(TNS) — Under a new state law signed by Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday, May 14, large railroads will be required to plan with the state for “worst-case spills” from crude oil unit trains, but exactly what that worst-case scenario looks like is not yet clear.
The law requires railroads to plan for the “largest foreseeable spill in adverse weather conditions,” but doesn’t define “largest foreseeable spill.”
In April, BNSF railway employees told Washington emergency responders that the company currently considers 150,000 gallons of crude oil – enough to fill five rail tank cars – its worst-case scenario when planning for spills into waterways. Crude oil trains usually carry about 100 rail tank cars.
“We’ve already seen worse than that though, haven’t we?” asked Roger Christensen, Bellingham’s interim emergency manager, when asked about using that amount for worst-case planning. “It seems like a low number … I hate to respond without knowing where they’re coming from. It doesn’t seem like a worst-case scenario to me.”
The amount is lower than what has been spilled and partially burned off in several high-profile crude oil train derailments in the last three years:
Mount Carbon, West Virginia, Feb. 16, 2015: More than 362,000 gallons spilled in a CSX train derailment and fire.
Casselton, North Dakota, Dec. 30, 2013: Roughly 475,000 gallons spilled from a BNSF train that derailed and caught fire.
Aliceville, Alabama, Nov. 8, 2013: About 749,000 gallons spilled into a swampy area from a Genesee & Wyoming train after a derailment and fire.
Lac-Megantic, Quebec, July 5, 2013: Roughly 1.6 million gallons spilled from a Montreal, Maine & Atlantic train in a derailment that killed 47 people.
“Water spills require special equipment such as boom and skimmers. The worst case release is used to make sure we have enough of this special equipment,” BNSF spokesman Gus Melonas wrote in an email to The Bellingham Herald. “For land spills we use vacuum trucks and heavy equipment to dig up the contaminant. Both of which are readily available in most areas.”
Melonas said in an interview that the 150,000-gallon number was based on studying historical derailments in the industry.
When asked if the company uses other amounts to plan for spills like the fiery derailments outlined above, Melonas replied, “We consider all scenarios when developing our emergency response plans with utilizing resources of local, regional and nationwide experts and equipment to safely and efficiently mitigate any hazardous materials incident including crude oil.”
“Until we have further regulatory clarity from the U.S. Department of Transportation on how the agency will require railroads to calculate ‘worst-case discharges’ to waterways, BNSF is considering using 150,000 gallons,” Melonas wrote. “BNSF is open to discussing the justification of this quantity with Federal or State environmental agencies.”
BNSF would not outline what its worst-case scenarios are for other situations, or say whether the company would adjust its scenario based on the new state law.
Planning for the Worst
The new law tasks the state Department of Ecology with crafting the worst-case scenario for railroad contingency plans in a process that could take a year or longer, and will include input from the railroads and the public, said Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, preparedness section manager for Ecology.
“Preparedness regulations are all about planning for a potential worst-case spill,” Pilkey-Jarvis said. “It (all starts) with defining a worst-case spill volume, then that drives the whole rest of your plan.”
The volume helps planners decide which equipment needs to be staged where, and how many people need to be trained members of a spill management team, she said.
“In (Washington) state the Legislature has defined the standard of what a worst-case spill volume should be, and in general it’s a pretty high bar,” Pilkey-Jarvis said.
Washington state requires marine ships that transport oil to plan for a spill of the entire cargo, including whatever fuel is aboard to operate the vessel.
Planning for that type of all-in worst case creates pushback from the industry, which sometimes says, “That could never happen,” Pilkey-Jarvis said.
“Well, that doesn’t matter from a planning perspective if you think that could happen or not,” she said. “From a planning perspective, we’re defining everything as a worst case.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) recently ran through a worst-case crude oil train derailment scenario in Jersey City, New Jersey. The exercise took emergency planners through an imagined scenario that could potentially kill or injure more than 1,000 people, and displace even more from their homes near the incident.
The scenario started with five of 90 tank cars derailing and spilling roughly 100,000 gallons of crude oil, which caught on fire. The blaze heats up other tanks, which rupture and spill more oil. The scenario outlined 225,000 gallons being consumed by flames, with the other 225,000 left on the ground, for a total 450,000-gallon spill.
“This is consistent with other real world events, such as the Galena, (Illinois) tank car derailment,” FEMA spokeswoman Susan Hendrick wrote in an email to The Bellingham Herald. “Complex and progressive scenarios allow communities to prepare for a range of consequences they may be faced with, including the size, scope and severity of an incident.”
In Bellingham, planners have not yet decided what the worst-case scenario might look like, Christensen said.
However, planners have calculated that throughout the city, 27,000 Bellingham residents – about a third of the population – live within the half-mile evacuation zone of the railroad tracks, he said.
Whatcom County and Bellingham planners work with BNSF, BP Cherry Point and Phillips 66 refineries, and other involved partners, to plan for different emergencies in the county.
Last fall, planners ran through a tabletop discussion of what resources might be available if 60,000 gallons of crude oil spilled from a train near Squalicum Harbor, Christensen said.
“It was a tabletop so we never got to the point of actually ‘deploying’ resources, but we did get a handle on that there is a significant amount of resources in our community,” he said. “We’re much more prepared than a lot of them, because of industrial partnerships. They might be the reason the hazard is coming through … but at least in Whatcom County we do have the industrial partners that bring resources to the table as well.”
Whatcom County Fire District 7 Chief Gary Russell said he’s not worried about knowing BNSF’s worst-case scenario, as it doesn’t change how his firefighters would respond to a derailment. His district covers nine miles of mostly rural BNSF track, and includes the two Whatcom County refineries.
