Tag Archives: Federal Railroad Administration

Bakken Crude, Federal Rail Administration, Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Rail accidents, Rail inspection, Rail Safety

Cozy relationship between North Dakota’s oil industry and a chief federal inspector

Repost from In These Times

Official Tipped Off Hess Rail Yard About Oil-Carrier Inspection

Emails cast doubt on the integrity of a federal crackdown on unsafe shipping practices.
BY Cole Stangler  /  Web Only / Features » April 29, 2014
Oil containers wait at a train yard near Williston, North Dakota before transporting crude oil across North America. Shippers and carriers often mislabel their cargo, which leads to improper handling and potentially dangerous accidents. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images)

Emails obtained by In These Times show a cozy relationship between North Dakota’s oil industry and a chief federal inspector charged with monitoring the safety of shipping crude oil by rail. The emails cast serious doubts on the integrity of the federal government’s supposed crackdown on the industry’s shoddy shipping practices—a subject of growing concern in the midst of a largely unregulated, and in some cases, deadly, transport boom.

Last August, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Agency (PHMSA) and Federal Railroad Administration announced they were rolling out the “Bakken Blitz”—a crackdown on shippers and carriers that mislabel their cargo. Federal hazmat regulations require trains carrying oil to properly classify and identify their shipments with placards. These practices are supposed to ensure that oil is safely packaged before being shipped. They’re also aimed at informing railroad personnel and, in the event of a mishap, any emergency responders. Regulators introduced the Blitz just one month after the Lac Mégantic disaster, when a runaway freight train carrying oil exploded in the small Quebec town, killing 47 people. In that case, Canadian safety investigators found American shippers in North Dakota’s Bakken region had understated the volatility of the oil that ignited and destroyed much of Lac Mégantic’s downtown area. Improper classification caused the shipment to be transported in an improper package. Emergency responders, too, were caught by surprise at how quickly the fire spread and how long it burned.

As part of the Department of Transportation’s new enforcement effort, PHMSA officials show up unannounced at rail facilities to conduct classification inspections—at least that’s what an agency spokesperson told In These Times at first. An email obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request strongly suggests that Kipton Wills, Central Region Director of PHMSA’s Office of Hazardous Materials Enforcement, pre-arranged at least one of his agency’s visits to a Hess Corp. rail yard in Tioga, North Dakota, last October.

“We will accommodate your request to inspect trucks at the Tioga Rail Terminal,” Jody Schroeder, the rail terminal supervisor, wrote in an email to Wills dated October 3, 2013—five days before the inspection took place. “At your convenience please let me know your schedule for this event.”

Schroeder later confirmed that Wills reached out to him about the visit.

Earlier this month, PHMSA spokesperson Gordon Delcambre told In These Times that such inspections are impromptu. “They’re unannounced,” he said. “[Inspectors] figure out who they’re going to visit ahead of time, make plans, go to the area and then start knocking on doors.”

Indeed, this is normal procedure. The agency’s handbook notes “the policy of the PHMSA hazardous materials enforcement program is to conduct unannounced inspections.” Exceptions can include cases of “apparent imminent danger to enable the company to correct the danger,” instances where special preparations, records and equipment are necessary, and cases where “giving advance notice would enhance the probability of an effective and thorough inspection.”

Delcambre said he would follow up with PHMSA’s Central Region director Wills to confirm the crude-by-rail inspections were unannounced. “Our field hazmat inspector procedures have not changed with our Bakken region effort,” Delcambre wrote later that day in an email. “PHMSA inspectors still do ‘unannounced’ visits to hazmat shippers and offerors and have been taking crude oil samples as needed at the facilities they call on.”

But when asked to respond for this story, Delcambre qualified that answer.

“Because we were conducting inspections on Hess Property of other entities (highway carriers) and in order to do that safely, in some cases such as this one, prior open coordination for facility orientation and confirmation of appropriate personal protective equipment was needed,” he wrote in an email.

