Repost from PBS News Hour
[Editor: On this highly influential PBS Newshour video, reporter Judy Woodruff gives background on recent derailments and explosions and concludes with an interview of NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman. Hersman urges action by the regulatory agencies to phase out the deadly DOT-111 tank cars, as is being done in Canada. This 8 minute video was seen by millions of PBS viewers on Wednesday, April 23. (My apologies for the unavoidable commercial ad that begins this video.) – RS]
Tag Archives: DOT-111
Rail officials: older tank cars have 1 in 4 chance of leaking if they derail
Repost from The Star Tribune – Business, Minneapolis, MN
Failure rates raising new fears over use of aging oil tankers
Article by: JIM SPENCER , Star Tribune | April 22, 2014Rail industry estimated their chance of leaking in derailments at 1 in 4.
A BNSF Railway train hauled crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont, in November. A National Transportation Safety Board forum on Tuesday looked at the safety in transporting crude oil and ethanol. One focus was the use of older tank cars, especially as oil train traffic increases. Photo: Associated Press file.
WASHINGTON – Tens of thousands of older tanker cars used to haul North Dakota crude oil and Midwestern ethanol run a one-in-four risk of leaking if they derail, railroad officials told the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Tuesday.
The failure rate, estimated by the Rail Supply Institute and the American Association of Railroads, illustrates a growing concern for safety that has accompanied skyrocketing shipments of crude oil across the country.
Crude oil shipments originating in the United States have grown from about 6,000 carloads in 2005 to roughly 400,000 in 2013 as the United States has tapped domestic petroleum sources. At the same time, the government has yet to issue new standards for safer tanker construction.
About six North Dakota oil trains per day travel across Minnesota and through the Twin Cities, many of them 100 cars long. Each tank car holds 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of crude oil. Ethanol trains, which pose a similar hazard, move on Union Pacific tracks through the state.
But recent fiery crashes have convinced some policymakers that the threat of derailments like the one that happened in December in North Dakota put the public at unacceptable risk.
“A spate of recent accidents in the United States and Canada [demonstrate] that far too often, safety has been compromised,” NTSB chairwoman Deborah Hersman said.
While the rail industry says it moves 99.9 percent of its crude oil shipments incident-free, industry data show that 46,400 rail cars have been damaged in 29,000 accidents since 1970.
The older, general-use tanker cars hauling oil and ethanol meet current government safety standards, but government videos on the first day of a two-day forum about safety in crude oil and ethanol transport showed an older car rupturing during a puncture test, spraying its contents over the test site.
“Taking [older cars] out of the fleet reduces risk,” Robert Fronczak of the Association of American Railroads told the board.
But, he said, eliminating them by attrition alone could take 40 to 50 years.
Setting new standards
The sturdier tank cars being built now are half as likely as the older model to spill contents in a derailment, the rail industry estimates. But car construction standards being discussed by the government could lower the chances of a derailment leak to less than one in 20.
However, the rail supply industry has “to have regulatory certainty” before it commits to major new tanker production and retrofitting of old cars, William Finn of the Railway Supply Institute told the board.
Lee Johnson, representing the American Petroleum Institute, questioned the spill data attributed to older, so-called “legacy cars.” He called the numbers “preliminary.”
Johnson said the oil industry needs to keep shipping oil in the older cars “to move increasing production.” There are not enough of the newer, sturdier tanker cars available to meet oil producers’ demands, especially in North Dakota’s Bakken field, which Johnson said will soon be producing 2 million barrels of oil per day.
Roughly 23,000 older “legacy cars” now carry crude oil, and 29,000 more carry ethanol. The United States may soon have even more crude oil moving in the more vulnerable rail cars because of a surcharge Canada now places on their use. That means railroads may divert newer, sturdier cars to haul oil to Canada. Retrofitting older legacy cars to make them more leakproof will take years, if not decades, several participants said.
“We don’t want to disrupt the country’s need for the fuel these cars are hauling,” Finn said.
Why the details matter
Meanwhile, a better car design remains the subject of debate.
Greg Saxton, chief engineer of the Greenbrier Cos., one of the country’s four major train car builders, believes in greater tanker wall thickness. “Engineers deal with uncertainty by adding some margin of safety,” he explained to the board.
Others argue that thicker walls add weight and reduce storage space without improving safety.
Wall thickness is probably the biggest sticking point in the tanker safety discussion. The Railway Supply Institute wants a standard width of seven-sixteenths of an inch. The Association of American Railroads wants nine-sixteenths of an inch.
“Crude oil contains a significant amount of dissolved gas,” the railroad association’s Fronczak said. A nine-sixteenth-inch wall will contain the vapor pressure that can build inside a crude oil tanker.
Videos shown Tuesday explained why such minutiae might matter. In one, a train car with a thicker wall withstood the whack of a giant prod traveling 14.7 miles per hour, while a car built to current DOT 111 standards ruptured in a 14 miles-per-hour collision.
