Press Release from Riverkeeper New York [Editor: This from our contact in Albany: “New York State rescinds the Global expansion NegDec (aka, FONSI) and declares the application incomplete. Cites air issues, spill response issues, potential “significant adverse impacts on the environment”, and EPA concerns. Letter from the State attached.” – RS]
Riverkeeper Responds to Decision Regarding Albany Oil Terminal Expansion
For Immediate Release: May 21, 2015
Contact: Leah Rae, Riverkeeper
914-478-4501, ext. 238
Riverkeeper applauds the decision by the New York Department of Environmental Conservation regarding the proposed expansion of Global Companies’ rail-to-barge transfer terminal at in Albany, which would facilitate the transport of heavy “tar sands” crude oil. Riverkeeper calls on the state to follow through on what they’ve begun today and promptly issue a “positive declaration” requiring an environmental impact statement.
“It is good for New York State that the DEC came to a proper decision in one of the most important environmental matters facing the state. We look forward to participating with the state on a full public safety and environmental review that is robust and protective of our communities and our waterways.”
The shipment of tar sands crude oil would pose a whole new level of risk to the Hudson River. In the event of a spill, the toxic, sinking crude would mix into the water column and be unrecoverable.
A lawsuit filed by Riverkeeper and other groups in June 2014 challenged the DEC’s decision not to require an environmental impact statement. Riverkeeper had reminded the DEC that state law required an environmental impact statement on the proposal due to the significant environmental and public safety impacts, ranging from air pollutants to the increased risk of fire and explosion in downtown Albany. The DEC’s own Environmental Justice Policy requires that nearby communities be consulted and informed about proposals that may affect them so that those communities can be meaningfully involved in their review.
Oil spill spreads near Santa Barbara; could happen in Bay Area
By Peter Fimrite, Wednesday, May 20, 2015 9:21 pm
The oil sheen and oil-soaked kelp befoul the ocean off the Southern California coast as cleanup continues. Photo: Brian Van Der Brug / McClatchy-Tribune News Service / Los Angeles Times
The San Francisco Bay Area, like Santa Barbara, is home to a vast network of oil pipelines that could easily rupture and cause the same kind of disastrous spill that is blackening the Southern California coast.
A large pipeline next to Refugio State Beach in Santa Barbara County burst Tuesday and spewed up to 105,000 gallons of crude oil, and officials say much of it entered the Pacific Ocean, where it coated wildlife and prompted an emergency oil spill response.
It is the kind of disaster that local officials say could happen in the Bay Area, especially around the oil refineries in Richmond and Martinez, where petroleum is regularly transported between marine terminals and storage facilities along San Francisco Bay and the Carquinez Strait.
“Pipelines are everywhere throughout the East Bay complex, and where there are pipelines there is the possibility of a rupture,” said Ted Mar, the chief of the prevention branch of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Office of Spill Prevention and Response. “There are all sorts of different reasons a pipeline might fail.”
Cause still unknown
Investigators have not yet figured out why the 24-inch pipeline burst next to Refugio State Beach in Santa Barbara County. The oil bubbled up into a culvert, ran under Highway 101 and flowed through a storm drain into the ocean. The pipeline was shut off within a few hours of its discovery. By Wednesday afternoon, a 9-mile plume of oil could be seen from the road along the scenic stretch of coastline about 20 miles northwest of Santa Barbara.
Santa Barbara County health officials shut down Refugio State Beach, where the spill was concentrated, and officials said there was a strong petroleum smell.
“We are starting to get some oiled wildlife in our facility,” said Steve Gonzalez, the spokesman for the Office of Spill Prevention and Response, adding that the slick is spreading at a rate of 3 to 4 miles a day. “We don’t have any hard numbers, but we do have some oiled wildlife.”
Gonzalez said the pipeline was transporting crude from the Exxon Mobil plant inland to Bakersfield. The pipe, operated by Plains All American Pipeline LP, a Houston company, is called the Flores to Gaviota Pipeline.
Company efforts
“The culvert has been blocked so no additional oil is reaching the water,” the company said in a statement. “Plains deeply regrets this release has occurred and is making every effort to limit its environmental impact.”
Most of the pipelines in the Bay Area are not large transmission lines pumping crude long distances like the one that ruptured at Refugio beach, Mar said. Still, a rupture could easily happen at one of the many underground pipes at petroleum companies on and around San Francisco Bay.
