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 Iowa Public Radio [Editor: For the most part, Canadian Pacific Railway spokesperson Andy Cummings is incredibly evasive, offering only general and unresponsive answers to the radio reporter interviewing him. This is a 21-minute investigative report, well worth listening beyond the first interview with Mr. Cummings. – R]
Derailment in Dubuque–A Reminder of the Hazards of Transporting Oil by Rail
By Emily Woodbury & Ben Kieffer, Feb. 13, 2015
DOT-111s make up about 70 percent of the U.S. tank car fleet | Bengt 1955 / flickr
With at least one million gallons of crude oil and ethanol passing through Iowa on a single freight train, derailments like the one last week a few miles from Dubuque are a major concern.
“As ethanol dilutes into the water, it’s kind of that process that depletes the oxygen from the water,” says Kevin Baskins, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “That’s something we’re going to continue to monitor in the near future.”
Baskins says that the cleanup is going well so far, and they are in the process of sparging air, a process that involves evaporating the ethanol into the air rather that letting it dissolve into the water.
Erin Jordan, reporter with The Gazette and KCRG-TV9, says that derailments with DOT-111s can be especially problematic, as they are vulnerable to puncture in a derailment. DOT-111s are a type of train car commonly used to transport crude oil and ethanol, as well as other hazardous materials.
“A Johnson County commodity study showed, in addition to ethanol, there was also battery acid, anhydrous ammonia, pesticides, paint […] and so you can imagine there would be an environmental effect to those,” she says.
Right now, nine Iowa counties have extra large shipments of crude oil traveling through. While area residents are not notified of what materials are being hauled through their communities, Canadian Pacific Railway’s spokesperson Andy Cummings says they will answer specific questions from emergency responders.
“They can contact the railroad, and we will make that information available to them,” says Andy Cummings. “For security reasons, we do not share details of our dangerous goods movements publicly.”
Canadian Pacific Railway and BNSF Railway Co. also report large shipments of Bakken crude oil to Iowa Homeland Security and Emergency Management.
“There has to be more with respect to openness and disclosure of the chemicals that are being transported,” says Baskins. “When a spill happens, it’s immediate that you have to alert the public, you have to have a plan in place to respond, and you can’t do that if you’re trying to figure out what’s in the chemical that actually spilled.”
On this River to River segment, Ben Kieffer talks with Kevin Baskins and Erin Jordan, as well as David Cwiertny, associate faculty research engineer for the IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering at the University of Iowa, and Andy Cummings, spokesperson for Canadian Pacific Railway.
Repost from CQ Roll Call [Editor: Significant quote by Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio on new tank car safety rule: “Get it done, get it done now. Start the production. Create jobs here in America.” – RS]
Members Fume Over Delayed Oil Tank Car Rule
By Tom Curry, Feb. 3, 2015
Rep. Jeff Denham, R- Calif., chairman of the House Transportation Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials (Photo By Douglas Graham/Roll Call)
Another House hearing and another regulatory agency under bipartisan fire for its slowness in issuing an eagerly awaited rule that will have sweeping effects on several industries.
Tuesday’s hearing of the House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Subcommittee on Railroads Pipelines and Hazardous Materials was a chance for members and industry spokesmen to assail the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) not issuing a rule that would tell railroads and rail car manufacturers the standard they need to meet for new oil tank cars.
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee ranking member Peter DeFazio said that even though PHMSA has known that the older tank cars, designated as DOT-111’s, “are not adequate or safe since 1993, PHMSA has yet to promulgate a rule for new standards. In fact, the industry itself is so frustrated that they’ve proposed a new standard to the agency.”
But the agency couldn’t act quickly, he said and the rule is “lost somewhere in the bowels of the administration between the agency and the trolls over at the Office of Management and Budget who will further delay the ruling.”
PHMSA has “managed to mangle the rule by merging it together with operational issues which are much more difficult to deal with and controversial,” DeFazio said.
PHMSA should simply issue a rule on tank cars: “Get it done, get it done now. Start the production. Create jobs here in America,” he said.
What’s on people’s mind is the possibility of another Lac Megantic accident, the Quebec oil tank car derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in 2013.