Other issues include reinforcing the ends of tanker cars where they are most likely to be struck in a derailment, installing pressure-relief valves on tankers to keep crude oil from exploding in the event of a derailment and applying additional thermal protection to cut the risk of fires.
The NTSB’s Hersman asked Johnson how long he felt the older, more vulnerable cars would be needed to haul crude oil.
When Johnson couldn’t provide a specific time frame, Hersman replied: “You’re not making me feel very optimistic.”
All about the unsafe DOT-111 tank car
Repost from The News Tribune, Tacoma, OR
[Editor: This article is a good start, but it leaves much unsaid. Information and disinformation abounds regarding the DOT-111 tank car, designed in 1964. There are retrofitted (improved) versions of the DOT-111, but they are a small percentage of DOT-111’s currently in use, and are not REQUIRED BY LAW for transport of hazardous materials … and even these retrofitted cars are considered by many to be unsafe. A place to begin learning more is Wikipedia. Even better is this NTSB document, or this by New York Senator Schumer … and especially this technical publication by Turner, Mason & Company. See also the authoritative and exhaustive American Association of Railroads’ Field Guide to Tank Cars. The City of Benicia should condition Valero’s Crude By Rail proposal by requiring tank cars of the latest and safest designs for all deliveries, with stiff requirements for daily verification and harsh penalties for violations. – RS]
Old oil tanker cars, old regulations, new danger
The News Tribune | April 22, 2014Freight trains have an excellent overall safety record, which is why we don’t flee at the sight of them. But the growing numbers of oil trains rumbling through Washington ought to be making us nervous.
U.S. petroleum production – especially at the Bakken formation in North Dakota – has been expanding far more quickly than the nation’s pipeline capacity. As a result, the crude oil is getting carted across states by train and by truck. Let’s take a closer look at the tanker car that hauls much of that oil through Western Washington.
It’s called the DOT-111, a 1964 design. The Bakken oil that exploded catastrophically in Quebec last July, killing 47 people, was being carried in DOT-111 cars.
Five years ago, the National Transportation Safety Board investigated a low-speed train crash in Illinois in which 15 DOT-111 cars carrying fuel-grade ethanol went off the rails. Thirteen of the cars ruptured; the resulting explosion killed a motorist waiting at the crossing.
The NTSB did the math: 13 out of 15.
“This represents an overall failure rate of 87 percent,” it concluded, “and illustrates the continued inability of DOT-111 tank cars to withstand the forces of accidents, even when the train is traveling at 36 mph, as was the case in this accident.”
The NTSB noted that the basic DOT-111 lacks many puncture-resistance systems and has a thinner shell than cars designed to carry extremely hazardous liquids, such as chlorine. It reportedly is well-suited for things that don’t blow up, like corn syrup.
Bakken crude – as the Quebec disaster demonstrated – is turning out to be unexpectedly volatile and even explosive. It shouldn’t be in the older DOT-111 fleet – newer models are reputedly safer – if the cars aren’t retrofitted with heavier steel armor and other safety features.
The American petroleum boom caught regulators and railways with their pants down.
Railroad companies didn’t have enough modern, thick-walled tanker cars, so the DOT-111s were pressed into service. Spills and explosions have resulted. The U.S. Department of Transportation hasn’t come up with the tighter tank-car standards the new reality obviously demands.
Earlier this month, U.S. Sen. Patty Murray held a hearing that put Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx on the hot seat. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine asked Foxx when the new oil train standards would be arriving.
“My target date is as soon as possible,” he said.
Four years ago – when North Dakota ran out of pipeline capacity – would have been better timing.
Federal Railroad Administration does not monitor or review railroad emergency response plans
Repost from Environment and Energy Publishing
Oil-by-rail loophole keeps U.S. emergency response plans in the dark
Blake Sobczak, E&E reporter | EnergyWire: Tuesday, April 22, 2014U.S. transportation officials don’t review how railroads would handle worst-case oil train disasters like last summer’s derailment in Quebec, which killed 47 people in a fiery explosion.
While railroads must keep “basic” emergency response plans in their own files, the Federal Railroad Administration does not monitor or review those plans.
That’s because railroads are required to provide “comprehensive” oil spill response plans to the FRA only if they use tank cars that hold more than 42,000 gallons of crude. In an April 10 letter responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from EnergyWire, FOIA officer Denise Kollehlon said the FRA’s files “do not contain any records related to the active comprehensive ‘oil spill prevention and response plans’ for oil shipments.”
Safety experts and environmentalists say the 42,000-gallon threshold is too high. They stress that the 1996 rule that set the limit never applies in practice. Just five tank cars nationwide are designed to store that much oil in a single packaging, officials say, and the FOIA response confirms that none are hauling crude (EnergyWire, Feb. 19).
The threshold predates the recent surge in oil-by-rail transport, which has seen annual crude shipments jump from fewer than 10,000 carloads in 2008 to 415,000 carloads last year, according to industry data.
