Repost from Bloomberg News [Editor: Many groups have called for a moratorium on crude by rail; this may be the first time a highly respected national media outlet has highlighted this view in a headline. New in this report: “The U.S. Department of Transportation said 14 cars were in a pileup and half of those were punctured. Emergency responders evacuated a 1-mile radius, which contained six homes.” – RS]
CN Rail, BNSF Tackle Accidents as Group Seeks Ban on Oil Trains
March 8, 2015, by Doug Alexander9:33 AM PDT
Smoke and flames erupt from the scene of a train derailment near Galena, Illinois, on March 5, 2015. Photographer: Mike Burley/Telegraph Herald via AP Photo
(Bloomberg) — Canadian National Railway Co. is building a 1,500-foot (457 meter) long track to bypass a burning train that derailed Saturday in northern Ontario, while BNSF Railway Co. crews are working to reopen track in rural Illinois after a train carrying oil derailed three days ago.
CN crews teamed with outside specialists are fighting the blaze after an eastbound train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire around 2:45 a.m. near Gogama, about 600 kilometers north of Toronto, cutting off rail traffic between Toronto and Winnipeg, Manitoba. The BNSF train jumped the tracks Thursday afternoon near Galena, Illinois, about 160 miles west of Chicago, according to the railroad, a unit of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
The accidents bring to four the number of oil train wrecks in North America in the past three weeks, according to the Center for Biological Diversity. The environment group is calling for a halt to transport of oil by rail, which has surged since 2009 with the boom in crude production from shale.
“We need a moratorium on oil trains,” Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist at the center, which has fought to protect wildlife for 26 years, said in a March 7 statement. “The oil and railroad industries are playing Russian roulette with people’s lives and our environment.”
The BNSF train was carrying oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale formation for Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. Twenty-one of the train’s 105 cars, which include two sand cars as buffers, jumped the tracks Thursday afternoon. The U.S. Department of Transportation said 14 cars were in a pileup and half of those were punctured. Emergency responders evacuated a 1-mile radius, which contained six homes. No injuries have been reported.
BNSF plans to reopen its mainline track Monday, Mike Trevino, a spokesman for the railroad, said in a phone interview Sunday.
40-Fold Increase
North American oil producers have increased their reliance on rail as new pipelines failed to keep pace with a surge of production from shale. The typical rail car carries about 700 barrels of oil, according to data posted on BNSF’s website. The number of oil carloads rose more than 40-fold from 2009 through 2013, when 435,560 carloads were shipped, and kept climbing last year to an estimated 500,000, according to the Association of American Railroads.
The CN derailment damaged a bridge over a waterway as five tank cars ended up in the water, with some of them on fire, the Montreal-based railway said in a Saturday statement. Crews have placed three lines of booms on the river to contain the crude. Drinking water supplies to Gogama Village and a nearby Mattagami First Nation community are not affected, CN said.
“Fire suppression activities will begin later today,” spokesman Jim Feeny said Sunday in an e-mailed statement. “Residents will likely see occasional smoke plumes of various shades of black, gray or white. This is expected, normal, and poses no threat to the public or the environment.”
Pipeline Limits
The railcars, carrying crude oil from Alberta, are CPC-1232 models railroads began to roll out in 2011 to boost safety.
The accident marks the second derailment of a CN oil train in three weeks near Gogama. A train with 100 cars, all laden with crude from Alberta bound for eastern Canada, derailed on Feb. 14 about 30 miles north of the town. A total of 29 cars were involved in that incident and seven caught fire, a spokesman said at the time.
Investigators from the Transportation Safety Board of Canada are on site, which is 37 kilometers from the previous accident, agency spokesman John Cottreau said Sunday by phone. The train was headed to Levis, Quebec, when 30 to 40 cars derailed.
“Billions of gallons of oil pass through towns and cities ill-equipped to respond to the kinds of explosions and spills that have been occurring,” according to the Center for Biological Diversity. “Millions of gallons of crude oil have been spilled into waterways.”