Greg Saxton, senior vice president of rail car manufacturer Greenbrier, said “if we were to have additional derailments that caused more fatalities, I think we could lose our franchise, the trust that the American people put in us to do this.”
Saxton said, “You’ve got to get beyond this uncertainty” about the tank car standard.
He added that “economic forces, the market, will crush an over-packaged commodity,” meaning that market forces will lead shippers to use the older, less safe, and less costly DOT-111 cars until PHMSA requires that they upgrade to a more crash-resistant model.
Greenbrier has urged PHMSA to quickly adopt what’s called the “Option 2” design of a tank car with thicker steel tank shells and other safety features.
Subcommittee Chairman Jeff Denham, R-Calif., told Saxton that he, too, wants to see PHMSA and OMB move quickly on the rule.
But he said he wanted to make sure “that there is not a misperception” among the American people that “our current tank cars are not safe” and “that our industry does not have a safe record.”
He noted that Greenbrier, the leading car manufacturer, could only build 8,000 new cars a year, so it would take perhaps a decade for that company and others to build new cars to replace all the DOT-111 cars.
Denham also said the public shouldn’t think “that there’s some magic, quick, fast track to get all of these new tank cars” on the nation’s railroads very quickly.
Lac-Mégantic disaster by the numbers: Catalogue of a tragedy
54% of town’s residents suffered from depression, PTSD after explosion: health report
Jan 28, 2015
A report into the health effects of the Lac-Mégantic, Que., train derailment and explosion indicates people living there are four times more likely to drink to excess following the disaster.
Two-thirds of the 800 people studied suffered human loss, and over half experienced negative feelings such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Marie-Claude Arguin, the town’s deputy manager, said children are among those still showing signs of PTSD, including trouble sleeping and hyper-vigilance.
“Essentially, children have taken care of their parents in the last year,” she said.
“They don’t have all the fears and worries that adults have … But they’ve seen the images, they’ve seen friends losing their parents, they’re living it.”
Lac-Mégantic Mayor Colette Roy Laroche says the town’s residents will need long-term support to cope with life after the tragedy. (CBC)
She said the community needs a firm commitment that help will continue, and hopes part of the assistance will be devoted to further studies on the population.
In July 2013, a freight train carrying 72 cars of oil derailed and exploded in the centre of Lac-Mégantic.
The explosion killed 47 people, and hundreds of thousands of litres of oil spilled into the Chaudière River as a consequence of the derailment.
Lac-Mégantic Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche said Wednesday the recovery period will be extensive for residents.
In the direct aftermath of the tragedy, resources were rushed in to meet the town’s immediate needs and its citizens were well cared for, she said.
The fear, she said, is that those services may not be there in the longer term. She urged officials to recognize ongoing mental-health support residents will require.
Human and material losses
Estrie public health director Dr. Mélissa Généreux, public health specialist Dr. Geneviève Petit and Danielle Maltais, an expert on the health consequences of major disasters, presented their findings on Wednesday morning in Sherbrooke, Que.
Généreux explained that following the tragedy, residents in the Granit MRC (regional county municipality) experienced a greater sense of belonging and community than people living elsewhere in the Eastern Townships.
Interviews with 800 residents of the Granit MRC found:
64 per cent had a human loss (fear for their lives or that of a loved one, was injured, etc.).
23 per cent had a material loss.
54 per cent had a negative perception (depression, post-traumatic stress, etc.).
17 per cent of people had an “intense exposure” (e.g. experienced all three of the above).
Généreux, Petit and Maltais commended the fact that medical and psychological resources were quickly deployed to the area after the blast.
Still, it could take years for the mental-health issues stemming from the disaster to subside, said Maltais, a researcher and professor at the University of Chicoutimi.
The public health officials convened in Sherbrooke said the tragedy will have lasting effects on the community for years, particularly because it was due to human negligence.
Arguin said more research is needed to ensure the younger generation is also taken care of, adding it’s hard to know how to handle this type of trauma because there’s no precedent.
“It hasn’t even involved children and teenagers, which is the future of our community,” Arguin said. “And they have been affected just as much.”
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