Repost from the White Plains NY Journal News on LoHud.com [Editor: Significant quote: “At the CSX-owned Frontier Rail Yard in Buffalo, 106 DOT-111 crude oil tank cars were checked and three had found to have critical defects, including a cracked weld, a missing bolt and one inoperative brake assembly….Since the state began its “inspection blitz” last February, inspectors have examined 7,368 rail cars (including 5,360 DOT-111s) and 2,659 miles of track, uncovering 840 defects, and issuing 12 hazardous materials violations. The state recently hired five new rail inspectors.” – RS]
Inspectors find 100 defects on crude oil trains, tracks
By Khurram Saeed, December 15, 2014
State and federal railroad safety officials have inspected more than 7,300 rail cars and 2,600 miles of track since last February in response to increase shipments of Bakken crude across nearly 1,000 miles of New York. (Photo: Associated Press)
A broken rail, defective train car wheels and missing bolts on the tracks were among some of the problems state and federal teams found during its most recent round of statewide inspections of oil trains and the rail lines they use.
They identified 100 defects, including eight safety defects that require immediate action, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office said in a release.
Inspection teams from the state Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration on Dec. 9 examined 704 crude oil tank cars and about 95 miles of track as part of the state’s on-going response to a surge in rail shipments of Bakken crude across nearly 1,000 miles of New York.
They did not look at the River Line, the track owned by CSX Corp. that runs through the Hudson Valley, including Rockland. As many as 30 trains carrying 80 to 100 tank cars filled with explosive crude oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota head south to East Coast refineries.
But the inspection of 15 miles of CSX-owned mainline track near Albany found a critical switch gauge defect that required a speed reduction, the release said. They also discovered four non-critical defects, including loose bolts. They must be repaired within 30 days.
“We have sent inspection crews to check rail tracks and crude oil cars across New York and we continue to find critical safety defects that put New Yorkers at risk,” Cuomo said in a statement.
Crude oil tank cars, especially the older DOT-111 models are also in the spotlight because they have been involved in several accidents, including an derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in Quebec in July 2013. Bakken crude is volatile and can catch fire should the tank rupture or derail.
The federal government is reviewing rules that would increase safety standards.
At the CSX-owned Frontier Rail Yard in Buffalo, 106 DOT-111 crude oil tank cars were checked and three had found to have critical defects, including a cracked weld, a missing bolt and one inoperative brake assembly.
CSX spokesman Rob Doolittle said in an email that the railroad “appreciates Governor Cuomo’s continued focus on making the safe transportation of energy products even safer,” adding that CSX is “committed to strong, ongoing and long-term coordination with state and local officials.”
Since the state began its “inspection blitz” last February, inspectors have examined 7,368 rail cars (including 5,360 DOT-111s) and 2,659 miles of track, uncovering 840 defects, and issuing 12 hazardous materials violations. The state recently hired five new rail inspectors.
A matter of faith: Rail bridge conditions hidden from public view
By Chris Hubbuch, December 14, 2014
BNSF Railway workers reinforced this railroad bridge south of Stoddard with cribbing last June. The bridge has been scheduled for replacement in 2015. (Click image for 2 more photos.)
STODDARD — On the afternoon of June 6, Kevin Gobel pulled into town after work and noticed dozens of railroad workers and trucks gathered near the village’s only railroad crossing.
Perturbed at trucks parked across the tracks and blocking the road, Gobel, the village president, went looking for whoever was in charge to ask what was going on.
The answer: We’ve got a real problem at the bridge south of town.
Gobel, who is also a Vernon County supervisor, called Chad Buros, the county’s emergency management director. Together they drove about three quarters of a mile south on Highway 35 to where a swarm of crews were busy working on the BNSF Railway bridge over the mouth of Coon Creek.
As it turned out, the problem was an “incipient failure” on one span of the 112-year-old bridge, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Train traffic was halted for 12 hours as crews put timber blocking under the span and nine others “that appeared susceptible to the same mode of failure.”
But six months later, Gobel still has little information about the bridge, which carries an average of 16 million gallons of volatile crude oil each day.
“Nobody’s ever gotten an official report from BNSF” about happened in June, he said. “Local governments need to be informed of what’s going on. I haven’t seen any documents stating what the status of (those) bridges are.”
Local officials and the general public are largely in the dark about the nation’s freight railroads, which carry growing volumes of flammable crude oil, while state and federal governments have limited authority and oversight.
And when it comes to rail bridge safety, the industry is generally left to police itself.
