Repost from Weather Films [Editor: Perhaps the best short video presentation I’ve seen on the dangers of crude by rail. Excellent for groups and public forums. Caution: graphic scenes of anguish and destruction. See also the lengthier original text-based report, notable for its expose on bridge safety. – RS]
Boom: North America’s Explosive Oil-By-Rail Problem
Weather Films, 12/7/14
On July 6, 2013, a train hauling two million gallons of crude oil exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. It took two days to put out the fire and devastated the small community.
That catastrophe had its origin in America. For five years, a boom in oil production has been taking place in the Bakkan Shale region of North Dakota. Oil from the Bakkan is transported across the U.S. and Canada by rail to refineries on the coasts – it was one of these trains that derailed in Lac-Megantic.
The sharp increase in domestic oil production has created jobs, decreased economic vulnerability to turmoil in the Middle East, and lowered prices of gasoline and home heating oil.
But there’s another side to this story.
In “Boom,” a joint investigation by The Weather Channel and InsideClimate News, we explore how the boom in oil has resulted in highly volatile crude oil being sent over aging, often defective rails in vulnerable railcars.
Rail accidents involving oil trains have been on the rise. But industry and regulators have been slow react. Will it take another Lac-Megantic to make America’s towns and cities safer?
“Boom” was produced by Weather Films, the award-winning documentary unit of weather.com.
Produced by Greg Gilderman
Edited by Brandon Kieffer
Associate Producer: Katie Wiggin
Consulting Producer: Joe Halderman
Director of Photography: Jason Rudge
Executive Producers: Neil Katz, Greg Gilderman, Shawn Efran
Additional Reporting by Andy Blatchford
Additional Editing by Jason Rudge
Special Thanks: Karine Blanchette, Yannick Gagne, Bernard Boulet, Adrien Aubert, Rachel Rawson, Trip Jennings, Samuel Ezerzeer
Call For Crude-By-Rail Moratorium In California After Train Derailment
2014-12-09, by Mike Gaworecki
A train derailment last week has prompted a California state legislator to call for a moratorium on crude-by-rail shipments through the state’s “most treacherous” passes.
Twelve cars derailed on a Union Pacific rail line along the Feather River northeast of Oroville, CA in the early morning hours of November 5th. The state Office of Emergency Services responded by saying “we dodged a bullet” due to the fact that the train was carrying corn, some of which spilled into the river, and not oil.
State Senator Jerry Hill (D-San Mateo), a vocal critic of the state’s emergency preparedness for responding to crude-by-rail accidents, does not think California should wait around for a bullet it can’t dodge before taking action. Hill sent a letter to Governor Jerry Brown calling for a moratorium on shipments of volatile crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale and other hazardous materials via the Feather River Canyon and several other high risk routes throughout California.
“This incident serves as a warning alarm to the State of California,” Hill wrote in the letter. “Had Tuesday’s derailment resulted in a spill of oil, the spill could have caused serious contamination in the Feather River, flowing into Lake Oroville and contaminating California’s second largest reservoir that supplies water to the California Water Project and millions of people.”
Hill’s letter goes on to mention the fact that increased use of crude transport by rail due to the fracking boom has also led to many more “fatal and devastating rail accidents involving large crude oil spills,” specifically raising the specter of the derailment and explosion of a train in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec in 2013, which killed 47 people and spilled 26,000 gallons of crude into the Chaudière River.
There is a need for a moratorium, Hill argues, because a train carrying one million gallons of Bakken crude—the same type of oil that was being transported through Lac-Mégantic—travels through the Feather River Canyon every week, and there are plans for a second of these “bomb trains” (so called due to the highly volatile nature of Bakken crude) to be added soon.
According to Hill, the trains travel through some of California’s most remote regions where the risk of derailment is especially high and “emergency responders are ill-equipped to quickly respond in these regions to prevent and mitigate major environmental and public health harm.”
Crude-by-rail has taken off in the U.S. because there is simply not enough space in existing pipelines to transport the glut of oil being produced across North America. This has led to more oil being spilled by train accidents in 2013 than in the previous three decades combined. According to Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration data, last year saw some 1.15 million gallons of crude oil spilled by rail incidents, compared to just 800,000 gallons between 1975 and 2012.
It just so happens that there are no pipelines bringing crude to California, however, so the state is bracing itself for a massive increase in the number of oil trains. In 2011 there were 9,000 carloads of oil shipped by rail into the Golden State, but that number is expected to swell to 200,000 carloads by 2016.
So far this year, California has imported nearly 4.4 million barrels of oil by rail through September, compared to just 3.3 million barrels from January to September in 2013. To put that in context: the 6.3 million barrels ultimately shipped via rail to California refineries last year represented a 506% increase over the 1 million barrels shipped by rail in 2012, but was still just 1% of total oil shipments into the state. However, crude-by-rail shipments are growing so quickly that they are expected to reach as much as 150 million barrels by 2016, some 25% of total imports.