The inspection of the Hess facility, which also services other oil and gas companies like Marathon, did turn up “probable violations.” Out of 18 oil samples that PHMSA collected and tested at the Tioga plant, the labeling on 10 of them understated how flammable the cargo was. In each of those cases, Hess and Marathon misclassified Packing Group I oil as belonging to Packing Group II. Packing Group I is the highest risk designation, reserved for crude oil with an initial boiling point lower than 95 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the most explosive kind of crude.

Months after the inspection took place, on February 3 of this year, PHMSA slapped Hess with a proposed $51,350 fine and Marathon Oil with a proposed $30,000 fine for the improper classification. Whiting Oil & Gas was hit with a proposed $12,000 fine for misclassifying Packing Group II oil as Packing Group III.

But Martin MacKerel, an environmental activist with the Bay Area-based Sunflower Alliance, says that these fines could have been much higher. “It’s clear that announcing the inspections gave the oil company the opportunity to reduce their fines,” says MacKerel. “These kinds of inspections need to be unannounced to have any real value.”

As he announced the slew of fines, the only federal enforcement thus far to stem from the “Bakken Blitz,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sounded a stern warning:

The fines we are proposing today should send a message to everyone involved in the shipment of crude oil. You must test and classify this material properly if you want to use our transportation system to ship it.

But emails from the top PHMSA official on the ground to Hess strike a much friendlier tone.

On February 4, the day that the fines were publicly announced, Schroeder reached out to PHMSA’s Wills asking if he knew anything about the violations that the inspector’s higher-ups had just announced. Wills replied to Schroeder that he had just learned about the fines, but said that he hoped PHMSA and industry leaders could “get it all on one page working together as a coordinated effort not an enforcement effort.”

Avoiding “enforcement” would appear to contradict the point of the Bakken Blitz, not to mention the very mission of PHSMA—whose job is to enforce existing regulations. After all, federal hazmat regulations are nothing new. The Department of Transportation’s crackdown is only supposed to make sure that North Dakota oil shippers are following the same practices that other truck drivers and railroad operators across the country have to comply with every day.

The emails may indicate a disconnect between federal priorities and those of local regulators. Just before the fines were issued, safety concerns over crude-by-rail shipments had again taken the national stage. On December 30, 2013, a derailed grain train collided with an oil train in Casselton, North Dakota, sending 400,000 gallons of Bakken crude up in flames, and forcing residents to evacuate. Days after that, PHMSA issued a safety alert warning, noting “the type of crude oil being transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude oil.” And later that month, Secretary Foxx issued a “Call to Action” and met with railroad executives and major players in the oil and gas industry like the American Petroleum Institute.

Referencing this meeting in his email to rail supervisor Schroeder, Wills appeared to suggest the impetus for the fines came from agency superiors in Washington “Once the results came back and the Secretary of Transportation met with the energy companies and railroad CEO’s [sic], it left the control of field staff and became a larger issue,” he wrote. “In my mind, the solution is getting the bosses from both sides around the table and discussing feasible testing schedules, etc. I will be in North Dakota next week and I am hoping to have a lot more information from my own agency by then on what the [Notice of Proposed Violation] means and what we can do as far as working in partnership.”

Those bosses eventually did sit around the table. PHMSA spokesperson Gordon Delcambre tells In These Times that officials from the agency’s Hazmat Safety Office met with representatives from the North Dakota Petroleum Council on April 1 to discuss “joint interest in the safe transportation of crude oil.” The Council does not publicly disclose all of its members, but the board of directors includes Hess, Marathon, Whiting and other major energy companies such as Enbridge Pipelines and ConocoPhillips.

There have been no fines announced since February, although Delcambre says that Bakken Blitz is still ongoing.

Safety advocates say the emails illustrate a business-friendly regulatory approach that runs counter to the core mission of the agency.

