W.Va. oil train derailment was 1 of 3 with safer tank cars
By John Raby & Jonathan Mattise, Feb 18, 2015, UPDATED Feb 18, 2015 1:33pm ET
A fire burns Monday, Feb. 16, 2015, after a train derailment near Charleston, W.Va. Nearby residents were told to evacuate as state emergency response and environmental officials headed to the scene. THE REGISTER-HERALD, STEVE KEENAN — AP Photo
MOUNT CARBON, W.Va. — The fiery derailment of a train carrying crude oil in West Virginia is one of three in the past year involving tank cars that already meet a higher safety standard than what federal law requires — leading some to suggest even tougher requirements that industry representatives say would be costly.
Hundreds of families were evacuated and nearby water treatment plants were temporarily shut down after cars derailed from a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude Monday, shooting fireballs into the sky, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning down a house nearby. It was snowing at the time, but it is not yet clear if weather was a factor.
The fire smoldered for a third day Wednesday. State public safety division spokesman Larry Messina said the fire was 85 percent contained.
The train’s tanks were a newer model — the 1232 — designed during safety upgrades voluntarily adopted by the industry four years ago. The same model spilled oil and caught fire in Timmins, Ontario on Saturday, and last year in Lynchburg, Virginia.
A series of ruptures and fires have prompted the administration of President Barack Obama to consider requiring upgrades such as thicker tanks, shields to prevent tankers from crumpling, rollover protections and electronic brakes that could make cars stop simultaneously, rather than slam into each other.
If approved, increased safety requirements now under White House review would phase out tens of thousands of older tank cars being used to carry highly flammable liquids.
“This accident is another reminder of the need to improve the safety of transporting hazardous materials by rail,” said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.
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.
Oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to more than 435,000 in 2013, 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, according to American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.
The downside: Trains hauling Bakken-region oil have been involved in major accidents in Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama and Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.
Reports of leaks and other oil releases from tank cars are up as well, from 12 in 2008 to 186 last year, according to Department of Transportation records reviewed by The Associated Press.
Just Saturday — two days before the West Virginia wreck — 29 cars of a 100-car Canadian National Railway train carrying diluted bitumen crude derailed in a remote area 50 miles south of Timmins, Ontario, spilling oil and catching fire. That train was headed from Alberta to Eastern Canada.
The train Monday was bound for an oil shipping depot in Yorktown, Virginia, along the same route where three tanker cars plunged into the James River in Lynchburg, Virginia, prompting an evacuation last year.
The train derailed near unincorporated Mount Carbon just after passing through Montgomery, a town of 1,946, on a stretch where the rails wind past businesses and homes crowded between the water and the steep, tree-covered hills. All but two of the train’s 109 cars were tank cars, and 26 of them left the tracks.
Fire crews had little choice but to let the tanks burn themselves out. Each carried up to 30,000 gallons of crude.
One person — the owner of the destroyed home — was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries were reported, according to the train company, CSX. The two-person crew, an engineer and conductor, managed to decouple the train’s engines from the wreck behind it and walk away unharmed.
The NTSB said its investigators will compare this wreck to others including Lynchburg and one near Casselton, N.D., when a Bakken crude train created a huge fireball that forced the evacuation of the farming town.
No cause has been determined, said CSX regional vice president Randy Cheetham. He said the tracks had been inspected just three days before the wreck.
“They’ll look at train handling, look at the track, look at the cars. But until they get in there and do their investigation, it’s unwise to do any type of speculation,” he said.
By Tuesday evening, power crews were restoring electricity, water treatment plants were going back online, and most of the local residents were back home. Initial tests showed no crude near water plant intake points, state Environmental Protection spokeswoman Kelley Gillenwater said.
State officials do have some say over rail safety.
Railroads are required by federal order to tell state emergency officials where trains carrying Bakken crude are traveling. CSX and other railroads called this information proprietary, but more than 20 states rejected the industry’s argument, informing the public as well as first-responders about the crude moving through their communities.
West Virginia is among those keeping it secret. State officials responded to an AP Freedom of Information request by releasing documents redacted to remove nearly every detail.
There are no plans to reconsider after this latest derailment, said Melissa Cross, a program manager for the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
Contributors include Joan Lowy in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana; and Pam Ramsey in Charleston, West Virginia. Mattise reported from Charleston.
