West Virginia train derailment causes massive fire, evacuations
By Ryan Parker, Feb 16, 2015, 1:31pm
A train derailment Monday afternoon in West Virginia caused multiple explosions and a massive fire, officials said.
At least one home near the derailment in Fayette County caught fire and has been destroyed, according to Lawrence Messina, the state’s public safety spokesman.
The derailment happened about 1:20 p.m. Eastern time, Messina said. Three hours later, the fire was still burning, he said.
The CSX train was hauling crude oil, which is leaking from at least one of the cars, Messina said. There are no reported injuries, he said.
“Our concern is oil is leaking into the Kanawha River,” he said. Two water intakes downstream from the treatment plant have been shut down, he said.
CSX acknowledged that the company was aware of the situation. “We are working with first responders on the scene to ensure the safety of the community,” it said on Twitter.
Some of the tanker cars exploded, and oil on a portion of the river is on fire, according to the office of Kanawha County Emergency Management & Floodplain Management, which was assisting in the response.
Kanawha County is downriver from Fayette County.
Adena Village, near the derailment, has been evacuated, and authorities were beginning to evacuate homes across the river from the fire about 4:30 p.m., Messina said. At least 100 people have been evacuated, he said.
Fayette County is about 60 miles southeast of Charleston.
Pictures on social media, which a spokesman for the Montgomery Fire Department confirmed were of the scene, showed fire engulfing the train.
Heavy snow is falling in the area, but Messina said it is unclear if that will help extinguish the fire.
Repost from 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA [Editor: The derailment happened in the CSX Corp. rail yard, and was very near to Interstate 95, Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia Naval Yard. NBC Philadelphia reported that the tank cars remained upright but were “leaning.” See also The Morning Call, Allentown, PA. – RS]
11 train cars derail in South Philadelphia
January 31, 2015
Philadelphia firefighters and Hazmat crews swarmed the area near Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia Naval Yard after 11 train cars went off the tracks early Saturday morning.
The derailment happened after 3:00 a.m. near South 11th Street just south of Interstate-95.
The cars were carrying crude oil.
After it was determined, there were no ruptured cars, crews turned the incident over to CSX.
CSX officials brought in cranes to upright the cars.
By Laura Arenschield & Rick Rouan, January 29, 2015
Ohio’s railroad tracks handle at least 45 million gallons of Bakken crude oil in a week. This view of tracks is from Groveport Road on the South Side. | Tom Dodge | Dispatch
Millions of gallons of some of the most volatile crude oil in North America are being transported on rail lines through Ohio each week, according to reports that the state had kept secret until this week.
The railroad-company reports show that 45 million to 137 million gallons of Bakken crude oil come through Ohio each week from North Dakota oil fields on the way to East Coast refineries.
Two million to 25 million gallons a week come through Franklin County alone.
Bakken crude oil is desirable to oil and gas companies because it requires less refining than other shale oil to be turned into diesel fuel and gasoline. It also is highly flammable.
Those reports are sent to state emergency-management agencies. The U.S. Department of Transportation has said the files don’t contain sensitive security details, prompting some states, including Virginia and Washington, to make the reports public.
Then this week, the state released the records to Lea Harper, managing director of the FreshWater Accountability Project, an environmental advocacy group.
The state released the reports to TheDispatch yesterday.
“So many other states are doing it, and our legal staff started looking into it and made a determination that it probably was not as volatile of information as it first seemed to be,” said Joseph Andrews, a spokesman for the State Emergency Response Commission in Ohio.
One of Harper’s relatives lives in a nursing home in Seneca County, near railroad tracks where Bakken crude-oil shipments pass each week. She said she worries about his safety.
“Anything that has happened in the past can certainly happen again,” she said, referencing the explosions in Virginia and Quebec.
No Bakken shipments have exploded or caught fire in Ohio, Andrews said.
Transport of crude oil via rail has surged in recent years amid the boom in the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota.
The amount of crude petroleum hauled on U.S. railroads increased from more than 20 million tons in 2012 to nearly 40 million tons in 2013, the most recent data available through the Association of American Railroads. In 2011, about 5 million tons of crude was hauled by rail.
That number includes all oil, not just Bakken crude oil.
With nearly 5,300 miles of track, Ohio has one of the densest concentrations of rail in the nation and is a crossroads between the Bakken shale formation and East Coast refineries.
Most of the Bakken crude traveling through Ohio is being transported on CSX rail lines. The CSX report shows that 30 million to 105 million gallons of Bakken crude are hauled through Ohio each week. Norfolk Southern moves 13 million to 28 million gallons of Bakken crude.
Norfolk Southern spokesman David Pidgeon said the company opposes public release of its routes for Bakken crude for security reasons.
“We have to balance that openness with operating a secure network,” Pidgeon said.
In an email, CSX spokeswoman Kristin Seay said crude-oil shipments represent less than 2 percent of the freight the railroad transports.
She said the company often goes beyond federal standards for track inspection and stays well within speed limits.
In February 2013, railroads opted for voluntary measures to ensure safe shipment of crude oil, including reduced speed limits and more inspections.
Canadian Pacific Railway runs an average of three trains per week on a short stretch of Norfolk Southern rail that cuts through northwestern Ohio. Those trains cross from Indiana into Williams County and travel northeast through Fulton County before crossing into Michigan.
The train that exploded in Quebec started as a Canadian Pacific train. The company transferred the train to Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway in Canada before the derailment.
Canadian Pacific has made several changes since, including tighter security requirements, more frequent inspections of tracks and equipment and more worker training, said Andy Cummings, a company spokesman.