Concerned citizens have documented cracked and crumbling rail bridges along the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River that engineers say are troubling and that prompted federal authorities to take a closer look. BNSF assures the public the bridges are safe, but the government does not have structural engineers to independently verify their claims. And unlike highway bridges, inspection reports are secret, unavailable to the public and local officials.
There isn’t even an inventory of bridges.
“What makes me nervous is the responsibility of safety for railroad bridges rests with the owner of the track. You’d like to think they use good faith and safety and upkeep of the bridges … but it only takes some poor owners that don’t take it as seriously,” said Pat Salvi, a Chicago attorney who handles rail accidents. “The consequences are so potentially dramatic.”
BNSF says its bridges are inspected at least once a year — some twice or more — by trained bridge inspectors as well as structural engineers, consultants and contractors. Canadian Pacific, which carries far less oil, says it also has a rigorous inspection program. Both maintain inventories.
But neither the reports nor the inventories are available to the public.
Railroad bridge failures are rare, said Frank Douma, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Center for Transportation Studies.
Yet he acknowledges the stakes are higher when trains are hauling hazardous materials: “The difference between an oil train and a grain train derailing is what happens when it derails.”
Little oversight, little access
The Federal Railroad Administration is tasked with oversight and enforcement of rail safety.
In a 2007 report, the federal Government Accountability Office outlined how little oversight the agency exercises over rail bridges, more than half of which were built before 1920.
The GAO recommended, among other things, that the FRA devise “a systematic, consistent, risk-based methodology for selecting railroads for its bridge safety surveys.”
In addition, a joint FRA-industry committee recommended the agency create and maintain a detailed bridge inventory. That never happened.
Since the release of that report, the agency has created a bridge inspection program, which spokesman Mike England said entails audits of the railroads’ inspection programs as well as spot checks by FRA inspectors.
But there are just six inspectors for the nation’s estimated 76,000 rail bridges; only two are engineers.
“The railroad has the oversight of the bridge. The FRA has oversight of the railroad,” said Greg Baer, statewide railroad structure and track engineer for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.
According to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, in the four years since the bridge inspection program was adopted, the FRA has looked at just 14 Canadian Pacific bridges in eastern Wisconsin, and none in Minnesota. It has yet to conduct a regular inspection of a BNSF bridge on more than 1,800 miles of track in either state.
The FRA has yet to produce any documents in response to a September request for audit records. And while the FRA has access to the railroads’ structural inspection reports, those documents are hidden from public view.
England said the primary objective of FRA bridge inspections is to verify the bridge’s physical appearance matches what’s in the railroad’s report — to “make sure they’re not fudging anything” — but that inspections are thorough.
But inspection reports obtained by the La Crosse Tribune offer little detail.
An FRA inspector’s July 30 report of a Canadian Pacific bridge in Milwaukee, reads in full:
“Observation of Bridge 84.99 and review of the latest bridge inspection report. This bridge includes a TRT swing span over the Menominee River. This bridge has 3 spans, TRT and beams, concrete substructure, open deck, double track, and is 293’ long. Bridge conditions observed generally correspond with conditions reported on bridge inspection report dated 6/18/2014.”
“It’s a detailed inspection,” England said. “They’re not going to put anything in the report unless they find something wrong.”
The reports show that inspector looked at 13 bridges in a single day along nearly 45 miles of track in two counties.
By comparison, a recent DOT inspection report on a 262.4-foot viaduct on Copeland Avenue in La Crosse describes in detail minor cracks and other features. A routine inspection report on La Crosse’s Cass Street bridge is 86 pages.
Douma notes that unlike highways and airports, which are built and maintained by government, railroads are and always have been private enterprises. They came into existence at a time when the federal government was much smaller, and at least as concerned about keeping the union together as moving people across the continent.
Prior to the 1980s, railroads were subject to strict economic regulation, but the rails have always been on private land and largely out of government oversight.
Earlier this year, the state of California launched its own rail bridge inspection program in response to increasing oil train traffic and what one report labeled “the dearth of information and lack of regulatory oversight regarding the structural integrity of California’s rail bridges.”
The FRA says it is the only such state-run program in the nation.
The PUC would not make officials available for an interview, but an agency spokesman said by email they are in the process of hiring two bridge inspectors and will implement the new program “as soon as possible.”
“I don’t mean to criticize the railroads’ programs, but for the public to have the confidence that bridges are in good shape, our role is to offer oversight,” PUC Rail Safety Deputy Director Paul King told the Sacramento Bee. “Given the heightened risk of one of these crude oil trains derailing and given the projections of significant increase in tonnage across these bridges, we need to fulfill this role.”
