Bakken Crude, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Feather River Canyon, Oil spill

Butte County CA: Excellent staff report to Board of Supervisors

Repost from the Chico Enterprise-Record
[Editor: Here is the Agenda for the January 13 Butte County Board of Supervisors meeting.  See item 5.03, scheduled for 10:05 am, including a Staff Report and a PowerPoint Presentation.  I highly recommend the Staff Report, which contains two substantive draft letters, addressed to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services and the California Public Utilities Commission. The Powerpoint is also excellent  (more reliably viewable here as a PDF).  JAN. 13 UPDATE: see Butte County seeks help dealing with oil train derailments.  – RS]

Supervisors to hold hearing on oil train derailment risks

By Roger Aylworth, 01/08/15
Black tanker cars are a common sight on the railroad that follows the Feather River in the canyon above Lake Oroville. Courtesy of Jake Miille
A train laden with black tanker cars enters a tunnel in the Feather River Canyon, near Highway 70 above Lake Oroville. Courtesy of Jake Miille

OROVILLE >> With trains loaded with a particularly volatile form of light crude oil coming through the Feather River Canyon, Butte County officials are preparing for “derailments or other unplanned releases” of the oil.

A public hearing on the topic is scheduled to take place at 10:05 a.m. Tuesday as part of the regular meeting of the Butte County Board of Supervisors.

The potential for derailments and spills in the canyon was underscored in late November when 11 cars of a westbound Union Pacific Railroad freight train went off the tracks about 20 miles west of Qunicy.

The derailed cars slid down the embankment toward the North Fork of the Feather River, spreading their load of corn over the hillside. Some of the corn, which was being taken to the southern Central Valley, made it into the river.

At the time the a spokesman for Union Pacific stressed the point that nobody was hurt and no hazardous materials released due to the derailment.

The derailment took place in Plumas County, and Plumas County Director of Emergency Services Jerry Sipe told this newspaper it could have been a different scenario if the same 11 cars had been tankers carrying Bakken crude oil.

The Plumas official explained that Bakken crude is a very light oil produced in North Dakota and Montana that has an “explosive potential” more like gasoline than say Texas crude.

Sipe said, “I think it is in fact a reminder, if not a wake-up call,” that trains going through the Feather River Canyon face flooding, rock slides and other potential derailment hazards, and the more trains carrying any kind of hazardous material in the canyon, the greater the chance of a derailment.

An agenda document related to Tuesday’s hearing before the Butte board, says the county Office of Emergency Management, Fire Department and hazardous materials team are preparing for such accidents.

 

Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community, Crude By Rail, Valero Benicia Refinery

Benicia Community Forum & Update, January 18, 1-4pm, Benicia Library

ANNOUNCING . . .
Community Forum & Update, Sunday, January 18, 1-4pm, Benicia Library

FacebookStopCrudeByOil_cover(267)Learn more about Valero’s crude by rail project and how it might affect Benicia residents at a Community Informational Forum on Sunday, January 18, 2015, from 1:00 to 4:00 pm at the Benicia Public Library, 150 East L Street, Doña Benicia Room. The Forum is sponsored by Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community (BSHC), a grassroots organization advocating responsible environmental action and currently working to STOP crude by rail in Benicia.

You’ll hear from guest speakers:

  • Antonia Juhasz, oil and energy analyst, award-winning author and investigative journalist, and
  • Diane Bailey, Senior Scientist in the Health and Environment Program for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Members of BSHC will also provide an update on our work.

  • Marilyn Bardet will discuss the history and status of the project’s Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR).
  • Andrés Soto will discuss the local, regional and cumulative impacts of transporting crude oil by rail. There will be plenty of time for questions, discussion and brainstorming.

For more information about the Community Forum or BSHC, please call (707) 742-3597, or email info@SafeBenicia.  For more information about Valero Crude by Rail check out  SafeBenicia.org.  Of course, you can find lots of info here on BeniciaIndependent.org.

Bay Area Refineries, Benicia Industrial Park, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fracking, Oil spill, Valero Benicia Refinery

The Fight to Stop a Boom in California’s Crude by Rail

Repost from The Huffington Post
[Editor: Our friend here in Benicia, Ed Ruszel, has been featured in numerous online blogs and news outlets in this story by Tara Lohan.  This is an abbreviated version.  The article mistakenly gives a link to The Benicia Independent rather than Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community.  BSHC can be found at SafeBenicia.org.  – RS]

The Fight to Stop a Boom in California’s Crude by Rail

By Tara Lohan, 01/08/2015

Ed Ruszel’s workday is a soundtrack of whirling, banging, screeching — the percussion of wood being cut, sanded and finished. He’s the facility manager for the family business, Ruszel Woodworks. But one sound each day roars above the cacophony of the woodshop: the blast of the train horn as cars cough down the Union Pacific rail line that runs just a few feet from the front of his shop in an industrial park in Benicia, California.

Most days the train cargo is beer, cars, steel, propane or petroleum coke. But soon, two trains of 50 cars each may pass by every day carrying crude oil to a refinery owned by neighboring Valero Energy, which is hoping to build a new rail terminal at the refinery that would bring 70,000 barrels a day by train — or nearly 3 million gallons.

And it’s a sign of the times.

Crude-by-rail has increased 4,000 percent across the country since 2008 and California is feeling the effects. By 2016 the amount of crude by rail entering the state is expected to increase by a factor of 25. That’s assuming the industry gets its way in creating more crude-by-rail stations at refineries and oil terminals. And that’s no longer looking like a sure thing.

Valero’s proposed project in Benicia is just one of many in the area underway or under consideration. All the projects are now facing public pushback–and not just from individuals in communities, but from a united front spanning hundreds of miles. Benicia sits on the Carquinez Strait in the northeastern reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, about 20 miles south of Napa’s wine country and 40 miles north of San Francisco, the oil industry may have found a considerable foe.