Sturdier train cars built to carry crude oil have failed to prevent spills in recent derailments
By Russell Gold, March 8, 2015 9:36 p.m. ET
Fire continued Friday after a train carrying 103 railcars loaded with crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale derailed south of Galena, Ill. Photo: Associated Press
In a string of recent oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada, new and sturdier railroad tanker cars being built to carry a rising tide of crude oil across the continent have failed to prevent ruptures.
These tank cars, called CPC-1232s, are the new workhorses of the soaring crude-by-rail industry, carrying hundreds of thousands of barrels a day across the two countries.
But the four recent accidents are a sign that the new tanker cars are still prone to rupture in a derailment. The ruptures could increase momentum for rules aimed at further reducing the risk of shipping crude by rail.
In the last month, there have been significant derailments of crude-carrying trains in West Virginia and Illinois, plus two in Ontario, including one Saturday in a remote part of the Canadian province.
Each train was hauling the new tank cars, which weren’t able to prevent the crude from escaping, leaking into one river and exploding into several giant fireballs.
“These new type of cars were supposed to be safer, but it’s obvious these cars are not good enough or safe enough,” said Claude Gravelle, a Canadian lawmaker who represents the northern Ontario area where two recent derailments occurred.
On Sunday, emergency workers were still trying to extinguish fires in multiple tank cars after 30 cars of a 94-car Canadian National Railway Co. train laden with Alberta crude derailed Saturday near Gogoma, Ontario. Five cars landed in a waterway.
The energy industry began using rail to transport oil in 2008 because it was a fast and inexpensive way to move growing volumes largely from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota.
In addition, building new pipelines has been expensive and politically fraught. In February, President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which has been under review by the Obama administration for more than six years.
The robustness of tanker cars has become a major focus of efforts to improve the safety of shipping crude by rail. Such shipments have soared from about 21,200 barrels a day in 2009 to 1.04 million barrels a day by the end of 2014, according to government statistics.
As the U.S. shale boom gathered speed, the safety of growing crude shipments by rail has attracted greater scrutiny in the U.S. and Canada, especially after a 2013 derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that claimed 47 lives.
Speed limits have been adopted, and a new rule in North Dakota that will take effect next month requires crude from the state to be treated to make the crude less combustible.
The cars involved in the two Ontario derailments and the incidents in West Virginia and Illinois all met the standards introduced by the rail industry in 2011 as a significant upgrade over older models, and were built with thicker shells and pressure-relief devices.
There are about 60,000 of the new CPC-1232 tanker cars in use hauling crude oil across North America, as well as about 100,000 of the older models, says the Association of American Railroads.
Last year, the Transportation Department proposed additional new rules for tank cars carrying crude, presenting three main options. One would stick with the CPC-1232, but the other two would make new cars stronger and retrofit existing cars.
The White House is now reviewing these options and is expected to issue recommendations in May.
Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, said the railroad-industry trade group “wants all tank cars carrying crude oil, including the CPC-1232, to be upgraded by retrofitting or taken out of service. Railroads share the public’s deep concern regarding the safe movement of crude oil by rail.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s trade group, says it also supports upgrades to the tanker fleet to improve safety.
Cynthia Quarterman, a former director of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration who stepped down last October, said the recent incidents “confirm that the CPC-1232 just doesn’t cut it.”
Tanker-car improvements alone won’t be enough to reduce overall risk, she added. “The crashworthiness of the tank cars does need to be raised, but that’s not enough. There needs to be a comprehensive solution, including better brakes to help minimize pileups.”
The four recent crashes also highlight some of the other risks of carrying crude by rail that seem to be persistent.
Two of the derailments involved Bakken crude from North Dakota, which contains a high level of gas, making it more volatile than other kinds of crude. In the Mount Carbon, W.Va., accident in February, nearly two dozen tankers full of crude derailed and were engulfed in flames, some exploding into fireballs that rose more than 100 feet in the air.
Tests on the crude showed that its vapor pressure, a measure of volatility, exceeded a new regulatory standard that will go into effect next month.
The recent derailments involved long trains that are essentially mobile pipelines as much as a mile long. The BNSF Railway Co. train that derailed and caught fire in Galena, Ill., 160 miles northwest of Chicago, was roughly a mile long and carrying 103 railcars loaded with crude from North Dakota’s Bakken Shale. BNSF is a unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.
