Tag Archives: Federal Railroad Administration

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Emergency Readiness & Response, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Massive increase in crude-by-rail

Oil train risks push communities to prepare for worst – “Little Black Bullets”

Repost from Poughkeepsie Journal
[Editor: Significant quote: “The U.S. Department of Transportation acknowledged in its proposed rule that an another accident isn’t a question of if, but when.  “Absent this proposed rule, we predict about 15 mainline derailments for 2015, falling to a prediction of about 5 mainline derailments annually by 2034,” the department’s proposal stated. Reviews and lawsuits mean it could be years before the rule is implemented.”  – RS]

Oil train risks push communities to prepare for worst

Khurram Saeed   |   August 21, 2014
The home of Doris Quinones is less than 100 feet away from the CSX railroad track, on which as many as 4 oil trains pass by every day, not to mention freight trains carrying other hazardous chemicals. An oil train is seen passing from the yard of Doris Quinones, July 31, 2014 in Haverstraw.(Photo: Tania Savayan/The Journal News)

Little black bullets.

That’s what Doris Quinones calls the dozens of outdated tank cars filled with crude oil that rumble yards away from her Haverstraw home every day.

One train hauling oil can have up to 100 cars, and as many as 30 oil trains pass through Rockland each week on the way to refineries. That’s twice the number from just six months ago as demand continues to grow for the volatile crude oil drawn from the Bakken region in North Dakota.

Those trains also pass through Ulster County.

In Highland, the trains roll past a restaurant and a Hudson River waterfront park that is being outfitted with a new deep-water dock for tour boats.

Ulster County’s vulnerable infrastructure includes drinking water intakes for Port Ewen and the Town of Lloyd.

A 100-car oil train can carry 3 million gallons of crude oil, and because so many more are on the rails, the number of derailments and accidents is rising.

The oil trains, which do not travel on a set schedule, roll through four of Rockland’s five towns on CSX Railroad’s River Line. Fully loaded trains run north to south, less than a mile from Helen Hayes Hospital in West Haverstraw, Lake DeForest reservoir in Clarkstown, the Palisades Center in West Nyack and Dominican College in Blauvelt, not to mention dozens of neighborhoods, scores of schools and day care centers and right past key highways like the Thruway.

Given her proximity to the tracks, Quinones said a derailed train would “land in my living room.”

“We’re all realists,” Quinones said recently in her backyard, where she sometimes lounges in her swimming pool and tends to her cucumbers. “They got to get something somewhere. It’s got to go on the freight train but they got to take extra measures even if it costs them more money.”

The oil trains are hard to miss, and the safety issues surrounding them, particularly their tank cars, have become harder to ignore. There have been a number of fiery explosions and accidents since 2013 that have caused officials at all levels to look closer at the dangers of shipping oil by rail.

Just over a year ago, 47 people died when an unattended oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Rockland had a close call in December when an oil train transporting 99 empty tank cars from Philadelphia to North Dakota hit a truck stuck on the crossing in West Nyack, sending the truck’s driver to the hospital.

Planning for worst

Peter Miller, chief of the Highland Fire District, said firefighters took part in a drill in Kingston on May 30, along with other fire departments. The drill was sponsored by the Ulster County Emergency Services Department and CSX.

He said the district’s response plans are constantly being updated, particularly now that the Bakken crude is rolling through.

“We upgrade our training and our response plans to cover what we would do, depending on where the incident is,” he said.

Even as federal transportation officials are proposing more stringent requirements for tank cars to make them safer, Rockland’s first responders are planning for nightmare scenarios and how to evacuate thousands of people quickly in a catastrophe or have them stay where they are.

“Our job is to really plan for the worst,” said Chris Jensen, Rockland County’s hazardous materials coordinator.

Rockland emergency officials are finishing the evacuation map for residents and businesses within a mile of the River Line.

It covers a mile on either side of the rail line, broken into half-mile sections, from Bear Mountain to the New Jersey border.