The last major pipeline disaster in the Bay Area was in 2004 when an underground 14-inch diameter pipe owned by Kinder Morgan Energy Partners ruptured, spewing 123,774 gallons of diesel fuel into Suisun Marsh, near Fairfield, sliming birds, fish and mammals and spoiling some 224 acres of wetlands. The pipeline was taken out after the spill.
Plains has a checkered history in California and around the country. The company was fined $1.3 million for Clean Water Act violations in March 2005 when 142,506 gallons of oil spilled into Pyramid Lake, part of the California Aqueduct 60 miles northwest of Los Angeles.
The company, which was then called Pacific Pipeline Systems LLP, was forced to abandon 70 miles of pipeline that ruptured because of a landslide, according to Suzanne Skadowski, the spokeswoman for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The pipeline giant also paid at least $1.5 million for the April 2011 release of 1.2 million gallons of crude oil near a Cree community in northwest Alberta, the largest oil spill in Canada in more than three decades.
Alberta’s energy regulator issued a scathing report after that spill, accusing a subsidiary of the company of improperly inspecting welds, failing to backfill around the pipe and placing a higher priority on keeping the pipeline running than containing the leak.
Plains has three storage facilities in the Bay Area but no pipelines. Mar said most of the lines in the Bay Area are smaller pipes that connect the oil refineries in Richmond and Martinez to storage tanks and marine terminals. Their proximity to populated areas makes disaster a little less likely.
The long transmission pipelines “are the lines that carry the product long distances between regulated areas,” Mar said. “Those are the ones to worry about, because those are the ones away from people looking at them constantly. They can go quite a distance before someone realizes they are leaking.”
Odor was the tip-off
The ruptured pipeline in Santa Barbara was discovered only after authorities went to the beach to investigate reports of a foul smell.
The Santa Barbara coastline is also an oil-rich area, with rigs and drilling operations out in the ocean. It was on the same stretch of coast where hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil spilled in 1969 after a blowout on an oil platform. That spill, the largest in U.S. history at the time, killed thousands of seabirds and marine mammals and was credited with starting the modern American environmental movement, which prompted major regulations against the oil industry.
“That region has a lengthy history. Its a high-producing area,” according to Mike Ziccardi, director of the Oiled Wildlife Care Network at UC Davis. “There are natural seeps there. We receive from 150 to 200 birds every year from there coated with oil that wasn’t from spills. It’s from natural seeps.”
Mar said cracks, valve malfunctions or other mishaps could easily happen in the Bay Area, especially during an earthquake, but “oil spills are more an exception than the rule.”
“When they happen, we need to respond quickly to protect the environment and California’s resources,” he said. “We are all stakeholders.”
Peter Fimrite is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer.
Dear President Obama: I read two articles about you in this morning’s news. What’s wrong here? You are all worried about climate change as it relates to national security, but not as it relates to climate change itself??! See below …
OBAMA: It’s real!
Climate change a threat to national security, Obama warns
NEW LONDON, Conn. — President Obama has argued for action on climate change as a matter of health, environmental protection and international obligation. On Wednesday, he added national security.
Those who deny global warming are putting at risk the United States and the military sworn to defend it, he told cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. Failure to act would be “dereliction of duty,” their commander in chief said.
He said climate change and rising sea levels jeopardize the readiness of U.S. forces and threaten to aggravate social tensions and political instability around the globe.
The president’s message to climate change skeptics was unequivocal: “Denying it or refusing to deal with it undermines our national security”
“Make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country,” Obama said on a crisp, sunny morning at Cadet Memorial Field. “We need to act and we need to act now.”
Seated before him were 218 white-uniformed graduates, pondering where military service will take them in life.
Obama drew a line from climate change to national security that had multiple strands:
• Increased risk of natural disasters resulting in humanitarian crises, with the potential to increase refugee flows and worsen conflicts over food and water.
• Aggravating conditions such as poverty, political instability and social tensions that can lead to terrorist activity and other violence.
• New threats to the U.S. economy from rising oceans that threaten thousands of miles of highways, roads, railways and energy facilities.
• New challenges for military bases and training areas from seas, drought and other conditions.
Preparing for and adapting to climate change won’t be enough, he said. “The only way the world is going to prevent the worst effects of climate change is to slow down the warming of the planet.”