“It’s telling that PHMSA has no interest in enforcement,” says Matt Krogh, Tar Sands Free West Coast campaign director at ForestEthics, an environmental group based in the Pacific Northwest. “Their goal appears to be to work together with industrial violators, not to provide the enforcement mechanism provided for in the law, and requested by higher ups in the Department of Transportation. Companies that routinely misclassify hazardous materials destined to transit America’s main streets and urban centers should be prosecuted, not coddled.”

It’s a familiar critique of what’s been referred to as a “sleepy, industry-dominated organization.” PHMSA routinely comes under fire for being too friendly with the energy industry that it regulates and for taking too long to issue much-needed rules. The small-budget agency also has oversight of the nation’s interstate oil and gas pipelines. Its 151 inspectors cover more than 2 million miles of pipeline across the country. And the unexpected shale-drilling boom has left the agency in charge of another daunting task—monitoring crude-by-rail shipments. Grappling with a dearth of pipelines, North Dakota oil producers have found rail to be the easiest, cheapest means of getting their product to market. Railroads carried more than 400,000 carloads of crude oil last year, according to the Association of American Railroads—compared to only 9,500 in 2008.

As shipments have increased, so, too, have accidents. The industry’s safety practices—from the tank-cars and routes it uses to the way it tests and classifies its shipments—garner increasing national and international attention. Last week in Washington, the National Transportation Safety Board convened a “Rail Safety Forum,” bringing together different government agencies and industry officials to discuss growing challenges. And in an unprecedented move, earlier this month, a United Nations panel on hazardous materials agreed to weigh in to the matter. The panel reportedly accepted a request from American and Canadian authorities to examine whether existing shipping rules in North America properly account for how dangerous and volatile Bakken-drilled crude actually is.

Washington may well be making moves to beef up safety practices and enforcement efforts. However, the emails obtained by In These Times raise questions about how successfully that message is being transmitted to inspectors on the ground.

—–


Cole Stangler is an In These Times staff writer and Schumann Fellow based in Washington D.C., covering labor, trade, foreign policy and environmental issues. His reporting has appeared in The Huffington Post and The American Prospect, and has been cited in The New York Times.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Federal Regulation (U.S.)

A first time divergence between Canadian and U.S. railway regulations

Repost from Rabble.com

Safety and climate concerns as oil by rail surges forward in North America

By Roger Annis | April 29, 2014

CN locomotive and oil wagons on the shore of Halifax harbour, photo Flikr Commons

On April 23, Canada’s minister of transport, Lisa Raitt, announced changes to railway transportation regulations in Canada that she says will make safe the rapidly growing transport of crude oil and Alberta tar sands bitumen in North America.

Raitt’s changes come in response to citizen pressure following a string of spectacular oil train crashes in the past nine months, most particularly the crash in Lac Mégantic, Quebec on July 6, 2013 that killed 47 people.

Raitt proposed two measures of substance: speed limits of 80 kilometers per hour must be followed henceforth by trains containing 20 or more wagons of dangerous goods (that speed can be lowered in populated or ecologically sensitive areas), and the most dangerous of the DOT 111 rail wagons used to transport oil—those without continuous crash shields along the bottom, numbering 5,000 or so—be withdrawn from carrying dangerous cargo within 30 days.

Otherwise, the minister says that Canada’s estimated fleet of 65,000 older DOT 111s must undergo modifications within three years to improve crash resistance, and better emergency response plans must be in place for when crashes of trains carrying oil and other dangerous goods occur.

Until now, modifications to DOT 111s have been voluntary in the U.S. and Canada. As for emergency response, Canada already has a required ‘Emergency Response Assistance Plan’ (ERAP) system on its railways for the transport of chorine, liquid petroleum gases, explosives and other exceptionally dangerous cargo. That dates from the fallout of a 1979 rail crash and explosion of chlorine and propane in a Toronto suburb that forced the evacuation of 200,000 people from their homes. ERAPs will now be required for any train carrying crude oil or other liquid fossil fuel.

Raitt’s announcement creates for the first time a divergence between Canadian and U.S. railway regulations. Cross-border harmonization has been previously assured by Canada simply following any U.S. regulatory lead. Now, for the first time, several distinct, Canadian regulations may come into place for trains that U.S. railways and shippers wish to bring across the border.