“We certainly believe that a stronger tank car is necessary and appropriate,” said Mike Treviño, a BNSF spokesman. A Canadian National spokesman said the company is in favor of stronger tank-car design standards.
The train in the Canadian National accident in Ontario over the weekend was 94 cars long, while the West Virginia train had 109 tankers full of North Dakota crude oil.
Canadian Transport Minister Lisa Raitt referred to “very long” unit trains last month when she proposed a new tax on crude shipments by rail aimed at building an insurance fund. “With that increased length of car, there’s an increased risk associated with it,” she said.
The number of derailments on long-haul tracks in the U.S. has declined 21% since 2009, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. But the number of train accidents related to “fire” or “violent rupture” climbed to 38 last year from 20 in 2009.
Repost from the Delaware County Daily Times, Primos PA [Editor: A variation on this AP story appeared in our local Vallejo Times Herald on 3/7/15, with this significant quote regarding the need for existing and proposed new tank car safety standards: “‘…those standards failed to prevent leakage and explosions that threaten human safety and environmental contamination,’ said Steve Barg, director of the Jo Daviess Conservation Foundation, which owns a nature preserve several hundred yards from the derailment site.” – RS]
Oil train tank cars derail in Illinois; involved safer models
Staff, 3/6/15 1:10PM EST
Smoke and flames erupt from the scene of a train derailment Thursday, March 5, 2015, near Galena, Ill. A BNSF Railway freight train loaded with crude oil derailed around 1:20 p.m. in a rural area where the Galena River meets the Mississippi, said Jo Daviess County Sheriff’s Sgt. Mike Moser. (AP Photo/Telegraph Herald, Mike Burley)
GALENA, Ill. (AP) — The rail cars that split open and burst into flames during a western Illinois oil train derailment this week were retrofitted with protective shields to meet a higher safety standard than federal law requires, railroad officials said.
The fire continued to burn Friday, a day after 21 of the train’s 105 cars derailed in a rural area south of the city of Galena. No injuries were reported, but the accident was the latest in a series of failures for the safer tank-car model that has led some people calling for even tougher requirements.
BNSF Railway said in a news release that the train’s tank cars were a newer model known as the 1232, which was designed during safety upgrades voluntarily adopted by the industry four years ago in hopes of keeping cars from rupturing during derailments. But 1232 standard cars involved in three other accidents have split open in the past year.
Those other accidents included one last month in West Virginia in which a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude derailed, shooting fireballs into the sky, leaking oil into a waterway and burning down a house. The home’s owner was treated for smoke inhalation, but no one else was injured.
Thursday’s accident in Illinois led local officials to announce a voluntary evacuation of an area within 1 mile because of the presence of a propane tank near the derailment. Only a family of two agreed to leave their home, Galena City Administrator Mark Moran said Thursday.
A railway spokesman initially said six cars derailed. But in an update Friday, BNSF said it found 21 cars had derailed in an area where the Galena River meets the Mississippi. The company said a resulting fire is believed to have spread to five rail cars, and emergency personnel were trying to contain the blaze.
The train had 103 cars loaded with crude oil from the Northern Plains’ Bakken region, along with two buffer cars loaded with sand, according to company spokesman Andy Williams. The cause of the derailment hasn’t been determined.
The accident occurred 3 miles south of Galena in a wooded and hilly area that is a major tourist attraction and the home of former President Ulysses S. Grant.
As of June of last year, BNSF was hauling 32 Bakken oil trains per week through the surrounding Jo Daviess County, according to information disclosed to Illinois emergency officials.
Firefighters could only access the derailment site by a bike path, said Galena Assistant Fire Chief Bob Conley. They had to pull back initially for safety reasons, but by midday Friday officials described the area as “stable.”
The Federal Railroad Administration said its investigators expected to have access to the site around noon, and it has not yet been able to determine if any crude oil spilled into nearby waterways.
BNSF said it was taking steps to prevent contamination.
Recent derailments have increased public concern about the safety of shipping crude by train. According to the Association of American Railroads, oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014, driven by a boom in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and Montana, where pipeline limitations force 70 percent of the crude to move by rail.