2015-01-08-16000050785_df993da9dc_z.jpg

Photo by Sarah Craig

A recent boom in “unconventional fuels” has triggered an increase in North American sources in the last few years. This has meant more fracked crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale and diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands.

Unit trains are becoming a favored way to help move this cargo. These are trains in which the entire cargo — every single car — is one product. And in this case that product happens to be highly flammable.

This is one of the things that has Ed Ruszel concerned. He doesn’t think the tank cars are safe enough to transport crude oil in the advent of a serious derailment. If a derailment occurs on a train and every single car (up to 100 cars long) is carrying volatile crude, the dangers increase exponentially. In 2013, more crude was spilled in train derailments than in the prior three decades combined, and there were four fiery explosions in North America in a year’s span, the worst being the derailment that killed 47 people and incinerated half the downtown in Lac Megantic, Quebec in July 2013.

Public Comments

In Benicia, a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) regarding the Valero project was released in June 2014 and promptly slammed by everyone from the state’s Attorney General Kamala Harris to the local group Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community because it left out crucial information and failed to address the full scope of the project.

One of the biggest omissions in Valero’s DEIR was Union Pacific not being named as an official partner in the project. With the trains arriving via its rail lines, all logistics will come down to the railroad. Not only that, but the federal power granted to railroad companies preempts local and regional authority.This preemption is one of the biggest hurdles for communities that don’t want to see crude-by-rail come through their neighborhoods or want better safeguards.

The DEIR also doesn’t identify exactly what kind of North American crude would be arriving and from where. Different kinds of crude have different health and safety risks. Diluted bitumen can be nearly impossible to clean up in the event of a spill and Bakken crude has proved more explosive than other crude because of its chemical composition. It’s likely that some of the crude coming to Valero’s refinery would be from either or both sources.

Public comments on the DEIR closed on Sept. 15, and now all eyes are on the planning department to see what happens next in Benicia.

But the Valero project is just the tip of the iceberg in California.

In nearby Pittsburgh, 20 miles east of Benicia, residents pushed back against plans from WestPac Energy. The company had planned to lease land from BNSF Railway and build a new terminal to bring in a 100-car unit train of crude each day. The project is currently stalled.

But Phillips 66 has plans for a new rail unloading facility at a refinery in Nipomo, 200 miles south of the Bay Area in San Luis Obispo County, that would bring in five unit trains of crude a week, with 50,000 barrels per train.

Further south in Kern County in the heart of oil country, Plains All American just opened a crude by rail terminal that is permitted for a 100-car unit train each day. Another nearby project, Alon USA, received permission from the county for twice as much but is being challenged by lawsuits from environmental groups.

Closer to home, unit trains of Bakken crude are already arriving to a rail terminal owned by Kinder Morgan in Richmond. Kinder Morgan had been transporting ethanol, but the Bay Area Air Quality Management District allowed Kinder Morgan to offload unit trains of Bakken crude into tanker trucks.

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Photo by Sarah Craig

With all this crude-by-rail activity, some big picture thinking would be helpful. As Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote about the Benicia project, “There’s no consideration of cumulative impacts that could affect public safety and the environment by the proliferation of crude-by-rail projects proposed in California.”

A longer version of this story appeared on Faces of Fracking.

California Assembly Bill 380 (AB 380), Derailment, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Hazmat notification, State regulation, Toluene

There may be a hitch in California’s new law

Repost from FOX40 Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto

New California Law Aims to Ease Oil Train Safety Worries

January 7, 2015, by Sonseeahray Tonsall


ANTELOPE- Last May, after devastating rail crashes made more damaging by a particular kind of crude oil being carried, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued an emergency order.

It said if more than a million gallons of that crude was moving on the rails, local emergency crews had to be notified.

California’s legislature tried to make that kind of notice permanent – not just for oil but also for 25 of the most toxic substances traveling the rails.

But there may be a hitch in California’s new law.

“Yesterday was a good example of a derailment of  a toxic substance, except it didn’t leak and there was no immediate  threat. But imagine that same rail car going through the Feather River Canyon and polluting the water source for millions of people in California,” Kelly Huston,  Deputy Director of the California Office of Emergency Services said.

Monday’s derailment in Antelope of Union Pacific rail cars carrying poisonous toluene is just one reason why the state Office of Emergency Services has to play the ‘what if’ game every day.

A new state law in effect as of January 1 is supposed to reduce the worry of some of those what-ifs, especially when it comes to the growing number of rail cars shuttling through the Sacramento region, loaded with the kind of highly flammable Bakken crude oil that’s exploded in other train derailments.

“Accidents happen, but our job as a society is to make sure accidents don’t become tragedies,” Assemblyman Mike Gatto said.

The Glendale area democrat co-sponsored AB 380, the new law requiring rail companies to notify emergency responders  of what threats could be riding the rails in their area.

“What’s unique about this legislation is that we’re working with the railroads to try to provide more real-time information…sort of like an Amtrak schedule,” Huston said.

Right now, those details come to emergency crews after the fact, not in advance when they could prepare.

The other unfortunately unique thing about this law is that rail carriers can still argue they don’t have to follow it, even though implementation is supposed to be complete by January 31.

“It is a delicate balance because the  railroads are federally regulated which means  federal laws pre-empt state laws in most cases,” Huston said.

So even though California’s done all it can, it remains to be seen if rail companies will cooperate with a law that could save lives.

Under the continuing federal emergency order, Cal OES gets the shipment information from rail carriers.

Huston would like to create a system that first responders can log in to themselves and get the information real-time.

The effort would not compromise a oil producer’s proprietary information, they said.

For safe and healthy communities…