Tag Archives: DOT-111

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Federal Regulation (U.S.), US Department of Transportation

Federal Court Order: Explosive DOT-111 “Bomb Train” Oil Tank Cars Can Continue to Roll

Repost from DeSmogBlog
[Editor: see also related story at SputnikNews.  – RS]

Federal Court Order: Explosive DOT-111 “Bomb Train” Oil Tank Cars Can Continue to Roll

By Steve Horn, 1/23/15

A U.S. federal court has ordered a halt in proceedings until May in a case centering around oil-by-rail tankers pitting the Sierra Club and ForestEthics against the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). As a result, potentially explosive DOT-111 oil tank cars, dubbed “bomb trains” by activists, can continue to roll through towns and cities across the U.S. indefinitely.  

“The briefing schedule previously established by the court is vacated,” wrote Chris Goelz, a mediator for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “This appeal is stayed until May 12, 2015, or pending publication in the Federal Register of the final tank car standards and phase out of DOT-111 tank cars, whichever occurs first.”

Order to Delay DOT-111 Bomb Trains Case
Image Credit: U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

Filing its initial petition for review on December 2, the Sierra Club/ForestEthics lawsuit had barely gotten off the ground before being delayed.

That initial petition called for a judicial review of the DOT‘s denial of a July 15, 2014 Petition to Issue an Emergency Order Prohibiting the Shipment of Bakken Crude Oil in Unsafe Tank Cars written by EarthJustice on behalf of the two groups. On November 7, DOT denied Earthjustice’s petition, leading the groups to file the lawsuit.

Initially, DOT told the public it would release its draft updated oil-by-rail regulations by March 31, but now will wait until May 12 to do so. As reported by The Journal News, the delay came in the aftermath of pressure from Big Oil and Big Rail.

“In a joint filing, the Association of American Railroads (AAR) and the American Petroleum Institute (API) contend the tank car industry doesn’t have the capacity to retrofit the estimated 143,000 tank cars that would need to be modernized to meet the new specifications,” wrote The Journal News. “Nor can manufacturers build new tank cars fast enough, they say.”

The “bomb trains” carrying volatile crude oil obtained via hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) from the Bakken Shale, then, will continue to roll unimpeded for the foreseeable future. They will do so in the same DOT-111 rail cars that put the fracked oil-by-rail safety issue on the map to begin with — the July 2013 deadly explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

And as DeSmogBlog has reported, industry promises to phase-out DOT-111s on a voluntary basis have rung hollow.

“The courts and the administration are dragging their feet on common sense safety steps that will take the most dangerous oil tanker cars off the tracks, slow down these trains, and help emergency responders prepare for accidents,” Eddie Scher, communications director for ForestEthics, told DeSmogBlog.

“We filed our lawsuit because the DOT is not moving fast enough on safety. This court’s decision ignored the imminent threat to the 25 million Americans who live in the blast zone and the communities around the nation that don’t have the luxury of waiting for DOT and the rail and oil industry lobbyists to finish their rule.”

Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Tank car retirement, Train speed, U.S. Department of Transportation

Groups Question Industry Influence on Oil Train Safety Rules, submit FOI request

Press Release from ForestEthics

Groups Question Industry Influence on Oil Train Safety Rules

Freedom of Information Requests Target Five Federal Agencies, Nearly 100 Lobbyists

By Eddie Scher, Jan 15, 2015

Today four public interest groups requested records exchanged between five US government agencies and nearly 100 oil and rail industry representatives on new oil train safety standards. The Department of Transportation announced yesterday that the agency would miss the January 15 deadline set by Congress and issue final rules by May 12, 2015.

“New oil train safety standards are decades late: the National Transportation Safety Board first called antiquated DOT-111 tank cars unsafe for hauling crude oil in 1991,” says Ross Hammond, ForestEthics US campaigns director. “But the administration seems to have trouble asking the oil and rail industry for common sense safety standards like speed limits, sharing information with firefighters, and a ban of the most dangerous cars.”