Repost from CBC News [Editor: New details: carrying tar-sands dilbit; 15 cars released crude oil and seven caught fire; responders letting it burn itself out; oil pooling at the frozen headwaters of a small creek; nearby Mattagami First Nation concerned; expect all trees in the surrounding area to be coated with toxins, some die-off; soil contamination a long range cleanup. – RS]
Gogama oil spill raises concerns about environmental damage
Cleanup continues at the site of a CN train derailment about 30 km northwest of Gogama, Ont.
CBC News, Feb 18, 2015 9:27 AM ET, Updated: Feb 18, 2015 11:57 AM ET
Derailed tank cars, Gogama, Ontario. (Transportation Safety Board)
While investigators continue to search for the cause of a CN train Saturday near Gogama, Ont., the environmental impact is becoming more apparent.
Black charred oil tankers lie on their sides in snow stained by crude oil.
CN said the derailed train was carrying diluted bitumen from Alberta to eastern Canada.
Laurentian University professor Charles Ramcharan says that’s one of the worst things that can be spilled.
“The trouble is that it’s very toxic, so if you have a spill it causes a lot of damage and because the bitumen is a solid, it stays on the landscape for a very long time.”
The nearby Mattagami First Nation is also concerned.
Oil is pooling at the frozen headwaters of a small creek near the site of the derailment.
Councillor Jennifer Constant said that waterway leads to her community.
“The impacts may be not immediate, but what are the long-term aspects going to be for people who do utilize the lake and go hunting in the area? They’ve used these lands for time immemorial and they’re worried about the impacts of that,” she said.
“Their health or practices have the potential to be affected by this.”
Contamination, die-off
While CN works with partners to clean up the spill, Ramachran said he worries the incident could fall off the radar because of its remote location.
“Just because there are no immediate human health concerns, I do worry that this one will kind of fall off the radar.”
CN says crews are letting a controlled fire burn out at the site.
Once the dillutants burn off, tar will be left to remove, Ramcharan noted.
He predicted all trees in the surrounding area will be coated with toxins, leading to some die-off. He said the soil will be contaminated as well.
A total of 15 cars released crude oil and seven caught fire when the train went off the tracks late Saturday night.
The Transportation Safety Board is investigating a section of broken rail containing a rail joint and a broken wheel.
The director with Transport Action Ontario, an organization that advocates for transportation improvements, said some kind of mechanical failure might be to blame.
“It’s hard to tell,” Dan Hammond said.
“You know, I would like the investigation to take its course on this one. But things like broken wheels, the industry does not like to see.”
CN said both the train and the track passed safety inspections shortly before the derailment.
Repost from McClatchy News [Editor: Another excellent contextual overview and detailed report by Curtis Tate. New in this report: CSX providing hotel rooms for evacuees; and discussion of WV refusal to provide hazmat notification to the public and estimate of 2 to 5 oil trains per week; and Sarah Feinberg, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration is a West Virginia native. – RS]
2 West Virginia towns evacuated as another oil train derails, catches fire
By Curtis Tate, McClatchy Washington Bureau, February 16, 2015
A fire burns Monday, Feb. 16, 2015, after a train derailment near Charleston, W.Va. Nearby residents were told to evacuate as state emergency response and environmental officials headed to the scene. JOHN RABY — AP
WASHINGTON — A train carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire Monday in West Virginia, less than two weeks after the U.S. Department of Transportation sent a package of new rail safety regulations to the White House for review.
The CSX train was traveling on the same route as another crude oil train that derailed and caught fire 10 months ago in downtown Lynchburg, Va. It was the second derailment in as many days of a train loaded with crude oil. Early Sunday, a Canadian National train loaded with crude oil derailed in northern Ontario. At least seven cars burst into flames.
In Monday’s derailment, residents of two small towns east of Charleston were evacuated, and at least one tank car fell into the Kanawha River, according to the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety. The river supplies drinking water for several local communities, and residents were urged Monday to conserve water.
The fire was expected to burn throughout the night.
A spokesman for the department said the 109-car train was traveling from North Dakota to Yorktown, Va., and that 12 to 15 cars had derailed. Trains from North Dakota’s Bakken region have been traveling to the Yorktown facility since December 2013, where the oil is transferred to barges for delivery to refineries on the East Coast.