“If it was one tank car on fire, we’d address it the same if it was five, we’d just probably not have the ability to deal with it,” Russell said. “In a derailment out here, you’d be protecting the area while it eliminated its fuel source.
“We treat every day like it’s an all-risk hazard. It doesn’t matter if it’s a freight train or a passenger train, with a greater loss of life,” he continued. “I worry about the product I don’t know anything about that’s in a tank car. … I’d rather have oil going up and down the rails than I would acids, sulfurs, chlorine and other hazardous commodities, because they can harm people faster than oil.”
Different Reporting Requirements
Unlike stationary facilities that have hazardous materials or chemicals on hand, railroads are exempt from nearly all requirements of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA).
After a disastrous release of toxic gas at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands of people in 1984, the U.S. Congress passed EPCRA to try to prevent similar accidents.
While businesses such as certain gas stations, water treatment plants, and fish processors need to report what hazardous chemicals are on their properties to state and local officials, and to make that information available to the public, railroads do not. The act “does not apply to the transportation, including the storage incident to such transportation” of chemicals otherwise included in the act.
Railroads do need to submit their worst-case discharge calculations and plans to the U.S. Department of Transportation, but they are not available to the public.
“It’s un-American to withhold these documents from the public,” said Fred Millar, an independent rail consultant who worked for environmental groups that helped pass right-to-know rules in the 1980s and ’90s. “For the first 20 years or so, the railroads said to us, ‘No law forces us to give you this information, we consider it confidential.’ After 9/11, they said ‘We won’t give you the information because of terrorism, you know.’
“Keeping it secret is a little like elephants tiptoeing through the tulips,” he said.
Pipeline companies are required to submit their oil spill response plans to the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. They are published online, but the worst-case scenario numbers are redacted from the reports.
Last year, DOT required railroads to notify emergency response agencies of shipments of 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude oil through their states, but the introduction of new regulations on May 1 ended that requirement.
Now, railroads will share that information directly with emergency responders, but it will be exempt from public records laws and the Freedom of Information Act, the way that other hazardous materials such as chlorine and anhydrous ammonia are currently protected.
The new Washington state oil safety law requires seven days’ advance notice from the facilities that receive crude oil, such as refineries, before trains are scheduled to come through the state. That information is supposed to be given to the state, which will make it available to emergency responders immediately, and will aggregate the numbers quarterly for release to the public.
McClatchy reporter Curtis Tate contributed to this report.
Repost from National Parks Traveler [Editor: Excellent, thorough report. Incredible interactive map of oil trains in and near our national parks. (Video portions of the map seem to be best viewed in Google Chrome.) Remember, it’s not only human life at risk, but the earth itself. – RS]
A Traveler Special Report: “Oil Trains” Pose A Significant Threat To National Parks
By Kurt Repanshek, May 13, 2015 – 1:15am
Oil trains that pass through John Stevens Canyon on the south border of Glacier National Park also pass through West Glacier, an entrance to the park./NPCA, Michael Jamison.
For more than a century, freight trains have rumbled up and over Montana’s Marias Pass, skirting the heavily forested south boundary of Glacier National Park, casting rolling shadows on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River below. Until recently the major threat was a grain car derailment, which on occasion left bears woozy from eating fermented grain and led to their deaths by train.
Today’s prospect of a derailment involving a 100-car train hauling millions of gallons of highly combustible Bakken crude oil risks an environmental catastrophe unprecedented in National Park Service history.
Every week an estimated 30-35 million gallons of Bakken crude oil passes along the park’s southern border as 10-12 BNSF Railway trains — with each tanker car holding about 30,000 gallons of crude — head from North Dakota to West Coast refineries and terminals. During the winter months, each mile-long train is exposed to a snowy Russian Roulette as they pass 11 avalanche chutes that could break loose without warning from mountains called Running Rabbit, Snowslip, and Shields on Glacier’s flanks.
Any day of the year, equipment failure, poor track conditions, or over-worked crews could lead to a derailment that could dump tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Middle Fork, a wild and scenic river, while an enormous fireball could ignite the park’s forests.
But Glacier National Park isn’t the only National Park System unit that faces this threat from “oil trains.” Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in the state of Washington, could have four oil trains, each upwards of a mile-and-a-half long, hauling crude daily to a proposed but as yet unbuilt oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver.
Park Service officials in Washington, D.C., were keeping an eye on the issue, and relying on their field staff to apprise them of any developments.
“We rely on National Park Service employees, like (Superintendent) Jeff Mow at Glacier who is engaged with communities near the park, to keep us informed on health and safety issues. Our concern is focused on visitor and employee safety, preservation of the cultural, historic and natural resources in our care and the health, safety and well being of our friends and neighbors who live near national parks,” said NPS spokesman Jeffrey Olson.
At individual parks across the National Park System, officials expressed great concern about the potential for a derailment in or near their parks.
At Fort Vancouver, Superintendent Tracy Fortmann said a derailment would “be catastrophic.”
“The threats are what you might expect,” Fort Laramie Superintendent Tom Baker said from his park in Wyoming. “If there were an oil spill, which most likely would be right at the crossing there just off of U.S 26 and Wyoming 160, that would be calamitous, to say the least.”
Bakken crude is extremely volatile and prone to explosive derailments, such as this one at Casselton, ND, back in 2013/NTSB
How extensive is the potential problem? When you look at a map of rail lines, it leaps out.