The FRA does have the authority to order a bridge closed, as it did in 1996, 1999 and most recently 2006. In each case, orders were issued only after the owners of the bridges ignored repeated warnings to repair serious defects.
The typical maximum civil penalty for violations is $25,000, though in cases of “grossly negligent violation or where a pattern of repeated violations has caused death or injury or an imminent hazard of death or injury” fines can reach $105,000.
“That’s not really much of a hammer,” Salvi said.
According to FRA records, BNSF settled 418 track safety violations in 2012, the most violations per mile of any of the seven Class 1 railroads. Those track violations resulted in fines of $865,000, of which BNSF paid $569,725.
Last year, BNSF reported a pre-tax profit of almost $6.7 billion on revenues in excess of $21.5 billion.
Bridge conditions spark concern
In June, when the swarm of workers showed up to fix the bridge in Stoddard, Guy Wolf started to get worried about the state of the bridges near his home in Mohawk Valley.
Wolf, a retired university retention specialist and avid angler, used a kayak to navigate up the mouth of Coon Creek to get a closer look at the emergency repairs.
“What really concerned me — they had things circled. Cracks,” he said. “You could begin to see that parts of the bridge were lower (than other parts). All this lumber stacked up under the bridge.”
He started looking at other bridges and was startled at their appearance. Over the summer, Wolf and La Crescent wildlife photographer Alan Stankevitz, who runs a blog where he tracks rail safety issues, began photographing rail bridges along the Mississippi River backwaters between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien.
They documented cracked supports, exposed reinforcing steel rods, and chunks of missing concrete.
But looks can be deceiving, according to the railroad, which assures all the bridges are sound.
“Railroad bridges are typically not pretty; but they are functional and safe,” BNSF spokeswoman Amy McBeth said. “The visual appearance of these structures is not indicative of their structural integrity.”
While it is impossible to determine a bridge’s structural integrity from photographs, four engineers who looked at the photos agreed there are signs of serious deterioration.
Al Ghorbanpoor, a professor and director of the Structural Engineering Laboratory at UW-Milwaukee, said while a thorough assessment would be required, “the photographs give the impression that the condition of these bridge structures should be of concern. There is clear evidence of excessive deterioration that could have negative impact on the structural integrity of these bridges.”
Most agreed the Coon Creek bridge was the most troubling, though John Zachar, a professor of architectural engineering Milwaukee School of Engineering, expressed concerns about the pictures of a bridge in Genoa where concrete breakage has left exposed rebar at the base of piers and on one of the spans.
“That is a significant structural deficiency,” Zachar said. “I’d say there’s no question about it. This is something we ought to look at.”
But John Bennett, a former vice president of planning and systems for Amtrak and policy adviser, said rail bridges can be sound even after losing some of their structural integrity.
“Many of these bridges were built 50 or 100 years ago, (when) standards weren’t as well known,” Bennett said. “Many of these bridges have been overbuilt in terms of strength.”
Wolf and other rail safety activists presented the photos to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who wrote to the FRA in September urging a quick inspection of the bridges.
The FRA says it sent inspectors to look at a dozen Mississippi River bridges and a letter to Baldwin said neither BNSF nor its own inspections revealed any conditions “that inhibit the ability of these bridges to safely carry rail traffic.”
But the agency did not release those reports in response to a FOIA request and has declined to provide access to them.
According to the letter, the four bridges pictured were built between 1911 and 1923 and show deterioration — cracking and spalling concrete, exposed rebar — typical for rail bridges of that age.
The letter also notes that BNSF is monitoring the Coon Creek bridge, and the temporary blocking, through twice weekly inspection. The FRA went on to say BNSF is inspecting its bridges twice as often as required by the agency and accurately documenting conditions.
Reinvesting revenues
Railroads have enjoyed substantial growth in revenue and profit in recent years as the U.S. economy has recovered.
BNSF says it is sinking record amounts of that money back into its infrastructure: the railroad spent $5.5 billion last year on capital improvements, and has announced plans to spend $6 billion this year — about half of that on maintaining its physical infrastructure, such as tracks and bridges.
Indeed, workers this fall cut an access road to the Coon Creek bridge in preparation for its replacement, which BNSF said was scheduled for 2015 even before the most recent problems were detected.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the railroad industry a C+ in its most recent report card on U.S. infrastructure, which Bennett said is largely due to the investments the big four railroads are making in their infrastructure.
In fact, Bennett said, railroad infrastructure is generally better funded than highways.