Tim Pellerin, fire chief of Rangeley, Maine, said “tangible, realistic” emergency response plans could help firefighters, who often reach remote disaster sites before railroads’ own hazardous materials crews.
“There’s got to be a system in place that checks this and oversees [railroads] to make sure that there are plans in place,” he said in an interview.
Pellerin led a group of U.S. firefighters 60 miles north into Canada after a 72-car oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.
The disaster claimed 47 lives and put hazardous materials safety on the map for U.S. and Canadian transportation regulators.
Later derailments and fires in Alabama and North Dakota in the United States and New Brunswick in Canada kept the issue in the spotlight, although they injured no one. Earlier this month, Pellerin called on lawmakers to provide more funding for first responders at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
Local fire departments can request hazardous materials shipping and emergency response information from railroads under voluntary industry standards. But picking out potential weak points in such plans “is an awful lot to expect from a small volunteer fire department with a $2,000-per-year budget,” Pellerin said, adding that his department lacks the specialized knowledge needed to gauge the adequacy of railroads’ response measures. “I’m not an expert in 10,000 things — I’m a fire chief,” he said.
The FRA, part of the Department of Transportation, did not respond to requests for comment, although it has previously said it is taking a “comprehensive approach to improving the safe transportation of crude oil by rail.” In February, the regulator reached a voluntary agreement with railroads to tighten oil train operating practices, lowering speed limits through urban areas and committing $5 million in industry funds to prepare first responders, among other measures.
Holly Arthur, spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads, noted that railroads are also developing an inventory of oil spill emergency response resources under the terms of the agreement.
“This inventory will include locations for the staging of emergency response equipment and, where appropriate, contacts for the notification of communities,” Arthur said in an emailed statement yesterday. “When the inventory is completed [by July 1], railroads will provide DOT with information on the deployment of the resources and make the information available upon request to appropriate emergency responders.”
Emergency response ‘offloaded to local communities’
Safety officials have questioned whether voluntary arrangements go far enough to protect local communities.
Outgoing National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman wrote in a Jan. 23 letter to FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo that without closely regulated response plans, “[rail] carriers have effectively placed the burden of remediating the environmental consequences of an accident on local communities along their routes.”
Hersman reiterated her crude-by-rail concerns yesterday in her farewell address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Crude-by-rail “can be a worst-case-scenario event, and we don’t have provisions in place to deal with it, either on the industry side or for the first responders,” she said.
Experts at the NTSB and Canada’s Transportation Safety Board agree that the magnitude of the Lac-Mégantic disaster swamped the small railroad’s response resources, which can include hazardous materials crews and specialized firefighting foam. The railroad involved in the July 6 crash — Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd. — has since declared bankruptcy in the United States and Canada and is in the process of being taken over by the New York-based Fortress Investment Group (EnergyWire, Jan. 23).
“Railroads have for decades offloaded to local communities the responsibilities for emergency response,” said independent hazardous materials consultant Fred Millar, who has worked with environmental groups including Friends of the Earth.
Millar said he was not surprised by the fact that the FRA does not keep tabs on railroads’ oil spill response plans. “Nobody even has a measure of what would be an adequate emergency response capability,” he said.
By contrast, crude pipelines, storage facilities and waterborne oil tankers must comply with lengthier emergency response requirements laid out by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, U.S. EPA and U.S. Coast Guard, respectively.
The 1996 rules for oil-by-rail emergency response plans were crafted by the Research and Special Programs Administration, the precursor to PHMSA.
The agency said then that “on the basis of available information, no rail carrier is transporting oil in a quantity greater than 42,000 gallons in tank cars.”
NTSB has since questioned why the benchmark for comprehensive plans exists if it never actually applies. Officials at the Department of Transportation have until tomorrow to respond to NTSB’s criticisms.
“By limiting the comprehensive planning threshold for a single tank size that is greater than any currently in use, spill-planning regulations do not take into account the potential of a derailment of large numbers of 30,000-gallon tank cars, such as in Lac-Mégantic where 60 tank cars together released about 1.6 million gallons of crude oil,” NTSB’s Hersman wrote in her letter to PHMSA, also part of DOT.
In the wake of the Lac-Mégantic derailment, PHMSA has also faced pressure to update decades-old crude tank car rules. Critics say the outdated federal tank car standards and the FRA’s lack of oil spill emergency planning oversight point to the difficulty of keeping pace with the fast-growing crude-by-rail business.
The FRA and the railroad industry cite improving safety statistics, noting that more than 99.9 percent of all hazardous materials shipments reach their destination safely.
But despite declining accident rates over the past decade, regulatory consultant and attorney Paul Blackburn said, “citizens need to be concerned about … what happens over time.”
“After a big event like the Lac-Mégantic disaster, you’d expect the industry to be more cautious,” he said of recent voluntary safety measures. But “as these events fade from memory, there’s nothing to stop the industry from backing off on its commitment to improve spill response” barring federal action.
Reporter Mike Soraghan contributed.