When reached for comment, the governor’s office deferred to the California Office of Emergency Services. Kelly Houston, deputy director of the OES, told DeSmog, “We share Senator Hill’s concern about the increase in crude oil coming into California by rail,” but that ultimately any decision on a moratorium would have to come from the Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration.
Houston stresses that the state is working to make crude-by-rail shipments safer, pointing to a report released by the state this past June, “Oil by Rail Safety in California,” and the work being done with railroad operators and federal regulators to improve California’s safety and emergency preparedness standards. “We’re going to have an increased risk because we don’t want to stop commerce into the state,” Houston says, “but what we want to do is increase safety and preparedness.”
U.S. Crackdown on Oil Trains—Less Than Meets the Eye
Federal regulators don’t stop oil trains from being left unattended, engines running.
By Marcus Stern and Sebastian Jones, Dec 8, 2014
The aftermath of the Lac-Megantic crude rail explosion in 2013 in Canada. Credit: Axel Drainvile, flickr
The first public action U.S. rail regulators took after a fiery oil train explosion killed 47 people in Canada in July 2013 seemed clear, impactful and firm: Trains carrying hazardous materials could no longer be left unattended with their engines running unless the railroad first got approval from the Federal Railroad Administration.
Leaving a freight train unattended overnight with the engines running had been a major factor in the Lac-Megantic, Canada, disaster, and the August 2, 2013 news release announcing the U.S. action had a no-more-business-as-usual tone. The emergency order was “a mandatory directive to the railroad industry, and failure to comply will result in enforcement actions,” the press release said, adding no train shall be left unattended on the tracks with its engines running “unless specifically authorized.”
But it turns out that the emergency order had a loophole big enough to drive a locomotive through.
Early on the morning of May 6, less than a year after the order was announced, James Racich, a trustee of the town of Plainfield, Ill., noticed a train parked near a crossing in the middle of town with its engines running early. Racich didn’t know about the emergency order, and he was accustomed to seeing trains left unattended on that stretch of track, enough so that it was a sore point with him. When he returned six hours later and saw the train still there—its engines still running with nobody aboard—he contacted the police. They confirmed that the train’s engines were unattended and contacted the railroad, Canadian National.
“They basically told us the train was secure, was locked up, things like that,” Plainfield Police Chief John Konopek said in an interview, adding “We have our hands tied. Because of federal regulation they can do that.”
The half-mile long train parked in Plainfield was a mix of hazmat tankers and non-hazmat box cars, Konopek said. Its crew members had left it unattended because they had reached their maximum allowable number of hours of continuous work. By the time the replacement crew arrived, the train had been parked in downtown Plainfield, unattended with its engines running, for more than seven hours, according to Racich.
Patrick Waldron, Canadian National’s director of state government relations, said in an interview that stopping the train on that section of track was part of the company’s “normal operating practices and is in full compliance of the laws and regulations, including that order.”
When pressed about the emergency order, he said, “I know the emergency order, but I’ve answered your question.”
It turns out that Waldron was right, because the emergency order is far weaker than advertised.
A tough-sounding FRA news release announcing the order had said that railroads could no longer leave idling trains unattended without approval from the FRA. Five days later, however, the FRA published the actual order in the Federal Register with less fanfare and tough talk. It contained fine print masking a huge loophole: The order would be satisfied when the “the railroad develops, adopts, complies with and makes available to the FRA upon request, a plan” for such stoppages. The “FRA does not intend to grant approval to any plan,” the order continued. So railroads could continue leaving trains unattended without FRA approval.
According to FRA spokesman Kevin Thompson, regulators aren’t required to review the plan. The railroad simply has to keep the plan in its files.
Canadian National reported it had a plan, Thompson explained, so the company had complied with the emergency order and can continue leaving trains unattended on the tracks with their engines running.
This article is part of a project supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the George Polk Award program at Long Island University, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism. It was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Letter to the Editor, The Benicia Herald [Benicia Herald letters to the editor only appear in the print edition. – RS]
A little humor on a serious subject
By Roger Straw, December 9, 2014
I got a big laugh out of the letter by my friend Jim Kirchhoffer, “The Mayor is at it again,” which appeared in last Friday’s Benicia Herald. Great spoof, and a wonderful lightening of the controversy over questions raised by Council members and the City Attorney resulting in allegations of Mayoral bias.
I was surprised, however, and somewhat horrified to discover that at least one very intelligent friend of mine didn’t find any humor or “tongue in cheek” in Mr. Kirchhoffer’s letter. I scratched my head and wondered why?
As a possible explanation, consider this: here in Benicia, we’ve been through four and a half years of continually repeated public attacks on Mayor Patterson by a local right-wing gadfly. Jim Kirchhoffer’s light-hearted spoof must have seemed to some Benicians like just another malicious rant.
Many thanks to Mr. Kirchhoffer for his gift of a touch of humor and for his injection of a lighter note into the current controversies. The point behind his satire is serious and well-taken: that our elected officials should be free to express themselves on current matters having to do with public health and safety, to exercise their expertise and competence on behalf of the public welfare, and to provide the public with information on a wide range of topics via email and other forms of communication.