Photos taken by local residents posted to Twitter showed a column of black smoke and fire that resembled the Lynchburg accident and others. Early Sunday, a Canadian National train carrying crude oil derailed in a remote part of northern Ontario.
Other fiery accidents have taken place in Casselton, N.D., Aliceville, Ala., and Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The latter derailment, in July 2013, killed 47 people and wiped out the town’s business district.
Those derailments prompted a series of changes by government and industry on both sides of the border, including operating practices, track inspections, train speeds and tank car design. The new rules currently under review by the White House Office of Management and Budget are scheduled for publication in mid-May.
The response to Monday’s derailment was complicated by a winter storm. The National Weather Service forecast a snowfall of 6 to 10 inches in the area.
Sarah Feinberg, the acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, said investigators from her agency and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration were on their way to the scene, about six hours from Washington.
“Both agencies are monitoring the situation closely and will commence official inquiries into the cause of the derailment,” said Kevin Thompson, an FRA spokesman. “The agencies are prepared to take all necessary enforcement actions following the investigation.”
Feinberg, a native of West Virginia, was appointed last month by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx to lead the agency. Feinberg and Robert Lauby, the FRA’s chief safety officer, will assess the derailment site Tuesday, the department said late Monday.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which last month added tank cars to its list of “most-wanted” safety improvements, was monitoring the incident, a spokesman said.
CSX, based in Jacksonville, Fla., was providing hotel rooms to the evacuees and working with local emergency personnel at the derailment scene, the railroad posted on Twitter.
Following the Lynchburg derailment last April, the Transportation Department began requiring railroads to notify state officials of shipments of 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude.
The West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management declined McClatchy’s request to review the notifications in June, invoking an exemption under the state’s open records law because CSX had marked the documents “proprietary and trade secrets.”
However, the frequency of the shipments could be gleaned from surrounding states, notably Kentucky and Virginia, that did make the reports available to McClatchy and other news organizations.
The reports show that two to five Bakken trains a week traverse West Virginia.
Repost from McClatchy News [Editor: Once again Curtis Tate has produced an incredible wide-ranging and deep analysis of current issues and developments around crude by rail in the US. This article can serve as a must-read primer on crude by rail. Note that the presentation below is only a rough copy – much better viewing on McClatchy’s website. – RS]
By Curtis Tate, December 31, 2014
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Every day, strings of black tank cars filled with crude oil roll slowly across a long wooden railroad bridge over the Black Warrior River.
Curtis Tate / McClatchyDecaying track and bridge conditions on the Alabama southern railroad could pose a risk to Tuscaloosa, Ala., population 95,000. Above, video of trains crossing the bridge.
The 116-year-old span is a landmark in this city of 95,000 people, home to the University of Alabama. Residents have proposed and gotten married next to the bridge. Children play under it. During Alabama football season, die-hard Crimson Tide fans set up camp in its shadow.
But with some timber pilings so badly rotted that you can stick your hand right through them, and a “MacGyver”-esque combination of plywood, concrete and plastic pipe employed to patch up others, the bridge demonstrates the limited ability of government and industry to manage the hidden risks of a sudden shift in energy production.
And it shows why communities nationwide are in danger.
“It may not happen today or tomorrow, but one day a town or a city is going to get wiped out,” said Larry Mann, one of the foremost authorities on rail safety, who as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill in 1970 was the principal author of the Federal Railroad Safety Act, which authorized the government to regulate the safety of railroads.
Almost overnight in 2010, trains began crisscrossing the country carrying an energy bounty that included millions of gallons of crude oil and ethanol. The nation’s fleet of tens of thousands of tank cars, coupled with a 140,000-mile network of rail lines, had emerged as a viable way to move these economically essential commodities. But few thought to step back and take a hard look at the industry’s readiness for the job.
It may not happen today or tomorrow, but one day a town or a city is going to get wiped out.
Larry Mann, principal author of the Federal Railroad Safety Act
In a series of stories, McClatchy has detailed how government and industry are playing catch-up to long-overdue safety improvements, from redesigning the tank cars that carry the oil to rebuilding the track and bridges over which the trains run.
Those efforts in the past year and a half may have spared life and property in many communities. But they came too late for Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, a Canadian lakeside resort town just across the border from Maine. A train derailment there on July 6, 2013, unleashed a torrent of burning crude oil into the town’s center. Forty-seven people were killed.