The Freedom of Information Act requests filed by ForestEthics, Communities for a Better Environment, Ezra Prentice Homes Tenants Association (Albany, NY), and Citizens Acting or Rail Safety (La Crosse, WI) name 97 individual lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute, Association of American Railroads and specific oil and rail companies, including Chevron, Tesoro, and Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF). Among the lobbyists named are six former members of Congress: Trent Lott, Vin Weber, John Breaux, Steve LaTourette, Max Sandlin and Bill Lipinski.

“The public has the right to know how an army of lobbyists is influencing the Department of Transportation,” says Ross Hammond, ForestEthics US campaigns director. “Oil trains carrying millions of gallons of toxic, explosive crude oil threaten the 25 million Americans who live in the blast zone. DOT should listen their own safety experts and quickly finalize strong new standards that take DOT-111s off the tracks, slow these trains down, prepare first responders and protect families.”

Government agencies and officials covered by this FOIA request are US Department of Transportation, National Transportation Safety Board, Surface Transportation Board, Federal Railroad Administration, and Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA).

##

ForestEthics demands that corporations and government protect community health, the climate, and our wild places. We’ve secured the protection of 65 million acres of wilderness by pushing major companies to shift hundreds of millions of dollars to responsible purchasing. www.ForestEthics.org

Bakken Crude, Climate Change, Derailment, DOT-111, Fossil fuels, Tank car design, Tank car retirement, Tank car retrofit, Volatility

DOT Ignores Congress’ Deadline for Upgrading Safety Rules to Prevent Oil Train Disasters

News Release from Center For Biological Diversity
[Editor: see this story also in INFORUM (Fargo ND), which shows an interesting photo of a cross section from a damaged oil tanker car.  – RS]

Department of Transportation Ignores Congressional Deadline for Upgrading Safety Rules to Prevent Oil Train Disasters

PORTLAND, Ore.— Ignoring a congressional stipulation in the 2015 budget bill calling for new safety rules for oil trains by Jan. 15, federal transportation officials now say they won’t update the rules until May. Amid mounting concerns over the unchecked rise in shipments of highly volatile crude oil by train that has resulted in several explosive derailments and dozens of fatalities in the past two years, the federal Department of Transportation has yet to enact any on-the-ground safety improvements.

“Every day of delay is another day of putting people and the environment at risk of great harm,” said Jared Margolis, an attorney at the Center who focuses on the impacts of energy development on endangered species. “Continuing to allow these bomb trains to operate under current regulations is simply rolling the dice as to where and when the next disaster will occur.”

While several explosive oil-train accidents have occurred since the rulemaking process began in September 2013, the agency has failed to take any immediate action to resolve well-established concerns, such as the use of unsafe, puncture-prone DOT-111 tank cars.

“DOT-111 tank cars were never intended to transport these hazardous products,” said Margolis. “Failing to ban them immediately is a failure of the government’s duty to protect us from harm.”

Congress, understanding that rapid action is essential to protect the public, put a requirement in the 2015 budget bill for federal transportation officials to issue new safety rules by Jan. 15; but the industry has been fighting to delay and chip away at any efforts that would make moving oil by rail more expensive, regardless of safety concerns.

“Bomb trains are just one of many dangers posed by our continued dependence on fossil fuels,” Margolis said. “Ultimately, if we’re going to avoid dangerous oil-train derailments, as well as avoid the climate catastrophe that is currently being caused by our emissions, we must move away from these dangerous fossil fuels.”

– – – –

The Center for Biological Diversity is a national, nonprofit conservation organization with more than 800,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Hazmat notification, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Rail inspection, State regulation

Albany NY: Year in review top news – crude by rail

Repost from The Times Union, Albany NY
[Excellent month-by-month review of CBR developments in New York’s capital region, and an excellent group of 14 photos.  – RS]

Albany’s Top 10 stories: Region a hub in oil train surge

Converging lines drove growth in shipment
By Brian Nearing, December 29, 2014
View of the courtyard between the apartment buildings and the rail line that carries oil tankers to the Port of Albany Wednesday, July 16, 2014, at Ezra Prentice Homes in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union) Photo: Cindy Schultz / 00027815A
View of the courtyard between the apartment buildings and the rail line that carries oil tankers to the Port of Albany Wednesday, July 16, 2014, at Ezra Prentice Homes in Albany, N.Y. (Cindy Schultz / Times Union)

More oil trains kept a-rollin’ last year in Capital Region from the booming Bakken fields of North Dakota, where massive hydrofracking has helped drop national gasoline prices below $3 a gallon.

