Train derailment at Norfolk Southern Abrams Yard in Upper Merion under investigation
By Oscar Gamble, 11/13/15, 10:48 AM EST
A section of train derailed at Abrams Yard of Norfolk Southern along Henderson Road in Upper Merion Friday morning, Nov. 13, 2015. Gene Walsh — Digital FIrst Media
UPPER MERION >> Five tanker cars on a train carrying heavy crude oil bound for New Jersey derailed near the Norfolk Southern Abrams Yard in King of Prussia Friday.
No one was injured and no oil was spilled.
The derailment occurred around 4:30 a.m. during switching operations at the yard while the train was traveling less than 5 mph.
According to Norfolk Southern Resident Vice President of Governmental Relations Rudy Husband, there has been no disruption to rail line operations and the derailment poses no risk to public safety. Husband said he anticipates it will take several hours to re-rail the cars and assess the damage to the tracks.
Service on the affected segment of track will resume after repairs are made.
This past May, emergency responders from Montgomery and Chester counties put into practice techniques that were learned over a three-day training course on containing an oil spill in the event of an oil train derailment. The exercise was one in a series of trainings and seminars on behalf of the Montgomery County Department of Public Safety to help municipal first responders prepare for a catastrophic oil train derailment.
In August, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf released a series of recommendations meant to reduce the risk of a catastrophic derailment, including reduced speeds through cities, beefed-up track inspections and a call for trackside communities to plan for an emergency.
The cause of the derailment at Norfolk Southern Abrams Yard remains under investigation.
OPINION | Jessie Mehrhoff, November 12, 2015 11:21 a.m. EST
(Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
It’s the fundamental connection between environmental degradation and human health that has me concerned about the prospect of Congress lifting the U.S. oil export ban, which will worsen climate change and threaten our communities with toxic spills.
The list of risks climate change poses to human health is long. Increased temperatures will spread tropical diseases to new latitudes. Heat waves will cause more deaths across the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to more health-threatening smog and decrease crop yields. Detailing these impacts and more in 2009, “The Lancet,” one of the world’s most respected medical journals, labeled climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
These aren’t just future consequences, to be experienced on the other side of the globe. In New Jersey, we still face the impacts of superstorm Sandy three years later. Climate scientists at Rutgers University predict even more extreme weather if climate change goes unchecked.
In addition to these consequences, the American Lung Association’s 2015 State of the Air report card has given Monmouth County an “F” for the number of high-ozone level days, and finds more than 56,000 people in the county suffer from asthma. Climate change is only going to make numbers such as this climb as our air quality worsens.
To avoid global warming’s most devastating health impacts, we must end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to pollution-free, renewable energy. Lifting our decades-old ban on the export of U.S.-produced oil represents the opposite course.
If the oil companies have a larger distribution market for oil produced in the U.S., they will drill more — upward of another 3.3 million barrels per day for the next 20 years, by some General Accounting Office estimates. Even if only a fraction of all this extra oil is burned, global warming pollution could still increase 22 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of five average-sized coal power plants.
In addition to worsening climate change, there’s the public health threat of transporting additional oil across the country. While most crude oil is shipped around the U.S. by pipeline, shipments by rail have been increasing. To keep up with increased demand, oil trains have grown larger and tow more tanker cars than ever before.
Currently, trains carrying highly flammable crude oil travel through 11 of the 21 counties in New Jersey —Mercer, Middlesex, Gloucester, Somerset, Hunterdon, Bergen, Camden, Essex, Hudson, Union and Warren — en route to refineries. These oil trains are an accident waiting to happen, and have spurred trainings across the state where firefighters, police and other emergency responders have prepared courses of action in an oil derailment emergency.
The fear of oil train accidents — where toxic crude oil is spilled into our communities — is not hyperbole. Accidents have been on the rise, with more oil accidentally dumped into our environment in 2013 alone than during the previous three decades combined.
In 2015, we’ve already seen three major oil train accidents. In Mount Carbon, West Virginia, a rail oil spill led to evacuations and a governor-declared state of emergency. In Galena, Illinois, a spill threatened to pollute the Mississippi River. A spill in Heimdal, North Dakota, forced the evacuation of a town.
If we are to prevent these accidents from taking place in the 11 New Jersey counties through which these trains travel, we must work to reduce the amount of oil these trains carry. Transporting the increased oil we would produce domestically if the oil export ban were lifted could require enough trains to span the country from Los Angeles to Boston seven times over.
Increasing our nation’s crude oil drilling and transportation by lifting our decades’ old ban on exports leads to more risk, not less. And the inconvenient truth of lifting the oil export ban means more drilling, more global warming pollution, and more threats to public health.
There is a way around lifting the oil export ban in the first place. President Obama is against lifting the ban, and the measure only narrowly cleared a Senate committee earlier in the month. That’s why we need Sen. Cory Booker to join Sen. Bob Menendez in standing strong against the oil industry and to vote to keep the ban in place — for the sake of the environment and public health.
Jessie Mehrhoff is lead organizer with Environment New Jersey, a citizen-based environmental advocacy organization.