“We put together a map that shows the rail system that Bakken (crude oil) runs on nationwide, and we overlaid it with National Park System units. And we suddenly realized, holy mackerel, this is 48 states’ worth of a problem,” said Michael Jamison, who oversees the National Parks Conservation Association’s Crown of the Continent program. “The spills that are happening in (Lac-Mégantic) Quebec, on the James (River in Virginia), out in Casselton (North Dakota), they’re happening all over the nation. These are rails that run either adjacent to or sometimes literally through the center of a park.”
From Passengers To Oil
Railway history in the United States is richly intertwined with national park history. A century ago the Union Pacific Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific Railway, and the Santa Fe Railway and numerous short-lines filled their passenger cars with riders anxious to see America’s grandest natural attractions: Glacier, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone national parks, among others.
Gleaming locomotives — first steam-powered, and then by diesel electric — pulled coaches, replete with linen-topped tables and white-jacketed stewards in dining cars. Travelers bunked in Pullman sleeping cars, which provided a comfortable trip out West.
Scenic national parks gave the railroads strong promotional opportunities to sell tickets. The Union Pacific hauled passengers to Cedar City, Utah, where they boarded buses operated by the Utah Parks Co. (a Union Pacific subsidiary), to explore Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Grand Canyon national parks. The railroad was even hired by the Interior Department to build lodges within these parks.
But rail passengers eventually turned to automobiles, and the railroads’ focus turned to freight.
“In 1952, for example, only 22 percent of the occupants at Zion, 20 percent at Bryce, and 27 percent at Grand Canyon came by rail,” Maury Klein wrote in the second of his two-volume history of the Union Pacific. “In effect, the railroad was subsidizing the vacations of automobile travelers as part of its contribution to the Utah economy.”
Today, a growing portion of the railroads’ freight is crude oil, most from North Dakota. Day into night and into day mile-long trains rumble out of the state’s energy-rich northwestern corner, carrying millions of gallons of crude oil from the Bakken formation, which is fueling resurgence in U.S. energy independence.
But it’s at times a costly path. Oil train derailments have led to spills, and in some cases fiery explosions, in North Dakota, West Virginia, Illinois, and Virginia. On May 6, just five days after the U.S. Transportation Department announced more stringent regulations for oil train tank cars, a fiery derailment near Heimdal, North Dakota, sent billowing clouds of black smoke and billowing orange flames soaring into the morning sky.
BNSF’s tracks run along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park/NPCA graphic
While individual railroads, railroad associations, and other stakeholders work to prevent such accidents, the growing domestic oil production demands transportation of crude, either by rail, pipeline, or truck. And with increasing rail transport, there are more rail derailments.
“… the accident frequency trend is against rail. Oil trains are getting bigger and towing more and more tanker cars,” James Conca wrote in a piece for forbes.com on May 5. “From 1975 to 2012, trains were short and spills were rare and small, with about half of those years having no spills above a few gallons. Then came 2013, in which more crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents than was spilled in the previous thirty-seven years.”
But do, or should, the railroads shoulder all the blame? As common carriers the railroads, which in most cases don’t own the oil tank cars they haul, are required to move a shipper’s hazardous materials, according to BNSF officials. For the railway, that means that their network of rails along the northern edge of the country has turned their trains into “rolling pipelines” from the Bakken boom to market.
“Other modes of transportation are able to turn down hazardous materials,” said Roxanne Butler, a BNSF spokeswoman. “Crude oil is a hazardous material and therefore, when a shipper asks us to move it, we are required to do so.”
“In 2007, we ran about 6,000 tankers on the rail nationwide. A year later we had increased that by 50 percent, we were running 9,000 tankers,” says NPCA’s Jamison, who was drawn to studying the matter after Jeff Mow became superintendent of Glacier in August 2013 and asked about the tankers rolling over Marias Pass and down through John F. Stevens Canyon.
“Five years later, by 2013, we were up to 435,000 tankers. And we have gone from one ‘incident,’ as they call it, in 2007, to about 150-plus in 2013, nationwide. And so the numbers were pretty clear of what was going on,” he continued. “At the same time, of course, we had gone from approximately zero wells in the Bakken, to approximately 7,000. And my concern was that the whole build-out on the Bakken has been estimated not at 7,000 wells, where we’re at currently, but it’s 70,000-100,000 wells. And so you just do the math. From zero wells to 7,000 wells we went from 6,000 tankers to 435,000 tankers. So what happens when you add a zero, when you go from 7,000 wells to 70,000 wells?”
The Concern At Glacier
Glacier National Park rises in the “Crown of the Continent,” a rugged, mountainous landscape hugging the U.S.-Canadian border that is considered by some conservationists to be the United States’ largest intact ecosytem, a 10-million acre chunk of wild where, The Trust of Public Land says, “the list of plant and animal species living … has remained unchanged since the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition.” Rivers run swift, cold, and pristine, brimming with trout and cherished by river runners. Forests hold bears and wolves, elk and deer, wolverine and fox, while eagles and falcons wheel in the skies. Mountains here, the Great Northern reminded us, were, and still are, home to mountain goats.
Glacier National Park Superintendent Mow knows oil spills and their aftermath very well. He was on the NPS tort investigation team following the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska in 1989, and 20 years later was superintendent at Kenai Fjords National Park while it was still dealing with some of the spill’s aftermath. More recently, Mow was an incident commander for the Interior Department during the Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Since taking the helm at Glacier, he’s met with BNSF officials to discuss their tracks that descend roughly 2,000 feet in elevation from Marias Pass down to West Glacier, a distance of about 46.5 miles.
