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 McClatchyDC News [Editor: Despite the curious analogy to foie gras, this is a SERIOUS discussion of Federal pre-emption and California’s attempt to regulate crude by rail. Apologies for the auto-play video. – RS]
Are California foie gras, oil train court cases on parallel tracks?
By Curtis Tate, January 15, 2015
On April 30, 2014, a CSX train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed in downtown Lynchburg, Va. No one was injured or killed but three tank cars went into the James River, spilling 30,000 gallons of oil and igniting a fire. CURTIS TATE — TNS
WASHINGTON — Perhaps the only imaginable connection between trains and foie gras, the famous French delicacy obtained by force-feeding duck or geese to fatten up their livers, would be as an appetizer in the dining car of the luxury Orient Express.
Ah. Pas vrai.
A California court recently overturned the state law against selling foie gras because poultry regulation is a federal concern. And that’s just what the railroad industry is arguing about a state law enacted last year requiring it to develop oil spill response plans.
The law came about as an expected increase in crude oil transported to California by rail raised concerns about public safety and emergency response.
Like the restaurants that serve foie gras and the industry that supplies it, railroads have decided they won’t be forced to swallow a state law that they think is pre-empted by a federal one.
In the foie gras case, a producer and a restaurant that served it argued that California’s attempt to choke off sales ran afoul of the federal Poultry Products Inspection Act. Last week, a U.S. district judge agreed, citing the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the ability to displace state laws.
Similarly, the Association of American Railroads, the rail industry’s principal advocacy organization, and two of California’s major railroads, Union Pacific and BNSF, argue that the Federal Rail Safety Act derails the state’s oil spill response requirements.
According to some attorneys who know the issue well, California’s law is heading to the end of the line.
“I don’t think the court will struggle with this,” said Kevin Sheys, a Washington attorney who advises railroads but has no involvement in the California case. “The law will be struck down.”
Environmental groups, however, argue that other federal laws apply to the railroads. Patti Goldman, a Seattle-based attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental group, said the Clean Water Act and the Oil Pollution Act, the latter passed in response to the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster, gave states the power to enact stricter oil spill response requirements than federal ones.
That’s in contrast to the Federal Rail Safety Act, which doesn’t allow states much room to exceed what’s required at the federal level. A court decision that weighs more heavily on the rail safety act would favor the railroads. A reliance on federal water pollution laws would favor the state.
“The structures for pre-emption in there are almost polar opposite,” Goldman said. “The federal government sets a minimum standard, and the states can go further. All of that is a structure that is meant to preserve state authority.”
Sometimes pre-emption works in California’s favor. Opponents of the state’s $68 billion high-speed rail system tried to slow down the project by arguing that it was subject to the California Environmental Quality Act and required extensive impact reviews.
But in a 2-1 ruling last month, the federal Surface Transportation Board said the project was exempt from the state law. Last week, state and federal officials, including Gov. Jerry Brown, broke ground on the project in Fresno.
As a more practical matter, railroads have largely prevailed in pre-emption cases because courts have been sympathetic to the notion that a patchwork of 50 different state laws could unreasonably burden interstate commerce.
In a notable case in Washington, D.C., a decade ago, a federal court struck down a local law that prohibited the shipment of hazardous materials by rail within two miles of the Capitol. A busy CSX freight line runs only blocks away, and the law would have forced lengthy and expensive detours of hazardous cargo.
But a massive increase in the transportation of crude oil by rail in recent years, and with it an increase in high-profile accidents, has exposed gaps in safety and emergency preparedness. California is bracing for a big increase in crude by rail, and last year the legislature extended the state’s oil spill response requirements to cover inland waterways.
That, naturally, affected railroads, which historically followed rivers because of the level terrain for heavy trains, including California’s Feather and Sacramento rivers.
The Association of American Railroads declined to comment on the California case, but spokesman Ed Greenberg noted that railroads “have extensive emergency plans in place, which include procedures in working with local first responders” and have “stepped-up emergency response capability planning and training.”
David Beltran, a spokesman for California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who’s defending the law, wouldn’t comment on the case beyond what’s in court filings.