Since 2008, oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada have caused 70,000-gallon tank cars to break open and ignite on multiple occasions, resulting in huge fires.
The wrecks have intensified pressure on the administration of President Barack Obama to approve tougher standards for railroads and tank cars, despite industry complaints that it could cost billions and slow freight deliveries.
Oil industry officials had been opposed to further upgrading the 1232 cars because of costs. But late last year they changed their position and joined with the railway industry to support some upgrades, although they asked for time to make the improvements.
Repost from ArtVoice, Buffalo, NY [Editor: Professor Niman has written a thorough examination of crude-by-rail issues. The local (Buffalo NY) perspective is no drawback. This is an excellent reference article no matter where you are. For example, if/when Benicia approves a permit for Valero’s proposed Crude By Rail project, everyone uprail from here can expect to be the new Buffalo. – RS]
Buffalo’s Bomb Trains
By Michael I. Niman, February 26, 2015
With one third of Buffalo’s population living in a disaster evacuation zone, the local media’s silence is deafening.
They span over a mile long containing up to 140 tank cars and as much as 4.5 million gallons of some of the nastiest forms of crude oil on earth, pumped from “extreme” extraction operations in North America’s new oil boomtowns. They cross rivers and transverse open plains, wilderness forest and some of the most densely populated urban areas in the country. Occasionally, with alarmingly increasing frequency, they careen off into rivers, catch fire and explode, or both. When spilled in water, their heavy oil exterminates river ecosystems. When they blow up, they release the fires of hell, with one oil train accident in 2013 wiping out most of the town of Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people and gutting its downtown. That’s when folks started referring to these explosive steel snakes as “Bomb Trains.”
This is one of the dark sides of North America’s fossil energy boom—the backstory on cheap fuel. The uptick in oil production comes from using extreme means to recklessly drill oil, using carbon-intensive methods like fracking to extract environmentally dangerous low grade oils such as Bakken crude from Montana and North Dakota. This oil, pumped from the dolomite layer of the Bakken geological formation, which also underlies portions of the Canadian provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, is more volatile than conventional oils, with a lower flashpoint for explosion. When rail cars started to blow in Lac-Mégantic, The National Post reported a blast radius of over one half mile.
The United States National Transportation Safety Board estimates that about 400,000 barrels a day of this oil make the trip to Atlantic Coast refineries, with 20 to 25 percent moving through the port of Albany. Much of this Albany-bound oil moves across New York utilizing rail lines passing though the hearts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Utica. Oil from Canada crosses the Niagara river, entering the US both in Niagara Falls, and via Buffalo’s 142 year old International Railroad Bridge, as well as taking a northern route, dropping down from Quebec on tracks passing through the Adirondack Park, including about 100 miles of Lake Champlain watershed shoreline. Non Albany-bound oil, such as some shipments from Buford, North Dakota to Houston, Texas, also take an unlikely route through Buffalo.
Though much of this oil winds up moving through New York State, federal law limits the state’s authority to regulate it. While crude oil can be stabilized to make it less volatile in transit, whether or not it receives such treatment is up to the discretion of regulators in the state that produces it—not necessarily the states through whose cities it will roll. Most of the explosive Bakken crude coming our way originates in North Dakota, where the energy industry all but owns the legislature, fertilizing the state’s anti-regulatory zeitgeist with a healthy dose of cash. The end result is, whatever passes for a state government in North Dakota fails to meet even Texas’s modest safety standards for anti-explosive fuel stabilization.
The Association of American Railroads reports that, thanks to the Bakken and Tar Sands oil booms, the amount of oil moving across the country by train has increased 45 fold (4,500 percent) from 2008 through 2013, with the volume continuing to increase through 2014 and 2015. As a result, more oil spilled from oil trains in the U.S. in 2013 than in the preceding 37 years. The number of accidents increased in 2014, and seems to be steadily increasing this year, with oil trains derailing and blowing up last week in West Virginia and northern Ontario. The Associated Press reports that the U.S. Department of Transportation now predicts an average of ten derailment accidents a year involving crude oil or ethanol tank cars over the next twenty years, “causing more than $4 billion in damage and possibly killing hundreds of people if an accident happens in a densely populated part of the U.S.” It’s no longer a matter of “if” there will a catastrophic oil train derailment.