Gordon Wren Jr., director of Rockland’s Office of Fire and Emergency Services, said the map “allows us to make the decisions quicker, faster.”

“Do you evacuate or not? If so, how far?” Wren said.

The map identifies schools, day care centers, nursing homes and senior housing, among other landmarks.

“(A police officer) can look at that and say, ‘Let’s get the people out of here,’ ” said Dan Greeley, assistant director of the county Office of Fire and Emergency Services. “It happens instantaneously.”

The U.S. Department of Transportation acknowledged in its proposed rule that an another accident isn’t a question of if, but when.

“Absent this proposed rule, we predict about 15 mainline derailments for 2015, falling to a prediction of about 5 mainline derailments annually by 2034,” the department’s proposal stated. Reviews and lawsuits mean it could be years before the rule is implemented.

In 2008, just 9,500 carloads of crude oil moved by rail. Last year, the figure exceeded 400,000, the Association of American Railroads said.

Rail industry officials note that 99.9 percent of all hazardous rail shipments reach their destinations safely and that only rail has afforded the nation the flexibility to move large volumes of oil so quickly and freely, letting the United States wean itself off foreign oil.

Susan Christopherson, chair of Cornell University’s city and regional planning department, said though pipelines are safer, oil shippers from western Canada and the Bakken shale region prefer trains because they provide flexibility from different points of origin to refineries nationwide.

The problem, she said, is the Federal Railroad Administration has “little capacity” to regulate the rail industry or monitor rail infrastructure safety.

“Costs for emergency preparedness have to be absorbed by state and local government,” Christopherson wrote in an email. “There is little or no compensation for these costs, which can be significant.”

Under Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the state has become increasingly proactive, carrying out inspection blitzes of rail yards and leveling fines.

‘Witches’ brew’

The River Line, part of CSX’s rail network, runs from outside Albany. In February, the railroad told The Journal News that two oil trains used the line daily, or 14 a week. By June, the railroad fixed the number of trains hauling 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude at 15 to 30, or up to four each day, according to documents it had to file with the state.

CSX spokesman Gary Sease said there have been incremental increases in crude oil volume over the past several weeks with likely more to come. The railroad recently completed double-tracking work in north Rockland to increase capacity on the track.

“It is a result of market conditions and can fluctuate,” Sease wrote in an email.

“We see customers investing in additional crude oil terminals over the next couple of years.”

Bakken crude oil is just the latest dangerous substance to travel the line, Jensen said. Toxic substances such as chlorine, ethanol, propane and vinyl chloride have moved on the former West Shore line for decades.

“It’s a witches’ brew of stuff,” Jensen said.

But one big difference is the amount of Bakken crude that passes through Ulster, Rockland and, for that matter, 15 other counties in New York.

Aside from CSX, Canadian Pacific Railway hauls Bakken crude from the Midwest to Albany, with an average of one train a day with a million-plus gallons.

In May, CSX began a first responders training program by bringing equipment and experts to communities to teach them about incidents involving crude oil. More than 1,000 people have been trained, he said.

That’s a good start but more needs to be done, said Jerry DeLuca, executive director and CEO of the New York State Association of Fire Chiefs.

“You don’t fight an oil fire with water. We need to have foam and a lot of it,” said DeLuca, whose group represents more than 11,000 professional and volunteer fire chiefs. “It’s not something we utilize every day, so you have to be trained.”

Poughkeepsie Journal staff writer John Ferro contributed to this report.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Lake Champlain, Massive increase in crude-by-rail

The risk to Lake Champlain

Repost from The Burlington Free Press
[Editor: What do pristine California waters and Lake Champlain (in upstate New York) have in common?  Would you believe oil trains?  – RS]

The risk to Lake Champlain

 Mike Winslow, August 15, 2014

The sound of trains clacking along the rails that abut Lake Champlain has become more common with the dramatic increase in freight traffic attributed to fossil fuel extraction.