“We took a very close look at our practices,” he said.
The reports sent to state emergency-management agencies do not say when Bakken crude oil is coming through Ohio. Railroad companies are not required to report schedules for those shipments.
In Cuyahoga County, 29 million to 45 million gallons of Bakken crude travel along rail lines each week.
“It’s a concern,” said Walter Topps, Cuyahoga County’s emergency-management agency administrator. “It’s not a concern in the sense that we’re not ready. But there’s an awareness in the first-responder community, among fire departments … we’re all aware of this.”
Every day, 40 trains carry 30,000 loads of freight – some containing volatile materials – while another 22 trains transport 6,000 passengers through the “Center of the Universe.”
A lot could go wrong.
But CSX and local emergency services officials assured members of town council last week that stringent planning and strong communication between agencies should help ensure a swift response in the event of a train emergency or prevent one all together.
The issue of rail safety is tied to what Bryan Rhode, CSX regional vice president in charge of state government affairs in Virginia, called an “energy revolution” currently underway in the United States.
Crowds line the train tracks in downtown Ashland as a CSX train makes its way through town in this 2012 Herald-Progress file photo
With increased domestic oil production come questions about how to get those resources to market. Rhode said that traditionally, crude oil would be transported by pipeline, but that infrastructure doesn’t exist in many of the new areas where the raw materials are being extracted, and that’s where rail comes in.
“This idea of moving crude [oil] by rail really sprung up a couple years ago,” Rhode said. “I’ve talked to people who have been with CSX much longer than I have and they tell me if somebody had come to them five years ago and said we’d be moving crude oil by rail, they would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’”
But it’s now something railroads are doing in increasing volumes even though Rhode said transporting crude oil still only constitutes about 2 percent of CSX’s business.
The issue has received increasing attention following a CSX train derailment in Lynchburg last April, when a large shipment of crude oil exploded along the James River and near the city’s downtown sector.
“In a lot of ways we got very lucky because nobody was hurt or killed,” Rhode said. “But it was still something that impacted Lynchburg, impacted the James River and something that we strive every day to avoid allowing to happen again.”
Even prior to the Lynchburg crash, there had been a push for safer crude oil transport. In February 2013 the Federal Railroad Administration issued a number of emergency orders and regulations aimed at enhancing safety. Following the crash, Rhode said the federal government implemented more stringent regulations concerning the shipment of crude oil by rail and HAZMAT materials, in general.
But despite those regulations and what Rhode called a culture of safety at CSX, accidents still can and do occur.
“We do everything we can to prevent accidents from happening, but when you’re moving huge amounts of material in large equipment, we all recognize that sometimes, despite our best efforts, things do happen,” Rhode said. “Our goal is zero preventable accidents.”
Emergency plans in place
Hanover is contained in the RF&P sub-division of what CSX calls its Baltimore division, bookended by Richmond to the south and Philadelphia to the north.
According to Henry Moore, division chief of planning for Hanover Fire-EMS, molten sulfur and crude oil comprise half of all hazardous materials making their way through the county on a daily basis. Ethanol carloads are also increasing with about 210,000 gallons of the volatile substance making its way by rail to Stafford County on a daily basis.
Moore said Hanover and the region have bolstered their foam suppression capabilities in preparation for a derailment or catastrophic event and that regional response teams routinely participate in emergency exercises in preparation for railroad accidents where hazardous materials are present.
Hanover has in place a standard operating guideline for responding to railroad emergencies and also maintains an initial responder checklist for public safety personnel created for joint response to train crises.
Anthony Callahan, deputy chief of the Ashland Police Department, said all Ashland officers are trained in how to handle critical incidents. In the advent of a train-related incident, responding officers are taught to first establish communication and to contact other resources. Officers are also instructed to designate a “danger zone,” where only emergency responders are allowed, and to set up inner and outer perimeters. They would then implement an incident command post to direct emergency personnel and secure a staging area for other first responders.
However, Callahan said that his officers will assume different roles based on the severity of the actual incident. In cases where a car is stuck on the tracks, for example, Callahan said the first responding unit would get in touch with CSX and work to get the occupants out of the vehicle, with the immediate consideration being the health and safety of individuals on scene and in the area.
In cases where there has been a collision requiring any sort of spill cleanup, Callahan said Fire-EMS would take the lead, with APD in a support role.
In case of an incident, Rhode said CSX also brings a number of resources to the table, including trained personnel and heavy equipment staged throughout its network to ensure a quick response.
If a community is impacted, CSX steps up to offer relocation services and local aid.
Rhode said that in the advent of an actual emergency, cross-jurisdictional communication is key. In the case of the Lynchburg incident, officials from CSX had existing relationships with state and local emergency response teams.
“We weren’t handing out business cards. We all knew each other; we’d worked together before,” Rhode said. “If you don’t know each other and you’re not talking to each other before [an emergency] happens, you’re probably going to have issues.”
Fortunately, ties are strong between CSX and local fire, EMS and law enforcement agencies, officials told town council.
Rhode said CSX partners with local first responders to make sure they have the training they need to effectively respond to an incident. This takes place through online courses and local “tabletop” exercises on up to specialized, in-person, training dealing specifically with crude oil accidents.
Moore said Fire-EMS is in the final stages of planning a joint Amtrak derailment tabletop exercise in Ashland with Randolph-Macon College and the Ashland Police Department. The training should take place in the coming spring, one more safeguard aimed at ensuring this train town also remains a safe town.
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