“One of the good things about the railroad, they have a business model that actually works — they’re able to extract enough profits from operations to invest in infrastructure,” he said. “As opposed to highways. … The highway bridge systems are much more perilous in terms of getting funding.”
“It’s certainly in our best interest to prevent accidents and keep our infrastructure sound,” McBeth said. “That’s why you see record investments in infrastructure.”
Repost from Reuters [Editor: Significant quote: “‘Look at the towns. All they’re getting are more trains in their backyard and all the risk with no financial benefits,’ said Dan McCoy, the County Executive in Albany, New York, where taxpayer funds have contributed to growing oil-train shipments.” – RS]
U.S. taxpayers help fund oil-train boom amid safety concerns
By Jarrett Renshaw, Dec 14, 2014
A crude oil train moves past the loading rack at the Eighty-Eight Oil LLC’s transloading facility in Ft. Laramie, Wyoming July 15, 2014. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
(Reuters) – For the past 18 months, Americans from Albany to Oregon have voiced growing alarm over the rising number of oil-laden freight trains coursing through their cities, a trend they fear is endangering public safety.
In at least a handful of places, the public is also helping fund it.
States and the federal government have handed out tens of millions in public dollars to rail companies and government agencies to expand crude oil rail transportation across the country, a Reuters analysis has found.
The public assistance in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma and Oregon comes as railroads are posting record profits, and as state and federal authorities press for safety overhauls that the oil and rail industries have opposed, following several explosive derailments.
The Reuters analysis identified 10 federal and state grants either approved or pending approval, totaling $84.2 million, that helped boost the number of rail cars carrying crude oil across the nation.
The funds are a fraction of total public funding for railroads each year, and look small compared to the $24 billion railroads themselves are spending annually on infrastructure.
But with oil-train safety under heavy scrutiny, the public grants could be controversial and add to growing strains between the industry and some local communities who say they are ill-prepared to deal with oil spills or derailments.
“Look at the towns. All they’re getting are more trains in their backyard and all the risk with no financial benefits,” said Dan McCoy, the County Executive in Albany, New York, where taxpayer funds have contributed to growing oil-train shipments.
In May, Albany’s sheriff, Craig Apple, warned that regional emergency crews weren’t equipped to respond to any major derailment.
“I am not seeing any increases in tax revenue, but I am seeing an increase in the cost of emergency services,” McCoy said.
Since 2008, there have been at least 10 major oil-train derailments across the U.S. and Canada, including a disaster that killed 47 in a Quebec town last July.
Officials and rail executives offer a counter-argument: the funds help improve safety for an industry that is helping revive the economy in some places.
Last year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo awarded CSX Railroad a $2 million grant to add a second 3.6-mile rail line just south of the state capital in a county that now handles about a fourth of the Bakken’s oil, a light, volatile crude whose vapors have exploded in several past derailments.
CSX spokesman Rob Doolitle said the new line allows the railroad to idle fewer trains in the region, block fewer crossings, and serve at least 200 different businesses more efficiently.
“Local communities benefit from increased capacity,” Doolittle said. CSX posted record revenues of $3.2 billion in the third quarter.
AN INDUSTRY TRANSFORMED
The taxpayer dollars are going to a rail industry that has transformed the U.S. energy market: Amid a shale-drilling boom that has overwhelmed the nation’s pipeline network, oil-train traffic has surged at least 42-fold since 2009, and 415,000 railcar loads of oil plied the nation’s tracks last year.
As oil-trains increasingly make up for a lack of pipelines, they share the tracks with passenger and other freight trains on some of the busiest U.S. rail corridors. Emergency responders in several regions have complained that they lack information to track them and quickly respond to accidents.
While federal law now requires rail operators carrying Bakken crude to report routes and the number of trains that transit through each state, railroads have been reluctant to share specifics publicly, citing security risks.
Philadelphia is one of the unlikely locales that has been both alarmed and enriched by the oil-by-rail industry.
In 2012, The Carlyle Group led a rescue of the East Coast’s biggest refinery, which had been slated for closure, aided in part by a state-backed aid package that included $10 million to build a new rail terminal.
The 335,000-barrel-a-day plant is making money once again thanks in large part to the rail terminal, which receives six miles of oil-laden railcars daily from North Dakota’s Bakken.
In September, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), an oil refining complex controlled by hedge fund Carlyle Group, announced plans to sell shares in its crude-by-rail terminal, a move that may fetch hundreds of millions of dollars and reduce its corporate tax burden.
Carlyle declined comment, but the company has previously said that government assistance helped to save at least 850 jobs at PES and boost Pennsylvania’s economy.