The track corridor dates back to 1890. John Frank Stevens, then principal engineer of the Great Northern Railway, had crossed Marias Pass the year before with an Indian guide and determined it the best location for rail traffic. Today, two sets of tracks run along the southern boundary of Glacier, cross over the Middle Fork of the Flathead River before coursing along the boundary of the Flathead National Forest. The steepest grade, between the top of the pass and Essex on the western side, is 1.8 percent, according to BNSF.
Amtrak’s Empire Builder (Seattle/Portland-Chicago), here portrayed at the Izaak Walton Inn at Essex, daily crosses the park with both an eastbound and westbound train. In summer, passenger counts reach 300 per train./J. Craig Thorpe painting, used with permission.
Winter’s heavy snows can bring avalanches cascading down 11 known pathways that stream down Glacier’s flanks onto the tracks below. These torrents of white fury led to the construction of snowsheds over key segments of rails as long ago as 1910. Today there are 11 sheds protecting the tracks, which also carry Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train as it shuttles between Chicago and Seattle, with stops at East Glacier and West Glacier and, if a flag is displayed, the Issack Walton Lodge at Essex.
BNSF recently conducted some maintenance work on Snowshed 5, but there are no plans to add sheds along the route, according to Ms. Butler.
Superintendent Mow is familiar with BNSF’s proactive efforts, which include sensors to monitor track conditions, to keep their trains on the tracks over Marias Pass and through the canyon. But, he adds, “We don’t operate trains and so quite honestly we don’t have the capacity to monitor their operations remotely.”
Since the tracks are outside the park’s boundaries, the Park Service has no official role in overseeing the train traffic and potential risks, the superintendent said.
“The only activity that we have issued permits for is avalanche mitigation during winter months,” said Superintendent Mow.
While an avalanche-caused derailment near the pass in January 2004 knocked 15 grain cars off the rails and closed the rail corridor for 29 hours, there have been no serious accidents in recent years. Yet the threat remains, and it’s a significant one when you consider the pristine river flowing below the tracks, the park’s forests above, and the explosiveness of Bakken crude.
“As we look at a response to a spill, there are just so many moving pieces that come into it,” the Glacier superintendent said. “From just whether it’s a winter vs. a summer spill, how you respond differently to that. It’s fascinating if you read about the (63,000-gallon oil) spill that occurred in the Yellowstone River this winter. There was that initial incident where the spill occurred, and how it impacted communities, then as the winter went on that calmed down, and as spring’s come along it’s remobilized a lot of the oil that was trapped in the snow and ice. It’s kind of a two-stage event, really.”
An NPS map shows the avalanche chutes that tower above the BNSF Railway track corridor.
In what could be described as a worst-case scenario, an explosive oil train derailment in John F. Stevens Canyon in the middle of a long, hot, dry summer could dump oil into the river and rain flames 100 feet or higher onto the park’s forests of aspen, lodgepole pine, spruce and fir. Depending where a derailment occurred, tank cars could jackknife end over end, spraying their combustible cargo over mountainside and into the river. Such a derailment also could take out a train, freight or passenger, running on the second set of tracks.
How such a derailment would impact U.S. 2, a winding two-lane highway that also parallels the Middle Fork, depends on the size of the derailment. The Casselton derailment, which occurred out on the prairie, led to the town’s 2,500 residents being asked to evacuate due to hazardous contaminants in the billowing smoke plumes. A similar derailment in narrow John F. Stevens Canyon could pose a much greater risk to human life.
Recovering oil from rivers is not easy, cheap, or quickly done. Cleanup after a 2011 pipeline break at the Yellowstone River near Laurel, Montana, recovered only about 5 percent, according to NPCA’s Jamison. A major derailment in John Stevens Canyon could dump many tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Middle Fork of the Flathead.
“I think the chances of actually responding in a meaningful way, relative to the larger watershed and the aquatic ecology, are fairly slim,” he said.
John F. Stevens Canyon is narrow, often filled with wind, and in a remote, rugged location.
“Even out in Casselton, where you have room to operate, the answer in all these cases has been let it burn out. It takes three or four or five days, you let it burn out. Because it’s so hot they can’t get close to it,” the NPCA staffer said. “You add the complications of a very narrow, very windy, very rugged canyon, and there’s no way they’re going to fight that fire. It’s going to burn itself out.”
If such a fiery derailment occurred in August, during a hot, dry, windy “red flag” day with high fire danger, the problems magnify quickly, he said.
”We have people in the backcountry that we need to evacuate, and we have oil in the river and we have a couple thousand tourists, because that’s a white-water raft river…,” Jamison continued. “The first step (to preventing a disastrous spill) is you do everything you can to keep the oil in the trains, and I don’t think we’re doing that right now. We’re not even close to that right now.”
For their part, BNSF officials declined to say how prepared they were to handle a derailment in the canyon.
Getting Crude To Port
Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state was established in 1948 to preserve the setting for the western headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the Columbia River that dates to the early 1800s. In 1972 the city of Vancouver gave the park the Pearson Army Air Corps airfield, which dates back to the 1920s. Today the historic site blends story-telling of those two aspects within an urban park covering a bit more than 200 acres.
It also happens to have a BNSF rail line running along the southern edge of the park, sandwiched between Highway 14 and Columbia Way. The tracks already carry tanker cars, but the number could increase substantially if a proposal to build an oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver moves ahead.
BNSF oil trains already pass through Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state, but a lot more could be on the way/NPS map
“The proposal as I understand it is that the (Vancouver Oil Terminal) will have the capacity to handle 360,000 to 380,000 barrels of Bakken crude per day, which is equal to 15 million gallons,” Fort Vancouver Superintendent Tracy Fortmann said.