“Sometimes it takes a disaster to get elected officials and agencies to address problems that were out there,” said Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine, a member of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees railroads, pipelines and hazardous materials, who’s leaving Congress after six terms.
Other subsequent but nonfatal derailments in Aliceville, Ala., Casselton, N.D., and Lynchburg, Va., followed a familiar pattern: massive fires and spills, large-scale evacuations and local officials furious that they hadn’t been informed beforehand of such shipments.
The U.S. Department of Transportation will issue a set of new rules in January regarding the transportation of flammable liquids by rail.
“Safety is our top priority,” said Kevin Thompson, a spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration,“both in the rule-making and through other immediate actions we have taken over the last year and a half.”
Nevertheless, McClatchy has identified other gaps in the oversight of crude by rail:
The Federal Railroad Administration entrusts bridge inspections to the railroads and doesn’t keep data on their condition, unlike its sister agency, the Federal Highway Administration, which does so for road bridges.
Most states don’t employ dedicated railroad bridge inspectors. Only California has begun developing a bridge inspection program.
The U.S. Department of Transportation concluded that crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale region posed an elevated risk in rail transport, so regulators required railroads to notify state officials of large shipments of Bakken crude. However, the requirement excluded other kinds of oil increasingly transported by rail, including those from Canada, Texas, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah.
While railroads and refiners have taken steps to reserve the newest, sturdiest tank cars available for Bakken trains, they, too, have ruptured in derailments, and Bakken and other kinds of oil are likely to be moving around the country in a mix of older and newer cars for several more years.
We anticipate that crude by rail is going to stay over the long term
Kevin Birn, director of IHS Energy
Staying power
American railroads moved only 9,500 cars of crude oil in 2008 but more than 400,000 in 2013, according to industry figures. In the first seven months of 2014, trains carried 759,000 barrels a day – that’s more than 200,000 cars altogether – or 8 percent of the country’s oil production, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.
The energy boom, centered on North Dakota’s Bakken region, was made possible by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a horizontal drilling method that unlocks oil and gas trapped in rock formations. It was also made possible by the nation’s expansive rail system.
Crude by rail has become a profitable business for some of the world’s richest men. Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, bought BNSF Railway in 2009. It’s since become the nation’s leading hauler of crude oil in trains. Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, is the largest shareholder in Canadian National, the only rail company that has a direct route from oil-rich western Canada to the refinery-rich Gulf Coast.
Amid a worldwide slide in oil prices in recent weeks, crude by rail shows few signs of slowing down. The price per barrel of oil has dropped nearly 50 percent since last January. Still, the six largest North American railroads reported hauling a record 38,775 carloads of petroleum the second week of December.
“We anticipate that crude by rail is going to stay over the long term,” said Kevin Birn, director at IHS Energy, an energy information and analysis firm, and a co-author of a recent analysis of the trend.
Regulatory agencies and the rail industry may not have anticipated the sudden increase in crude oil moving by rail. However, government and industry had long known that most of the tank cars pressed into crude oil service had poor safety records. And after 180 years in business, U.S. railroads knew that track defects were a leading cause of derailments.
To be sure, railroads are taking corrective steps, including increased track inspections and reduced train speeds. They’ve endorsed stronger tank cars and funded beefed-up training for first responders.
Ed Greenberg, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, the industry’s principal trade group, said railroads began a “top-to-bottom review” of their operations after the Quebec accident.
“Every time there is an incident, the industry learns from what occurred and takes steps to address it through ongoing investments into rail infrastructure, as well as cutting-edge research and development,” he said. “The industry is committed to continuous improvement in actively moving forward at making rail transportation even safer.”
But the industry continues to resist other changes, including calls for more transparency. The dominant Eastern railroads, Norfolk Southern and CSX, sued Maryland to stop the state from releasing information to McClatchy about crude oil trains.
The industry also seeks affirmation from the courts that only the federal government has the power to regulate railroads. The dominant Western carriers, BNSF and Union Pacific, joined by the Association of American Railroads, sued California over a state law that requires them to develop comprehensive oil spill-response plans.
Curtis Tate / McClatchyDecaying track and bridge conditions on the Alabama southern railroad could pose a risk to Tuscaloosa, Ala., population 95,000. Above, video of trains crossing the bridge.
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