This could become a real headache in three years time if U.S. shippers and carriers take longer to modify or phase out older DOT 111s. And since Lac Mégantic, they are showing few signs of any hurry. At a recent National Transportation Board hearing, a representative of the American Petroleum Institute said that older rail cars will be needed for at least ten more years.

Two measures that the federal government is refusing to take, responding to railway pressure, is advance notification by the railways to municipalities of the movement of dangerous cargos through their jurisdictions, and more extensive ‘route planning’ that would direct trains carrying dangerous cargos around populated areas. The latter measure would be costly for the railways and not logistically possible in many cases.

Of continuing note is the failure of the federal government to convene a judicial inquiry into the cause of the Lac Mégantic disaster. For the railways, oil shippers and the federal government, such a proceeding would be very uncomfortable. It would shed light on the string of circumstances that produced the disaster, and that might shed further light on criminal wrongdoing or liability in such areas as:

  • The dilapidated condition of the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway. The consignee of the oil on the fateful train was Irving Oil of New Brunswick. A consortium came together to begin to ship oil from North Dakota to Irving’s refinery in Saint John, New Brunswick in 2012. The consortium included CP Rail.
  • The failure to notify and warn communities of the possible safety consequences of the oil by train operation.
  • The successive decisions by federal rail regulators that allowed MM&A to operate with lesser safety standards that the Class I rail duopoly in Canada, including operating its trains with one employee only.
  • The mislabeling of the volatility of North Dakota oil that listed it as less dangerous than it was.

To this day, most U.S. oil shippers in North Dakota are refusing to share with the U.S. Department of Transportation the results of their chemical analyses of the crude product they are shipping.

North Dakota (and to a lesser extent Saskatchewan) is the location of the Bakken oil field, the second largest oil field in the U.S. Seventy per cent of its crude oil product is shipped by rail. The volatility of Bakken crude, it turns out, resembles that of refined gasoline.

The danger of railway shipments in North America is illustrated by a front page article appearing in the Toronto Star on April 26. It reports that in a 24 hour survey the newspaper recently conducted of one of the rail lines running through Toronto, owned by CP Rail, it counted more than 130 cars of crude oil, and tankers carrying methyl bromide and ethyl trichlorosilane — highly poisonous chemicals rated among the world’s most dangerous — as well as radioactive material, methanol, diesel, sulfuric acid and other hazardous goods.

The article reports that the railways and the federal government cite ‘security’ reasons for not divulging their shipments. But Fred Millar, a U.S. consultant on chemical safety and rail transport, tells the newspaper, “This security excuse is really a hoax. These are giant tank cars with placards on the sides that tell you what’s in them.”

Surge of oil by rail

In 2013, there were 450,000 carloads of oil moved by rail in the U.S. (not including movements by Canada’s two railways). So far in 2014, U.S. carload movements are up nine per cent over last year.

According to Statistics Canada, railways in Canada moved app. 165,000 carloads of fuel oils and crude petroleum in 2013, including movements into the U.S. The number jumps to 237,000 when liquid petroleum gas (propane, butane, etc) is included. Carloads of fuel oil and crude petroleum were up 18 per cent in January 2014 over the same month last year.

This will soon pale in comparison to the huge surge of Alberta tar sands bitumen and conventional oil that is coming. Tar sands and conventional crude producers and shippers are building rail capacity in Alberta and Saskatchewan at a dizzying rate. Some is already operational. The Financial Post reports that a total of 850,000 barrels per day of rail shipping capacity is under construction in Alberta, more than the amount of oil that the Keystone XL pipeline would carry. If all that went into trains, it would be half a million carloads in one year.

By the end of 2014, some 550,000 barrels daily will be rolling.

Investment broker Peters & Co says crude oil carloads originating in Canada could triple by 2015.