“Stretching a mile or more in length, these 100-car trains pose a significant threat,” she said when discussing the potential of a derailment in her park, “It would be a horrific thing, it would be catastrophic.”
In its official comments on the terminal project, dubbed Tesoro-Savage, the National Park Service said that those proposing to build the facility and BNSF “should be required to develop robust mitigation and emergency response plans for the entire length of the supply and distribution lines.”
The NPS has called for extensive oversight, planning, and mitigation for the tracks that wind hundreds of miles back to the oilfields.
“These plans should consider both winter and summer conditions and should provide a rapid response in the event of a train derailment or marine oil spill,” the agency said in its official comments. “In areas of high snowfall, including at Glacier National Park, project proponents should investigate construction of snow sheds to prevent derailments and consider alternatives to using explosive devices to control avalanche events along the tracks.”
A decade ago, before oil trains were rolling, BNSF sought NPS permission to use explosives along the southern boundary of Glacier on a regular basis to control avalanches. The Park Service denied permission, and instead suggested that the railroad build more snow sheds. However, during the snowy winter of 2014 BNSF was given temporary permission to use aerial explosions, produced from a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, which creates a loud boom to trigger avalanches.
Now, with the daily traffic of oil trains coming through John F. Stevens Canyon, NPCA would like to see the railroad be more proactive in protecting its trains from avalanches.
“They need less than a mile of new shed. Not all in one place,” said Jamison. “In many places they’re just expanding the length of the shed that they have.”
BNSF’s Butler says multiple options are needed to keep trains running safely.
“Even with a robust avalanche risk minimization program that includes forecasting, snow sheds and operations restrictions, in times of high risk additional strategies may be needed,” she says.
Western parks don’t face all the dangers of oil trains. As the NPCA map shows and explains, rail lines wend their way, “along the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers and converge in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. A derailment here could affect one of America’s most important historic sites and affect water quality for miles downstream.”
CSX tracks also travel through the gorge that cradles New River Gorge National River in West Virginia, and have been used to funnel oil trains to Virginia ports. However, the railroad has agreed to reroute oil trains around the New River Gorge National River.
Derailments are highly destructive, as the remains of a grain train derailment in 2011 in New River Gorge illustrates/NPS
“After the derailment and subsequent fire just north of the park in February, CSX contracted with Norfolk Southern to reroute most of the trains carrying oil out of the gorge,” said Jeffrey West, the National River’s deputy superintendent. “I will say they have been excellent to work with when a derailment does occur – quick environmental response, excellent compliance with our mitigation and recovery requirements. We have had diesel spills (punctured fuel tanks), and hydraulic leaks within the gorge – they have always been good about the clean-ups (three cases in the last five years).”
CSX officials also have a mitigation plan in place that has led to quick response whenever there’s been a derailment in the gorge, the Park Service official said.
“Anything that goes into the river (soybeans, coal, corn, or oil) gets immediate reaction from their hazmat team, and their hazmat contractors,” Deputy Superintendent West said. “In my five years here, they have notified us within an hour of a derailment with a spill. We send rangers and resource management personnel to monitor the site – they work with us to solve the environmental concerns.”
The Danger Of Bakken Crude
This is the charred locomotive involved in the Casselton derailment. For the engineer’s account of the crash, click here/NTSB
Oil pulled from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation is particularly troublesome for shippers. Hal Cooper, a chemical engineer who has long studied the nation’s oil reserves and associated transportation systems, describes the crude “as being potentially hazardous in terms of flammability and volatility…”
One possible way to reduce that combustibility, he said, would be to remove the “volatile organic hydrocarbon vapors” from the Bakken crude before loading it into tankers.
When the ramp-up in production is considered, the problem becomes alarming.
“The state of North Dakota has undergone nothing less than an enormous increase in its crude oil production of less than 100,000 (42-gallon) barrels per day in 2006 to 300,000 barrels per day in 2010 and to 1,050,000 barrels per day at the beginning of 2014,” Dr. Cooper wrote in a report for the Puget Sound Regional Council.
Most of that oil, he points out, is carried by BNSF. In October 2013 it was estimated that the railroad hauled 620,000 barrels a day of the total 732,518 barrels a day produced in North Dakota.
The issue grows greater when you consider, as Dr. Cooper points out, that “there is a massive amount of crude oil lying underneath North Dakota in as many as 11 individual layers in at least five major formations. The total estimated oil resource in the Bakken Formation is between 300 and 500 billion barrels, of which between 4 and 6 billion barrels at a minimum to as much as 25 to 50 billion barrels at a maximum is considered as being presently recoverable.
“The total resource is as much as one trillion barrels of oil from all of the oilfields, in North Dakota, making it more than Saudi Arabia.”
Back at Glacier, Superintendent Mow says the volatility of Bakken crude “is a blessing and a curse, because being so volatile it’s been shown that fires are common with spills associated with the Bakken. But on the other hand, if it’s not burning it will evaporate on its own pretty quickly.”
Railroads try to be ready for the worst. BNSF and other railroads jointly run a first-responder training center in Pueblo, Colorado, to instruct them on how to attack tanker car fires. For its part, BNSF has a force of 160 trained emergency response personnel located across its rail network, and uses a system to “determine the most safe and secure routes for crude trains of 20 or more loaded cars.”