State Sen. Jerry Hill, a San Mateo Democrat, said the attorney general’s office had assured him that the law wouldn’t be pre-empted when it came before his committee last year.
“We feel comfortable based on the legal opinions we have,” Hill said.
He thinks it’s premature to predict that the law will be invalidated. But Hill said that he and others who supported it should be prepared for that outcome.
“Everyone would regroup and try to find a way to meet the goals that we’re trying to achieve,” he said.
Harris, who’s said she’ll run next year for the U.S. Senate seat of retiring Democrat Barbara Boxer, also defended the foie gras ban. She tried to have that suit dismissed by arguing that she had no present intent on enforcing the law while reserving the right to do so.
That prompted a quip from Judge Stephen Wilson in his 15-page ruling striking it down: “Defendant seeks to have her paté and eat it, too.”
Harris made a similar argument in the rail case.
“I think it’s going to be decided the same way,” said Mike Mills, an oil and gas attorney in Sacramento. “I don’t see a different outcome.”
Mills said the California case might put a federal solution on a faster track.
The U.S. Department of Transportation issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in August for a new regulation that would require railroads hauling crude oil to have comprehensive oil spill response plans. The rule would apply uniformly across all states, and it would achieve what California tried to do on its own.
“Oftentimes, litigation will produce a decision that forms the basis for new legislation,” Mills said. “Potentially, it could happen.”
Aging Railway Infrastructure Raises Safety Concerns As Bay Area Readies To Receive Dramatic Increase Of Bakken Crude Oil
Alhambra Trestle in Martinez, CA (Jeffrey Schaub)
KCBS Cover Story Special, Part 1 of 3, Produced by Giancarlo Rulli, December 29, 2014 – KCBS reporter Jeffrey Shaub and producer Giancarlo Rulli investigate the Bay Area’s aging railway bridges that will carry increasing loads of highly volatile Bakken crude oil from North Dakota in this three-part KCBS Cover Story Special.
MARTINEZ (KCBS) — Questions are being raised about the safety of the century-old Alhambra railroad trestle in Martinez. Some local residents and officials are concerned because the bridge is carrying an increasing number of loads of a highly volatile cargo.
As the train rumbles its way across the 115-year-old Alhambra trestle in Martinez, loud creaks and rattles can be heard. And unlike more modern bridges, dozens of its bolts and bridge supports are rusted.
The trestle was originally built in 1899 and reinforced in 1929. The railroad replaced the rail deck in 2003, but the trestle’s support structures are 85 and to 115 years old.
“The railroad told us, actually, that the rust strengthens it,” City Councilman Mark Ross told KCBS, but he isn’t buying it.
He said that residents are worried about its safety, especially because it carries up to mile-long tanker trains loaded with highly volatile—and controversial—Bakken crude oil from shale fields in North Dakota.
“It really begs for inspection and a full report to the community as to its status,” Ross said.
Paul King, the Deputy Director of Rail Safety for the California Public Utilities Commission, agrees.
King said the Bay Area will soon see a dramatic increase in Bakken crude shipments over the Alhambra trestle.
“Somebody needs to be looking, overseeing it, and somebody needs to be doing it for the state of California.
A CPUC report identified railroad bridges as a significant rail safety risk, including many that are over 100 years old—structures like the one in Martinez.
That report and concerns about the Alhambra have the federal government also worried.
“We can’t wait because they will eventually collapse, fall apart—damage will be done,” Rep. John Garamendi (D-Walnut Grove) said.
He cites the derailment of a Bakken crude oil train in Quebec, Canada, which wiped out half the town of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people in July 2013.
That blaze burned for 36 hours.
“It’s a ticking time bomb—it’s just a matter of time,” Martinez resident Bill Nichols, who lives near the trestle, said.
But Lena Kent, a spokeswoman from the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway said that concerns about the Alhambra are perceptions and not reality.
“At BNSF, safety is our first priority in everything that we do,” she said.
In Part II, we’ll look at how the state, federal cannot even obtain safety data about the Alhambra and other bridges carry Bakken fuel because—in part because there are so few 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.”
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