One of the largest operations under construction is being built by Kinder Morgan and Imperial Oil. It will handle 100,000 barrels of dilbit per day, app.1 1/3 unit trains per day, with an expansion capacity to take it to 250,000 bpd once further, feeder pipeline connections are made.

Whether by rail or by pipeline, port authorities in Houston and coastal Texas are gearing up for much more export traffic.

Port export projects are also planned in Saint John, New Brunswick (Irving Oil), on the lower St. Lawrence River at Cacouna, Quebec (TransCanada), and in Portland, Maine. These three projects are in anticipation of the Energy East tar sands pipeline with its planned capacity of 1.1 million barrels per day and the proposed ‘reversal’ of Enbridge Inc.’s aged Line 9 across southern Ontario.

One factor affecting oil by rail prospects is shipping costs. Compared to pipelines, the cost of shipping oil by rail is approximately double–$15-20 per barrel by rail compared to $7-11 for pipelines. More use of unit oil trains can bring down rail costs, though these heighten the dangers compared to mixed-cargo trains in which groups of cars carrying flammable liquids are separated by cars less-flammable products.

The Financial Post reports that the first unit bitumen train rolled out of Alberta late last year. Gary Kubera, chief executive of Canexus, one of the first oil train terminal companies to expand facilities in Alberta, told Reuters recently, “We expect unit trains will be going to the East, West and Gulf coasts. There is a lot of investment going into refineries to allow them to move crude by rail.”

One of the consequences of the surge of oil by rail (and coal) is that non-fossil fuel customers get short shrift because oil (and coal) shipments are more lucrative for the railways. For grain farmers in Canada and the U.S., 2013 was a bumper year, but they have lost significant income for lack of timely rail transport to get crops to market. The situation in Canada has become so bad that the federal government was obliged to adopt a special law in late March directing the rail companies to transport specified, weekly amounts of grain for the foreseeable future under penalty of fines. U.S farmers are also complaining, but so far there is no government action.

In Canada, there is a legislated maximum rate dating from the year 2000 that the railways can charge to grain farmers.

Last December, some Amtrak passenger train service connecting Chicago and the west coast was cancelled because of heavy coal and oil traffic on shared rail lines.

Meanwhile, a new entry to the fossil fuel-congested rail line story is… sand! The product is required extensively for oil and gas fracking. U.S. fracking-sand shipments have jumped more than fourfold since 2007, to 20.9 million tonnes in 2012, according to Freedonia Group, a Cleveland-based market researcher. Demand is expected to more than double to 47.3 million tonnes by 2022, the group predicts.

It’s all a major profit bonanza for the railways. In Canada, CN and CP reported first quarter profits in 2014 of $254 million and $623 million, increases of 17 per cent and 12 per cent, respectively, over the same quarter last year. Overall revenues in 2013 were up seven per cent at CN and eight per cent at CP.

In the U.S., the largest rail carrier of oil, BNSF, had 2013 earnings of $6.7 billion, up 15 per cent over the previous year. Union Pacific earned $7.4 billion the same year, up ten per cent.

All of this comes as scientists are saying ever more urgently that if humanity is to avoid runaway global warming with catastrophic consequences for human society, a rapid shift is needed away from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The latest such warning is in a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released in late March. The report was the result of three years’ work by more than 300 scientists around the world.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Fracking, Rail accidents, Rail routing, Traffic

More Trains equal More Train Crashes with cars and trucks; trend reversal

Repost from The Milwaukee Wisconsin Sentinel Journal
[Editor: Note that references here to Wisconsin’s “frac sand mining” are NOT describing tar-sands mining of bitumen.  Rather, there is a boom in Wisconsin for “SILICA SAND, which is mined and exported to states like North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Texas where it is used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The tough, crystallized sand, unique to the Wisconsin-Minnesota area, is hard enough to break through rock and release natural gas.”  Source: The Cap Times.  – RS]

More trains lead to more crashes with vehicles in Wisconsin

Recent booms in sand mining in Wisconsin and crude oil from shale in North Dakota.

By Lydia Mulvany of the Journal Sentinel  |  April 26, 2014 3:49 p.m.