But BNSF officials would not say how close the nearest emergency response teams were to Glacier, Fort Vancouver, and Fort Laramie. They also declined to say whether the railroad has studied John F. Stevens Canyon to determine whether there’s a safer route for its oil trains; in July 2014 the railway had adopted Rail Risk-Based Traffic Routing Technology to “determine the most safe and secure routes for crude trains of 20 or more loaded cars.
While BNSF spent $5.4 billion on its rail operations in 2014, railway officials would not say how much was spent on track maintenance around those parks.
“Given the amount of work that it would require me to invest in your request, we are not inclined to participate in the story,” Ms. Butler said.
While the dangers of oil trains have been well-known for years, incidents seem to be increasing. On May 1, the U.S Department of Transportation along with its Canadian counterpart announced oil train regulations that would require stronger tanker cars, new braking standards, maximum speed limits between 40 mph and 50 mph, and routing analyses by railroads hat would review “27 safety and security factors.”
Freight trains, some hauling tanker cars, pass through Mojave National Preserve/NPCA photo.
The regulations will not be fully effective before 2023. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, who has been leading the effort to make the trains safer, was unimpressed. “The new DOT rule is just like saying let the oil trains roll. It does nothing to address explosive volatility, very little to reduce the threat of rail car punctures, and is too slow on the removal of the most dangerous cars,” she said in a statement. “It’s more of a status quo rule than the real safety changes needed to protect the public and first responders.”
BNSF officials had a mixed reaction to the rules.
“BNSF has advocated for a safer tank car in the movement of crude oil and finally setting a new federal standard will get the next generation tank car into service and substantially reduce the risk of a release in the event of an incident,” the railway said in a statement.
“We have also said that any regulatory changes that automatically take away capacity will have a devastating impact on our shippers and the economy. Most importantly, capacity is not abundant. The supply chain’s experiences with the recent disruptions at the West Coast ports is clear evidence of the negative impacts substantially reduced capacity will have on the economy.”
“DOT has handed down an unprecedented railroad operating requirement that is 100 percent dependent on the actions of rail customers or tank cars owners,” Hamberger said. “This decision not only threatens the operational management of the U.S. rail system, but trains moving 30 mph will compromise network capacity by at least 30 percent. The far-reaching effects of this decision will be felt by freight and passenger customers alike. Slow-moving trains will back up the entire rail system.”
While the rules include a requirement that train speeds not exceed 40 mph in “high-threat urban areas,” Glacier and many other national park settings are not urban.
“The value of what’s at stake is so high — with regard to the wild and scenic river, the Flathead (Lake downstream), Glacier Park,” Jamison said.
In general, the resources that national parks preserve and protect demand the utmost safety precautions, he said.
“At Fort Vancouver, the human communities that are around it, the historic and cultural resources. What’s at stake is so high that we absolutely need to insure to the best that we can in case something bad should happen,” he said. “And that insurance means an investment in some site-specific infrastructure changes, and some site-specific rule changes in these places of high value.”
NPCA, said Jamison, believes speed limits also should be set for trains traveling through areas “of national significance with regard to natural and cultural values,” such as Glacier.
While speed can be a factor in derailments, so can faulty equipment. In the Casselton derailment — which dumped an estimated 400,000 gallons of oil when 21 of the oil train’s 106 tankers and two locomotives went off track — National Transportation Safety Board investigators focused on a broken axle on a grain car that derailed onto the tracks in front of the approaching oil train.
Despite new rules and precautions, with increasing oil train traffic, the odds of a serious derailment impacting a national park are more than likely only going to go up. Whether the response infrastructure is in place to prevent a major catastrophe is more difficult to answer.
“We don’t operate the railroad, but we just really want to emphasize what’s at stake in the event of an incident,” Glacier Superintendent Mow said. “So anything that we can do to influence safe operations and a spill never occurring, that’s one area for us to put some attention to. At the same time, we also have to be prepared for a spill, and to that extent our response capability, how would we interface with those first responders, the county and the state and the EPA as they ultimately become engaged.
“In this area, you call 911, and while 911 may direct you to Flathead County, Flathead County is often quick to call us because we’re the ones closest to being on the scene,” he added. “It becomes pretty integrated. We’ve had some early discussions, still need to do more tabletop exercises on some various scenarios to ensure that if there is an emergency we can have a smooth response, we don’t have to stand there and figure out who’s going to do what.”
How to improve safety, while not impeding commerce, is a question with few answers.
“We’re not out to stop transportation by any particular means. But the fact remains that these are literally bombs that run through our cities and next to our national parks,” said NIck Lund, NPCA’s landscape conservation program manager. “All it will take will be one more Lac-Mégantic. If a Lac-Mégantic accident happened in Philadelphia, where trains run constantly, or any of the cities that are involved here, that would sort of just completely change the nature of how this is thought of, I think.
“It’s a very difficult question I think a lot of people are struggling with what the answer is. Even if trains are the safest mode at this point, it only takes one incident for something really terrible to happen,” he said.
This map, prepared by NPCA, shows the convergence of railroad tracks (in purple), national parks (in green) and oil facilities (in blue)/NPCA.
Repost from State Impact Pennsylvania, NPR.org [Editor: Quote: “Conrail knows what’s in the cars on their tracks but considers it proprietary information, not to be revealed unless there’s an emergency.” – RS]
What’s in those tank cars near the Amtrak derailment?