CP: Broken Rail Caused Oil Train Derailment in Wisconsin
By The Associated Press, November 11, 2015, 9:33 P.M. E.S.T.
Workers tend to the scene of a train derailment in Watertown, Wis., on Nov. 9 after 13 cars of a Canadian Pacific train carrying crude oil overturned Sunday. (John Hart/AP)
WATERTOWN, Wis. — Canadian Pacific Railway says a broken rail caused an oil train derailment in southeastern Wisconsin last weekend.
The railroad said Wednesday the defect was not visible to the naked eye.
More than a dozen cars of a CP train loaded with crude oil jumped the tracks in Watertown on Sunday afternoon, puncturing one car that spilled hundreds of gallons of its load and caused the evacuation of a neighborhood.
The railroad says it uses rail flaw detector cars that use ultrasonic technology to detect defects the eye cannot see. The technology last passed over the site in late September, and nothing was found.
The derailment happened a day after a BNSF Railway freight train derailed Saturday near Alma in western Wisconsin, spilling ethanol into the Mississippi River.
North County residents meet to oppose oil train rail spur
By Jackie Iddings, November 10, 2015 7:44 am
Tankers courtesy Mesa Refinery Watch Group
–A group of concerned North County residents met earlier this month at Congregation Ohr Tzafon in Atascadero for a public forum about Phillip 66’s plans to run oil trains through California to its Mesa refinery in Nipomo. Phillips 66 has applied to the county for a permit to build a rail terminal to unload oil trains carrying tar sands oil crude from Alberta, Canada.
Federal laws prohibit state and local governments from passing laws and regulations that control trains passing through their jurisdictions, but the group believes that San Luis Obispo County is in a unique position because denying Phillips 66 the permit will not only prevent the oil trains from running through San Luis Obispo County, it can significantly reduce oil-train traffic in California.
Phillips 66 proposes to bring mile-long oil trains, each carrying 2.4 million gallons of low grade tar sands crude, through San Luis Obispo county five times a week for the next 20 years. Once refined at the mesa refinery, the oil will be transported by train to the San Francisco Bay area for further treatment, then exported to the highest bidder.
Phillips 66 says importing the lower qualilty crude is necessary because it is running out of California crude, putting jobs at the Nipomo Mesa refinery at risk. The Mesa Refinery Watch Group challenges the oil company, stating “Phillips’ corporate executives have stated in writing that they want their entire company to process lower-cost crude oil in order to generate higher profits.” A statement on the Mesa Refinery Watch Group’s web site says, “The issue is about higher profits by switching to rail delivery, not about protecting jobs.”
Beth Kean from the California Nurses Association, and Lee Perkins from ProtectSLO presented concerns that would impact San Luis Obispo county in the event of an oil train accident.
Kean and Perkins stated the danger of derailments and explosions are very real. More than 95,000 people in San Luis Obispo County live, work, or attend school within a one mile blast zone around the Union Pacific tracks that would be used by the oil trains, they said. Retired Templeton fire chief Greg O’Sullivan spoke from Sunday night’s audience stating that an oil train derailment and explosion would tax local first responder resources and could result in hundreds of deaths in a populated area. O’Sullivan stated that the risk to public safety and environmental resources such as water, is just too high to be balanced by any claimed safety measures.
On October 7, 2015 the Los Angeles Times published a table showing 31 oil-train crashes between January 2013 and July 2015. Over half of thesewere credited to track issues. In an April 2015 press release announcing the Department of Transportation’s intent to improve transport safety the DOT reported the number of accidents involving trains carrying crude oil “is unprecedented.” “Operation Safe Delivery Update” a DOT report released in July 2014 reported the “potential devastating consequences of a crude oil train derailment.” Another DOT press release issued in May 2014, “Upon information derived from recent railroad accidents and subsequent DOT investigations, the Secretary of Transportation has found that an unsafe condition or an unsafe practice is causing or otherwise constitutes an imminent hazard to the safe transportation of hazardous materials.”
The DOT released derailment projections in an August 2014 issue of the Federal Register in which it presents a high end risk assessment for derailment of crude oil shipments at 5 to 15 events between 2015 and 2034. The assessment includes 10 additional events in the same time frame of “higher consequences.” These higher consequences total up to environmental damages, injuries and deaths costing between $1.15 and $5.75 billion for a single event.
A July 2013 oil train derailment in Lac-Megantic,Ontario, resulted in 47 deaths and clean-up costs were estimated at over $180 million. The railroad, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway folded because it was only carrying $25 million in liability insurance, leaving Canadians responsible for financing the costs.
A draft of the Phillips 66 environmental impact report (EIR) is available for public view on the web site for the San Luis Obispo County Planning Department. The final EIR may be released in early 2016 and public hearings can start as soon as on month after that release. Opposition to oil trains is growing in San Luis Obispo county and across the state as well as in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation.
Kean and Perkins are making presentations at the San Miguel School Board meeting at 6:30 on Nov. 12, and to the Templeton School Board meeting at 6 p.m. on Dec. 10.
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