Laurel Norlander grew up down the road from train tracks that trace the edge of Lake Wissota outside Chippewa Falls.

She’d been crossing those tracks her whole life, but that didn’t help the night of Jan. 3, 2013. The 60-year-old was returning to town after a visit to her parents’ home. She stopped at the stop sign before the tracks, but didn’t see or hear an oncoming Canadian National train. The train conductor told investigators he blew the whistle, but Norlander says she’s sure the train never did. They collided, leaving her with a totaled car and a bruised leg.

“It was very bizarre, and I’m grateful to be alive,” she said. “But at an uncontrolled intersection, it would sure be nice if they would blow the horn.”

Norlander’s crash was the first of 60 crashes between trains and highway users in 2013, the highest number Wisconsin has seen in five years. Injuries are at a six-year high, at 21. In addition, there were three deaths.

One possible factor in the rise is increased train traffic in the state, a result of recent booms in sand mining in Wisconsin and crude oil from shale in North Dakota.

Products of the state’s sand mining operations, which have grown from a handful in 2010 to well over 100, are used in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a process for extracting oil and natural gas. Crude oil, some of which passes by rail through Wisconsin, has similarly exploded. According to the American Association of Railroads, railroads nationwide transported 9,500 carloads of crude in 2008. In 2012, that number jumped to 234,000, and the most recent estimates for 2013 are around 400,000.

Trains on the tracks where Norlander was struck used to be few and far between, Norlander said, but a new sand plant in town has changed that.

“There’s been quite an increase in train traffic,” she said.

Jeff Plale, the state’s commissioner of railroads, said it seemed as if trains and cars were crashing every time he turns around.

“We have more trains going through the state, they’re heavier, they’re longer. Stop playing with the trains,” he said. “I’m just tired of it, because these (accidents) are so preventable.”

Plale said that besides increased train traffic, some railroads that weren’t in use have been revived, so people aren’t accustomed to seeing the trains.

“All of a sudden you’ve gone from having no trains or very few, and now you have a whole bunch of them. It’s a matter of being cognizant and safe,” he said.

Much of the sand mining activity in Wisconsin has occurred in the region governed by the Western Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission, which includes Chippewa County. Train-highway incidents there are at their highest in more than a decade.

According to a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel analysis, there were 11 crashes with trains at highway crossings in Barron, Chippewa, Clark, Dunn, Eau Claire and St. Croix counties. It hasn’t been that high since 2001, a year when the state saw more than 100 rail-highway incidents.

Rail accidents at road crossings have been steadily declining since a peak in the late 1970s, when the annual totals for Wisconsin were 450 and higher. In contrast, there were just 33 crashes in 2010.

Federal Rail Administration spokesman Michael England said reasons for the decline are stepped-up enforcement, advances in technology and a large increase in crossings with lights and gates.

There are more than 4,000 rail-highway crossings in Wisconsin. Of these, about 800 have both flashing lights and gates, a thousand have flashing lights, and 2,200 have only crossbucks. The average cost of installing gates is around $200,000, and the Office of the Commissioner of Railroads spends $4.4 million a year upgrading crossings.

Whatever the signage, crossings can be deadly. In many of the 2013 accidents, drivers went around gates or failed to stop. But cars also got stuck on the rails, in snow, or slid on ice into a train’s path.

Clarence Drewa, 87, a Palmyra resident, was driving Nov. 7 on Benson Ave. in Vernon when his tire got stuck in the railroad tracks. When he saw a train coming, he exited the car, his daughter, Sandra Stefanski, said. But the train struck the car and sent it hurling toward him. Among other injuries, his ribs were marred by fractures, and he died a week and a half later, she said.

The most tragic part was when two of his grandchildren, ages 5 and 6, were looking for their grandpa to come home.

“He was in all of our lives daily, and he was a very healthy man,” his daughter said.

Derailment, DOT-111, National Transportation Safety Board, Public Safety, Rail tanker cars

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, 2014

Rail 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.”