By Susan Phillips, May 13, 2015 | 6:12 PM
Emergency personnel work at the scene of a deadly train derailment, Wednesday, May 13, 2015, in Philadelphia. The Amtrak train, headed to New York City, derailed and crashed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
News footage of the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia Tuesday night shows nearby tank cars that look similar to the rail cars carrying crude oil or other hazardous material across the country each day. In aerial photos, it looks as if the Amtrak train, traveling at 100 miles an hour, nearly missed creating an even greater catastrophe, if it had struck an oil train, say, or a train carrying chlorine gas. Residents quickly took to twitter, wondering what about the content of those tank cars, and whether it was hazardous.
“This could be just one more in a litany of near misses,” said David Masur, director of PennEnvironment, an activist group working to ban oil trains.
It wouldn’t be far-fetched for a passenger rail car to collide with an oil train, dozens of oil trains run through the state on their way to Philadelphia and South Jersey refineries each week. In fact, Norfolk Southern runs oil trains on a track that runs above Amtrak lines, close to the derailment. Bakken crude oil from North Dakota crosses those lines daily, traveling across the Delaware river, and down to refineries in South Jersey. WHYY reporter Tom MacDonald says he saw the black tankers about 50 yards from the derailed Amtrak train.
But it’s still unclear what is in those tank cars.
“It could be corn oil, it could be very benign stuff,” said Conrail spokesman John Enright.
The accident occurred on Amtrak’s rail lines, but the scene is very close to a Conrail yard, which Enright says is used for local transport.
“I know the sensitivity to the whole crude oil situation,” said Enright. “One shouldn’t presume anything.”
Enright says Conrail knows what’s in the cars on their tracks but considers it proprietary information, not to be revealed unless there’s an emergency.
“If there was an incident then that information would be readily available to [first responders],” he said.
In this case, the Amtrak train did not hit any nearby freight cars, so the contents of the blank tankers remains a mystery.
Norfolk Southern, which operates the oil trains that cross the Amtrak line, did not respond to requests for comment. And the American Association of Railroads would also not comment on the freight rail traffic in the area. Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management would not comment on the contents, saying they were focusing on the accident itself.
But rail safety experts say the accident could have been much worse if the Amtrak train did hit those black tank cars, and if those cars were carrying explosive or flammable material.
A passenger is carried following an Amtrak train crash Tuesday, May 12, 2015, in Philadelphia. Train 188 was traveling from Washington to New York City. (AP Photo/Paul Cheung)
Fred Millar is an independent rail safety expert.
“Having the oil train sitting there is not necessarily an undangerous situation,” said Millar.
Millar says, although it’s rare, trains have been known to run into each other. Federal investigators recently released a report about an oil train explosion in North Dakota in 2013, where the train hit a derailed freight train.
“One kind of industrial accident can set off another,” he said.
Not only would the death toll be higher, but the neighborhood would need to be evacuated.
Jim Blaze is an economist and railroad consultant who worked in the railroad industry for 30 years.
“Let’s say there was [hazardous material] in those rail cars,” said Blaze. “If the cars cracked open, it could have been an explosive force and caused a chain reaction. What would the casualty rate have been as a result? Could you imagine evacuating 750,000 people? What’s that going to cost? What’s the lost business revenue?”
Not only is it unclear what’s in those nearby tank cars. It’s unclear if Philadelphia’s first responders would be ready. The city’s Office of Emergency Management says it’s done exercises to prepare. But it’s not clear if the exercise has included passenger rail cars.
Pennsylvania’s Emergency Management Agency spokesman Cory Angell says that’s not a scenario he’s heard discussed.
Delaware County’s Office of Emergency Management says the risk of an Amtrak or regional rail line hitting an oil train is low because the passenger rail cars don’t run in close proximity to the oil trains as they do in Philadelphia. Ed Truitt runs Delco’s OEM.
“We’ve looked at a lot of different scenarios and that was never conceived as being a threat in Delaware County,” said Truitt.
Truitt says the rail cars only travel between midnight and 5 AM through the county.
“This needs to be fixed:” FOX6 finds a new “risk on the rails,” could Milwaukee be the next Quebec?
By Brad Hicks, May 12, 2015, 10:00pm
MILWAUKEE (WITI) — Last year, the FOX6 Investigators were the first to expose a new risk on the rails — a steady stream of long oil trains trekking across the state from North Dakota. The crude oil they carry from what’s called “The Bakken” is highly explosive. Since then, there has been growing public concern about these so-called “bomb trains” in Wisconsin. Now, there’s a new concern, in a neighborhood in Milwaukee.
When the mile-long oil trains lumber by Milwaukee’s Fifth Ward lofts, the cars come roller-coaster close to a renovated building. A sliver of light between brick and steel.
From his fifth floor window, Brian Chiu has a front row seat.
“It’s so loud,” Chiu said.
But it’s not the noise that concerns him. The fear is five floors down.
Fracking technology has opened an oil spigot in North Dakota.
“It’s increased the amount of traffic on the railroads exponentially,” Wisconsin Railroad Commissioner Jeff Plale said.
The railroad traffic has increased by several thousand percent.
Bakken crude oil has a very high vapor pressure, meaning it can easily explode. And the tank cars carrying it?
“(They) were not designed to haul crude. A lot of them were designed to haul corn syrup,” Plale said.
When these trains have derailed, the cracker-thin tank cars have ruptured, with disastrous results. By far the worst incident occurred in Lac Megantic, Quebec. Forty-seven people were killed in the fireball.
Three times this year, trains carrying crude have derailed in the United States. Last week in North Dakota, the sky turned gray with smoke.
In March, a train derailed across the border in Galena, Illinois. The wreckage burned for four days.
A week before that, a train derailed in West Virginia. Hundreds had to evacuate.
The train that derailed in North Dakota was headed toward Wisconsin. Two trains before that had just been here.