It was only two days into 2014 in the aftermath of a massive oil train derailment and fire in North Dakota when federal regulators warned that Bakken crude was more likely to catch fire than regular crude. And at year’s end, critics were warning that federal plans to phase out less-sturdy versions of the most common rail tankers during the next two years were too slow.

In between, massive trains pulling dozens of all-black tanker cars — carrying millions of gallons of crude and ominously called bomb trains by opponents — kept coming.

Because of its geographic location, with rail lines converging from all four directions and its access to the Hudson River, Albany has become a major oil shipping hub, which drew little public attention when the oil boom began taking shape some five years ago.

Some oil is unloaded at the port for shipment down the Hudson in barges or tankers, while other oil continues by rail either south along the Hudson River to coastal refineries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania or north along Lake Champlain to Canada.

And there are many more trains than just a couple years ago. For the first 10 months of 2014, more than 672,000 oil-filled tanker cars moved by rail in the U.S., an increase of more than 13 percent from the previous period of 2013, according to federal statistics. That was more than twice as many as the 300,000 rail oil tankers that moved for the same period in 2011.

But for part of the oil train story in Albany, 2014 will end the way it began, with the state Department of Environmental Conservation still weighing plans by an oil terminal operator at the port, Global Partners, to build a facility that heats crude oil to make it easier to pump in cold weather.

Bakken crude doesn’t have to be heated in the cold, leading many to conclude Global wants to begin accepting trains carrying Canadian tar sands oil, a thicker crude that must be heated to be pumped in the cold. Global has never said either way. DEC extended the comment period on the project eight times amid growing community opposition.

Global and another terminal operator, Houston-based Buckeye Partners, have DEC permission to ship 2.8 billion gallons of oil a year that is arriving by rail. By the end of January, Gov. Andrew Cuomo had ordered a state review of safety and spill control plans while also pressing the Obama administration to act faster to toughen rules on the burgeoning energy network.

The governor did not wait for the report to act. By February, he was touting the first rail-safety inspections at the Port of Albany and elsewhere by state and federal regulators. By year’s end, eight such inspection “blitzes” had been done involving nearly 7,400 rail cars, including more than 5,300 oil tankers, and nearly 2,700 miles of track. A total of 840 defects have been uncovered.

In March, Albany County Executive Daniel P. McCoy slapped a county moratorium on Global’s crude heating project. By July, as many as 42 oil trains each week — each holding more than 100 million gallons of Bakken crude — were coming into Albany from North Dakota, according to figures released by the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services.

This summer, two major rail companies — CSX and Canadian Pacific — revealed information about their shipments under an emergency federal order intended to help inform local emergency workers of potential risks. CSX transports oil through 17 counties on a line that runs upstate from Lake Erie and eastward roughly along the Thruway corridor, while CP runs oil through five counties in the Capital Region and the North Country on the way from Canada.

The region can expect to see trains for a long time. By October, a Canadian Pacific official predicted increased transport of tar sands crude oil from Alberta in coming years would account for about 60 percent of the railroad’s oil revenue. That same month, the DEC rejected oil train opponents’ claims that the state had the power to immediately ban the most common type of tanker cars — called DOT-111s — from entering the port loaded with flammable oil.

Also in October, Global quietly withdrew plans before the DEC for a new oil terminal facility on the Hudson River in New Windsor, Orange County, so that oil could be moved from massive crude oil tanker trains onto vessels to continue downriver to coastal refineries. The company also announced it had voluntarily stopped using the oldest, least sturdy models of DOT-111s.

By December, officials in North Dakota announced new safety rules on Bakken crude oil shipments aimed at reducing its potential explosiveness, but the limits would not affect about 80 percent of oil arriving daily in Albany, leading oil train opponents to criticize the rules as almost meaningless.

And it looks like the surge of oil trains will continue to grow. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, two refineries in Linden, N.J., and Philadelphia are adding crude-by-rail terminals to handle up to 8.8 million gallons a day of incoming shipments.

For oil trains from North Dakota and Canada to reach these refineries, the trip would have to pass through Albany.