He laid out his administration’s steps to reduce carbon greenhouse gas emissions, including strict limits on emissions from vehicles and power plants. The government expects those emission reductions to provide the U.S. contribution to a global climate treaty that world leaders are expected to finalize in December. Obama said it doesn’t take a scientist to know that climate change is happening.
The evidence is “indisputable,” he said.
OBAMA: Eh, well …
Eugene Robinson: Obama drills a hole in his climate policy
Here are two facts that cannot be reconciled: The planet has experienced the warmest January-March on record, and the Obama administration has authorized massive new oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
“Climate change can no longer be denied … and action can no longer be delayed,” President Barack Obama said in an Earth Day address in the Everglades. Indeed, Obama has been increasingly forceful in raising the alarm about heat-trapping carbon emissions. “If we don’t act,” he said in Florida, “there may not be an Everglades as we know it.”
Why, then, would the Obama administration give Royal Dutch Shell permission to move ahead with plans for Arctic offshore drilling? Put simply, if the problem is that we’re burning too much oil, why give the green light to a process that could produce another million barrels of the stuff per day, just ready to be set alight?
Please hold the pedantic lectures about how the global oil market works: Demand will be met, if not by oil pumped from beneath the Arctic Ocean then by oil pumped from somewhere else. By this logic, the administration’s decision is about energy policy — promoting U.S. self-sufficiency and creating jobs — rather than climate policy. The way to reduce carbon emissions, according to this view, is by cutting demand, not by restricting supply.
But we are told by scientists and world leaders, including Obama, that climate change is an urgent crisis. And on the global scale — the only measure that really matters — the demand-only approach isn’t working well enough.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is an astounding 40 percent higher than it was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when large-scale burning of fossil fuels began. Fourteen of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred this century, with 2014 measured as the warmest of all. And the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced last month that January through March 2015 were the warmest first three months of the year ever recorded.
It’s not that demand-side efforts are entirely ineffectual against climate change; without them, emissions and temperatures would be rising even faster. But it is hard to argue that the current approach is doing enough.
If we are going to avert the kind of temperature rise that climate scientists say would be catastrophic, some of the oil, coal and natural gas buried in the ground will have to stay there.
“Drill, baby, drill” was a slogan Republicans used during the 2008 campaign, but it became a reality under Obama. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, domestic oil production zoomed from 5.4 million barrels a day in 2009 to 8.7 million barrels a day last year, a level not seen since the waning days of the Reagan administration.
Obama has opened vast new lands and offshore tracts to oil drilling. To be fair, he has also put some sensitive areas off-limits, including in the Arctic. But overall, under Obama, the United States has come to threaten the likes of Saudi Arabia and Russia for supremacy in fossil-fuel production.
This is part of what Obama calls his “all of the above” energy strategy, in which he fosters growth and innovation in renewable energy sectors, such as solar and wind, while also promoting U.S. self-sufficiency.
Anticipated rules from the Environmental Protection Agency limiting emissions at coal-fired power plants may go a long way toward reducing the nation’s carbon footprint. But given the urgency, why shouldn’t Obama also take such an approach to climate change? Why not attack the supply side of the equation by firmly deciding to keep drilling rigs out of the Arctic Ocean?
The environmental risk alone would justify saying no to Shell’s plans; a big spill would be a disaster. But even if Arctic oil can be exploited without mishap, we’re talking about billions of gallons of oil being added to a market that is currently glutted. It doesn’t matter whether that oil is eventually burned in New York or New Delhi, in Los Angeles or Lagos.
If we don’t take a stand in the Arctic, then where? And if not now, when?
Amtrak Derailment Could Have Lead to Evacuation of Almost 20,000
This image appears on a legal complaint by law firm Kline & Specter, filed yesterday on behalf of several passengers injured in the Amtrak 188 derailment: USDC Eastern District 15-CV- 2744-LDD.
By Austin Nolen, May 20, 2015
The recent Amtrak derailment, which has already led to eight deaths, could have been far worse. As many already know, Amtrak 188 derailed near another train, which could have been carrying crude oil. As PhillyMag points out in a piece they ran on these so-called “bomb trains,” “a large-scale oil train fire in Philadelphia would be a fiasco. Federal officials recommend evacuating all people within a half-mile of an oil train fire—that’s how destructive they can be.”