“We’re kind of at the epicenter of where this stuff is coming,” Plale said.
That brings us back to Brian Chiu and his Fifth Ward home — and those oil trains just feet from the Fifth Ward lofts, going over the S. 1st Street bridge.
FOX6 first photographed the concern in February — but it wasn’t until the snow and ice melted that we saw the full extent. “I beams” that support the bridge have rusted away at the base to wafer-thin strips of steel. In some spots, entire sections are just gone.
Chris Raebel, an engineer at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) agreed to take a look at what the FOX6 Investigators found.
“My focus is on steel design — just like the bridge,” Raebel said.
Unlike most railroad bridges, which have elevated foundations, the piers on this century-old span reach right to the road — where every winter, salt eats away at the steel.
“That’s hit the base of the bridge and that`s corroding the metal,” Raebel said.
In the past, some of the rusted piers supporting the bridge have been reinforced, but several columns have been corroded right through.
“At some point this needs to be fixed. This is not acceptable,” Raebel said.
FOX6 News received similar comments from other structural and civil engineers who saw the photos, but they didn’t want to be identified because they may do business with the railroads. They said things like:
“The level of rust and deterioration is a serious structural problem. They should be contacted immediately.”
And: “I would definitely report these conditions to the owner of this bridge without further delay.”
Canadian Pacific Railroad should already be aware. Canadian Pacific owns the bridge and is required to inspect it each year. In a written reply to a FOX6 request for those records, the company said it “meets or exceeds all federal requirements,” and that the bridge was last inspected in the winter. Canadian Pacific wouldn’t tell us exactly when that was — and whether there was snow on the ground. Canadian Pacific refused to show FOX6 News any of the inspection reports.
FOX6 asked them again earlier this months at a Common Council meeting in Milwaukee.
“We`ve given you a statement on that and we won`t have anything to add,” a Canadian Pacific representative said.
Canadian Pacific had been invited to Milwaukee to answer questions about the oil trains. Canadian Pacific’s brash brush off didn’t sit well with some Common Council members.
“You don`t give that image to the community that your facilities are safe. You don`t give us that confidence,” Milwaukee Alderman Terry Witkowski said.
Ken Wood knows what these inspections entail.
“I’m a structural engineer. My main focus is bridges. I`ve been working with bridges for 20 years — bridge design, bridge inspection, bridge rehabilitation,” Wood said. “You`re going to be looking for fatigue cracks, and the other thing you`d look for is corrosion, certainly, on a bridge — because corrosion is basically taking away the cross section.”
If you look at the base of the “I beams” on the bridge in the Fifth Ward, you’ll see layers and layers of flaking — in some places, more than an inch thick. That doesn’t happen quickly.
“It`s been some time, that`s for sure,” Wood said. “What happens during corrosion is the steel expands, sometimes seven to eight times what it is, so you can see that actually happening in the base here,” Wood said.
FOX6’s Brad Hicks: “How do you even inspect this with that much flaking on there without removing the flaking?”
“They would have to remove flaking to see what`s underneath and take some measurements with calipers to find out how much area they perceive is left,” Raebel said.
So that’s what the FOX6 Investigators did.
The beam is nine-tenths of an inch thick, but at the base, only four-tenths of an inch is left. The column is just over an inch thick. Corrosion has eaten it down to less than half that.
FOX6’s Brad Hicks: “The kind of thinning we`re seeing here, does that impact the load capacity of a bridge like this?”
“Yes,” Raebel said. “They have a certain amount of steel they need to resist the load from above.”
And that load is greater than ever.
Engines alone weigh three times what they did when the bridge was built in 1914. And a one-mile train weighs more than 25 million pounds.
“Now a two-mile long train is relatively common,” Plale said.
And with trains like that moving over the bridge daily — metal fatigue adds up.
“Is the bridge really built, with all that rust and all that corrosion, to support that kind of weight?” Chiu wonders.
Officials in the state of Wisconsin had the same question. In 2006, a study was commissioned on the impact heavier trains have on state-owned railroad bridges. That study concluded “many within the railroad industry are concerned that the aging bridge infrastructure will no longer be able to withstand the increased loadings.”
One bridge engineer who examined FOX6’s pictures said the problem may not be that bad, because in theory, you could cut a vertical pier in two horizontally, and it would still hold up the bridge. But that’s assuming you still have inch-thick “I beams” — not corroded columns.
The concern here isn’t that the bridge will completely collapse — but that if a column gives way and the load shifts and the train tips — with the Fifth Ward lofts just feet away, could Milwaukee become another Quebec?
“I would encourage the owner of the bridge to seriously look at this and consider repairs. And it seems like it should be done soon,” Raebel said.
To their credit, the railroads, including Canadian Pacific, have been at the forefront — pushing the federal government for stricter tank car standards. The railroads don’t actually own the tank cars — the oil companies and third-party leasers do.
Eleven days ago, the federal government announced new cars need to be thicker, and the old ones need to be retrofitted within five years.
The federal government is the only entity that can demand the railroad turn over its inspection reports on the bridge. For two months, FOX6 News repeatedly asked the Federal Railroad Administration if it has any of Canadian Pacific’s inspection audits for the S. 1st Street bridge. The agency hasn’t responded.
Local municipalities like Milwaukee are pretty powerless when it comes to regulating the railroads.
On Tuesday, May 12th, the Milwaukee Common Council approved a resolution urging federal regulators to immediately inspect all tracks, bridges and crossings on which Bakken crude oil is carried — but at the end of the day, that’s simply a request.
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