Both the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control, and the United States Department of Transportation recommend evacuating a one half mile perimeter around accidents involving railroad tanker cars carrying flammable liquids. Karen Edelstein, a researcher and the New York Program Director for the FracTracker Alliance, mapped oil train routes across the state, adding overlays for this evacuation zone, and for schools and hospitals. Her data shows that statewide, there are 502 public schools situated within potential evacuation zones. In Buffalo, about one third of the population live within one half mile of these bomb train routes, and 27 public schools and eight private schools lie within potential evacuation perimeters as well. This includes PS 42, which serves students with disabilities, and is located adjacent to the track. Sister’s Hospital and the Buffalo Zoo are well within this perimeter, which skirts the Buffalo State and Erie County Medical Center campuses. If we freak out when it snows, how well are we going to handle what appear to be atomic fireballs, should one of these trains blow up?
While the profits from this oil boom have been privatized, much of the cost associated with reckless extraction have been externalized, meaning dumped on the public. Aside from the obvious environmental costs that we and future generation will have to bear, are the less visible emergency preparation costs that every school, hospital and municipality within a half mile of bomb train routes must now cover. In Buffalo, this means 35 schools need to work with local emergency services providers to develop plans to quickly evacuate students not just from buildings, but from neighborhoods, all with a possible backdrop of explosions, sirens and billowing smoke.
While it’s not statistically likely that a train will explode in Buffalo or any other specific place, it is a certainty that trains will keep exploding with increasing frequency across the U.S. and Canada. This means that cash strapped municipalities across the continent will have to develop plans to address a catastrophe we know for certain will befall some of our communities.
Addressing this risk involves not just planning to respond to it, and maintaining an emergency response network capable of responding, but also working to prevent such a catastrophe. A report from the Cornell University Community and Regional Development Institute points out that this involves a multitude of responsibilities, such as monitoring surface rail crossings to prevent vehicle train collisions that can lead to a derailment. Such responsibility, the report notes, usually falls to local police forces that often lack the personnel to do this. Likewise, federal regulators lack the personnel to inspect the nation’s rail infrastructure, and state Departments of Transportation lack the resources to adequately inspect bridges crossing railroad tracks. All of these costs fall not on the oil or railroad industries, but on government agencies, with much of this work not being done due to budget constraints.
What little planning there is to deal with an oil train explosion is alarming to read. A three car fire requires, according to the New York State Office of Fire Prevention and Control , 80,000 gallons of water for laying down a fire retardant foam blanket and cooling adjacent rail cars. Hence, the state recommends, if there is “NO life hazard and more than 3 tank cars are involved in fire OFPC recommends LETTING THE FIRE BURN unless the foam and water supply required to control is available” [sic.]. The wording here is ominous, with the availability of the required foam and water not being the default expectation, but instead, simply a possibility. This language is there for a reason, however. The Auburn Citizen, in central New York, quotes Cayuga County Emergency Management Office Director Brian Dahl, who, in response to a question about his county’s ability to respond to an oil train fire, unequivocally states, “The amount of foam and water you would need, there’s just not enough in central New York.”
While oddly inferring that maybe you should put the fire out if you have adequate foam and water, even if there is no “life hazard,” the state’s instructions don’t mention what to do if there is a life hazard, but no foam or water. Also troubling is their inference that if more than three cars are on fire you should just give up. Last week’s fires in Ontario and West Virginia saw seven and fourteen cars ablaze respectively, with each fire burning for over 24 hours. In all caps, the state’s instructions warn responders,
“All resources must be available prior to beginning suppression.”
It doesn’t give any suggestions as to what to do if you can’t move the water to the fire, or have the foam necessary to smother a dragon. None of the suggested responses are tolerable should an oil train explode in an urban environment.
Dr. Michael I. Niman is a professor of journalism and media studies at SUNY Buffalo State. His previous columns are at artvoice.com, archived at www.mediastudy.com, and available globally through syndication.
There are about 60,000 of the new CPC-1232 tanker cars in use hauling crude oil across North America, as well as about 100,000 of the older models, says the Association of American Railroads.
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