The oil trains, carried by a company called Conrail, transport the oil, from a North Dakota shale formation, through Chicago to Philadelphia, according to a Conrail spokesperson and industry documents reviewed by The Spirit. The oil trains initially enter the Riverwards in Kensington along a line owned by Amtrak before branching off through Port Richmond near Bridesburg to cross the Delaware River. The freight then travels from Philadelphia across the Delaware River to South Jersey refineries.
Conrail is a wholly owned subsidiary of CSX and Norfolk Southern, “two larger rail lines”. Though, according to a CSX spokesperson, the company operates independently. The federal government created Conrail in the 1970s to help bail out bankrupt rail companies. Though Conrail was privatized in the 1980s, it continues to receive federal funding today.
The company has since been involved with several notable environmental issues. A federal court convicted Conrail of multiple felony counts of environmental crime in 1995. The firm currently faces multiple lawsuits over a 2012 incident in Paulsboro, NJ, where a Conrail freight train derailed over a bridge in November of that year and released about 24,000 gallons of vinyl chloride, according to a National Transportation Safety Board accident report.
While a Conrail official has confirmed that the tankers near the Amtrak 188 derailment did not contain crude oil, and were in fact empty, what if they hadn’t been?
The Spirit’s analysis of the derailment suggest that had the passenger train hit nearby oil tankers, around 15,696 people from the area, including parts of Port Richmond, may have fallen within the evacuation zone: a half-mile radius around the crash site. This figure represents the total population in 12 Census block groups surrounding the crash site. The Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management did not respond to a request for comment.
However, as City Paper has reported, the office’s director during a public meeting speculated that if an incident involving crude oil did occur, the evacuation zone would be a half-mile radius. Furthermore, a recent report from PennEnvironment indicated that the same radius was put into place in other crude oil disasters. A Conrail representative did not respond to a request for comment about their safety operations.
The Spirit’s investigation of Conrail’s operations began before the recent Amtrak derailment, and relied upon industry documents provided to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency under a federal Department of Transportation order. The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records then mandated their public release. Subsequent changes to the laws have rendered these records once again inaccessible.
There have been several other documented instances of close calls regarding oil tankers in Philadelphia. A derailment left train cars dangling over the Schuylkill River in January 2014, and another train ran off its tracks in South Philadelphia a year later.
An April 2014 story in The Inquirer details a third incident, which involved Conrail tankers in Port Richmond on the train tracks crossing Aramingo Avenue near Castor Avenue, close to where Amtrak 188 derailed last week. Conrail spokesman John Enright told the Inquirer that three tanker cars of the nine-car train derailed in the 2014 Port Richmond incident. The cause of that derailment wasn’t known at the time. According to Conrail, the tankers were carrying acetone. The Philadelphia Fire Department found no leaks in the crash and no injuries were reported.
These scenarios aren’t unique to Philadelphia either. Two years ago, a runaway oil train in Lac-Mégantic, a town in Quebec, hit a nightclub and killed 47 people. Other instances in West Virginia, North Dakota, and Illinois had oil tankers catching fire in more rural area.
Philadelphia’s oil lines run through highly residential areas: University City, Southwest Philadelphia, and North Philadelphia. As maps show, if an emergency involving an oil spill were to occur, evacuating the area would be a huge undertaking and potentially result in mass casualties. The Inquirer estimates that 400,000 total Philadelphians live within a half-mile of rail lines that carry crude oil.
Some in Philadelphia have called for the creation of an “Energy Hub” in the city, especially Phil Rinaldi, CEO of Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), the company that owns a South Philadelphia crude oil refinery. This plan would make a Philadelphia a pipeline center for crude oil, natural gas and other gas liquids. The creation of a Philadelphia Energy Hub would greatly benefit the city’s manufacturing industry—an industry that’s been crippled since the deindustrialization of the city in the 50s—but also brings up a host of safety concerns.
City representatives maintain that Philadelphia has a comprehensive emergency protocol in place to respond to a disaster involving crude oil or any other hazardous materials. Some of the information, such as evacuation routes, is available on the city’s website. City officials, however, have refused to disclose information regarding the specifics of this plan to clean water activists, who believe the city has no such formalized plan.
“That’s one of our challenges—striking the balance between sharing information so the public can be prepared and not sharing information because we do live in this post-9/11 world,” Samantha Phillips, the city’s director of emergency management, told The Inquirer.
Dear President Obama: I read two articles about you in this morning’s news. What’s wrong here? You are all worried about climate change as it relates to national security, but not as it relates to climate change itself??! See below …
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