolution to the city council stating that we need to do whatever we can to stop these trucks from rolling on our streets,” the mayor said.
Police showed up in force, but did not move to make any arrests.
For three hours, the protesters blocked tanker trucks from leaving, then finally unchained themselves and left peacefully.
Because of our reporting, the environmental group Earth Justice has filed a lawsuit against Kinder Morgan and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District to try to force an environmental review. Kinder Morgan and the air district would like to see the suit dismissed. The first hearing in that case is Friday.
Repost from Railway Age
The vital other shoe in crude by rail reform will drop not in Ottawa or Washington, but in Bismark, N.Dak., where, in the void created by federal inaction, officials are preparing to use state jurisdiction over natural resources to order the degasification of petroleum at the wellhead.
The initiative follows months of opaque pronouncements by federal regulators in both Canada and the U.S. with respect to the need to render volatile crude oil safe before transport by rail.
A spokesman for Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) told Railway Age that rules for the pre-loading treatment of crude oil for shipment by rail are not on its reform agenda, despite earlier, apparently overly enthusiastic, pronouncements.
While Transport Canada and the U.S. Department of Transportation have responded to the succession of oil train explosions this year and last by focusing on railroad operations, hazmat classification, and tank car design, some have been muddled on the need to treat the volatile cargo itself before its loading into railcars—this despite their own warnings that crude, fracked from the mid-continent Baaken shale formation, has the explosivity of gasoline.
Some oil producers and shippers have resisted any new regulatory requirement that they process crude for transport by rail the way they already must for delivery by pipeline.
Removal of toxic, explosive, and corrosive gases from crude for transport by pipeline has been required for years under the regulatory authority of the PHMSA. But neither PHMSA nor its DOT sibling Federal Railroad Administration have seen fit to require similar treatment—variously termed “degasification”, “conditioning”, “stabilization”, or “normalization”—for crude, destined for shipment by rail.
Crude shippers have complained since the first oil train calamity in July 2013 at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that PHMSA regulations for testing and classifying oil for transport by rail were imprecise. Such confusion is only augmented by PHSMA’s twice-stated reference to a purported “requirement” that dangerous gases be removed before crude is loaded into railcars.
The most recent such PHMSA pronouncement in a June 11, 2014 letter to the National Transportation Safety Board reiterated an earlier safety alert:
“On Jan. 2, 2014, PHMSA also issued a safety alert warning of the flammability of the crude oil extracted from the Bakken Shale region in the United States. PHMSA noted that the alert reinforces the requirement to properly test, characterize, classify, and where appropriate, sufficiently degasify hazardous materials prior to transportation.”
Railway Age asked the PHMSA media relations office to clarify the requirement to “degasify,” and to cite the underlying legislative or regulatory authority. A PHMSA spokesperson researched the inquiry and responded that there was in fact no such legal basis in existence or under formal consideration. The PHMSA spokesman referred us to North Dakota, which was contemplating the introduction of compulsory degasification.
Indeed, the oil and gas division of the North Dakota Industrial Commission has announced a public hearing for Sept. 23, on the “oil conditioning practices” in the state’s three light-oil pools: Bakken, Three Forks, and Sanich. Oil producers are invited to propose “methods to effectively reduce the light hydrocarbons in crude oil.”
Division spokesperson Alison Ritter told Railway Age, “The hearing is a first step in conditioning the oil to make it as safe as possible for transport.” She said that gas/liquid separators are already required at all North Dakota wellheads. At issue is whether they are being effectively used to render so-called “hot crude” safe for rail transport.
Separators boil off light hydrocarbons such as ethane, butane, and propane from crude oil, reducing its vapor pressure and propensity to explode. Heavy and corrosive hydrogen sulfide is also removed for pipeline transport. None of this is compulsory for shipment by rail.
North Dakota had been an uncritical booster of CBR even after Lac-Mégantic, until the fourth of the conflagrations occurred Dec. 30, 2013, on the outskirts of Casselton, when a westbound BNSF grain train derailed in the path of an eastbound BNSF oil train.
North Dakota is also proceeding with the training and deployment of its own rail inspectors, who will enforce FRA and PHSMA regulations within the state.
Repost from The Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada
Canada’s transportation safety agency is raising concerns that dangerous crude oil could still be travelling by rail inside misclassified tank cars, despite assurances from the federal government that the problem has been fixed.
In a recent letter to Transport Canada, the Transportation Safety Board said new requirements to test oil don’t explicitly address its “variability,” including the fact that different products are sometimes blended together before they are shipped.
The letter was sent just days before the TSB issued its final report on the Lac-Mégantic rail tragedy, in which a train loaded with volatile crude oil exploded last summer, killing 47 people and levelling much of the Quebec town. The agency’s report, made public last month, found that more than a dozen different factors contributed to the crash, including a failure to apply enough hand brakes, a weak safety culture at the railway and lax regulation by the federal government.
TSB tests conducted early in the investigation showed that the oil on the train was more volatile than its shipping documents had indicated and it recommended that new measures be taken to ensure shipments are classified accurately. The federal government responded by toughening the rules for testing crude oil samples, including new provisions requiring a shipper to make information about the sampling method they use available to the government upon request.
However, those new regulations “do not explicitly address the variability in the properties of mined gases and liquids, such as petroleum crude oil,” the letter from the TSB says. While the properties of manufactured dangerous goods, such as gasoline, are better understood and relatively predictable, the agency warned that crude oil and natural gas can vary from one well to another and in the same well over time.
Oil that comes from different sources may also be blended when it’s loaded onto rail cars, the TSB notes. That means crude that was deemed relatively safe during one set of tests – for example, at the time crude is extracted from a well – could be mixed with more dangerous oil when it is loaded onto tank cars, and the overall risk may not be reflected by the original test results. The TSB letter also raises questions about the department’s ability to enforce its own classification rules.
Oil is widely known to be flammable, but regulators in Canada did not previously believe it had the potential to explode and cause the kind of destruction it did in Lac-Mégantic. The train that derailed there was carrying light crude from the Bakken formation, which straddles North Dakota, Montana, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Bakken crude and other light shale oils are now widely believed to be more volatile than conventional oil.
A spokesperson for Transport Canada said there are “strict requirements” under the Transportation of Dangerous Goods Act that compel companies to classify dangerous goods properly. “Testing criteria are harmonized with [United Nations] requirements and are the same as for the U.S.,” the spokesperson wrote in an e-mail. She added that the department is working with the crude oil industry, U.S. regulators and Natural Resources Canada to develop standardized tools and processes for crude oil testing.
The American Petroleum Institute recently developed a new set of classification and rail loading standards for its members to approve, which are expected to be made public later this month. Both Transport Canada and the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration were involved in the process, according to the API, but the new standards would not be enforceable unless regulators chose to adopt them.
In the meantime, some companies are choosing to adopt new testing methods – in addition to those required by federal regulations – to ensure they are accurately measuring the possible dangers of the crude they’re extracting or transporting. Producers in North Dakota are also increasingly looking to stabilize the crude before they ship it, in a process that removes the most volatile components from the main product, reducing the potential dangers of shipping it by rail.
A separate safety advisory from the TSB, which was also issued days before the agency’s final report on Lac-Mégantic, warned that some of the problems identified at Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway may also exist at other short-line railways. The safety agency said runaway trains occur at a greater rate at short-line railways than larger railways and suggested short-line employees may not always receive the training they need to operate safely.