Earlier this year, six railcars transporting Bakken oil to the PES rail terminal derailed on a bridge over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia’s Center City. No oil spilled from the CSX-operated train, but images of railcars teetering above the city’s vital waterway shocked locals and prompted protests.
“It spooked a lot of people in Philadelphia, and really raised the profile of the issue of crude by rail, an issue most people don’t think about,” said Matt Walker, a director with the local Clean Air Council.
CONGESTION RELIEF
Citing high costs, oil and rail industry groups have resisted some of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s recent proposals to enhance crude-by-rail safety, which include quick retirement or retrofitting of older, accident-prone railcars, lower speed limits, and mandatory electronic railcar braking systems.
Railroads and local transport authorities say public grants are a public good.
Since 2011, Oklahoma has received two federal grants worth $8.6 million that were used to fund privately-held FarmRail System, a regional rail operator, to move more crude by rail out of the state’s Anadarko Basin.
“We see these grants as improving public safety, much like you spend money on improving a highway,” said Gary Ridley, the head of the Oklahoma’s transportation agency. Trains are better than oil trucks, which clog up roads, he said. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin recently announced a $100 million spending package to upgrade rail crossings in the state.
In Oregon, oil terminal giant Global Partners successfully lobbied state and county officials to fund $8.9 million in upgrades to the Portland and Western Railroad, which runs next to the Columbia River. As a result, Global was able to increase the number of oil-trains to its private rail hub in the state by more than a third, to 38 per month. Global declined comment.
“It really doesn’t matter whether the train is carrying crude oil or cotton puffs, they have the right to pass through,” Jerry Cole, the mayor of Rainier, Oregon, where oil-trains pass through daily. “All I can do is to make it as safe as possible.”
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, editing by Jonathan Leff and John Pickering)
Repost from The Oregonian [Editor: A poignant opinion piece by an informed advocate. Jared Margolis is an attorney working for the Center for Biological Diversity’s Portland office on issues related to energy and endangered species. – RS]
Oil trains are too long and too heavy
By Jared Margolis, December 11, 2014
In this Sept. 16 file photo, rail cars containing oil sit on tracks south of Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
Even to the most reasonable among us here in the Northwest, the lonely cry of the train whistle in the night is no longer a very comforting sound. You can’t help but wonder if it’s announcing the arrival of one of the 20 or so trains of up to 100 tanker cars that pass through the region in an average week, each one carrying up to 3 million gallons of explosive crude oil.
The exponential increase in risk posed by these trains has been highlighted by an unprecedented wave of accidents, including the explosive derailment in Quebec that incinerated part of a town and killed 47 people, and another in downtown Lynchburg, Va., that set the James River on fire, putting wildlife habitat and drinking water supplies at risk.
More crude oil was spilled by rail in 2013 — in excess of 1 million gallons — than between all the years from 1975 to 2012, according to an analysis of data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA).
Between 2008 and 2013 there was nearly a tenfold increase in crude-by-rail spills, from eight to 119.
Yet, as the amount of volatile crude oil hurtling through Oregon towns, cities and sensitive waterfront landscapes continues to increase, proposals to reduce the danger have failed to focus on what federal regulators acknowledge to be among the most important factors making crude oil trains more likely to derail than most trains: the length and weight of each train.
Instead, proposals from federal regulators have been limited to giving the rail industry five years to stop hauling explosive crude oil in the most puncture-prone tanker cars, which PHMSA has stated will actually lead to longer, heavier trains. The length and weight of tanker trains hauling crude oil has been singled out by regulators as one of the leading causes of several disastrous derailments in recent years. Those increased risks are demonstrated by the simple fact that while the number of overall train derailments is dropping, the number of oil train derailments is escalating.
PHMSA’s own analysis has determined oil trains “are longer, heavier in total, more challenging to control … [and] can be more prone to derailments when put in emergency braking.” That’s why I co-authored a legal petition, filed with PHMSA last month, asking the agency to establish rules limiting trains carrying crude oil and other hazardous liquids to 4,000 tons — the weight that the American Association of Railroads has determined to be a “no problem” train, considered much less likely to derail. This safety guideline is currently exceeded threefold by the 100-car crude oil trains rumbling through Oregon.
And the risks posed by these long, over-heavy oil trains are only expected to grow: Analysts project the amount of oil being transported to California refineries by train to increase more than tenfold by 2016, much of it moving through Oregon.
It only makes sense to take aggressive, reasonable precautions to protect people and wildlife against this escalating, unacceptable danger.
• Jared Margolis is an attorney working for the Center for Biological Diversity’s Portland office on issues related to energy and endangered species.