Each week approximately 60 million gallons of oil travel along the lake carried by 20 trains with up to 100 cars each. Nearly half of these shipments carry the volatile Bakken crude.

The U.S. meets 66 percent of its crude oil demand from production in North America with tremendous growth in outputs from Canada and the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota. In October 2013, U.S. crude production exceeded imports for the first time since February 1995.

Oil produced from the Bakken fields is light. That means it flows easily, but it also means it is more volatile and flammable.

As a result, the potential property damage and loss of life associated with rail accidents involving Bakken oil is higher than oil from other sources.

In January, two federal agencies issued a safety alert warning of these risks.

The alert was triggered by a series of devastating accidents. Federal Railroad Administration statistics suggest that on average, at least one car slips off the tracks every day. There have been six major derailments since the beginning of 2013.

The most infamous occurred July 5, 2013, in Lac Megantic, Quebéc. An improperly secured train rolled on its own, and 63 cars derailed near the center of town, leading to multiple explosions and fires, evacuation of 2,000 people and 47 deaths.

There have been unsettling precedents:

• October 19, 2013: 13 tank cars derailed in Alberta leading to evacuation of 100 residents. Three cars carrying propane burned following an explosion.

• November 8, 2013: 30 cars derailed in a wetland near Aliceville, Alabama and about a dozen were decimated by fire.

• December 30, 2013: two trains, one carrying grain and one oil, collided in Casselton, North Dakota. Twenty of the oil train cars derailed and exploded leading to evacuation of 1,400 people.

• January 7, 2014: 17 cars derailed in New Brunswick and five exploded leading to evacuation of 45 people.

• January 20, 2014: Seven cars derailed on a bridge over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, though no oil leaked.

• More recently, 15-17 cars derailed in Lynchburg, Va., on April 30. Three fell into the James River and one burst into flames. There were no injuries, but 300-350 people had to be evacuated, and oil leaked into the James River. The state estimated 20,000 to 25,000 gallons escaped during the wreck.

Our region is no stranger to train derailments. In 2007, a northbound Vermont Railways freight train derailed in Middlebury, spilling gasoline into Otter Creek and leading to the evacuation of 30 streets in the vicinity.

Trains have also derailed along the Lake Champlain route. In 2007, 12 cars derailed near Route 22 in Essex, N.Y., the same stretch of tracks now carrying volatile oil.

Concern over the state of North American freight rail safety predates the increase in oil shipments.

In 2006 the Toronto Star ran a five-part series on rail safety. The newspaper noted, “Canadian freight trains are running off the rails in near record numbers and spilling toxic fluids at an alarming rate, but only a tiny fraction of the accidents are ever investigated.”

The greatly increased traffic in oil has further strained railroad infrastructure. According to an article in Pacific Standard Magazine, 85 percent of the 92,000 tank cars that haul flammable liquids around the nation are standard issue DOT-111s. They have been referred to as “Pepsi cans on wheels.”

These cars are built to carry liquids but lack specialized safety features found in pressurized tanks used for hauling explosive liquids. The industry has agreed to include additional safety features in any new cars put on the tracks, but since rail cars have an economic life of 30-40 years, conversion to the newer cars has been slow.

One relatively new risk is the predominance of “unit trains.” These are long series of cars all shipped from the same originating point to the same destination.

Often the cars will all carry the same product. It used to be that oil cars were mixed in with other freight cars bound for different locations. Unit trains are a greater risk in part because safety standards are based on the carrying capacity of a single car and don’t account for the greater volumes that unit trains can transport.

The National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency charged with investigating accidents, has called on the Federal Railroad Administration to change this standard.

Recently, an oil company submitted plans to build an oil heating facility in Albany, N.Y. The facility would be used to heat oil shipped via rail. The oil would then be transferred to barges and floated to refineries.

If permitted, a heating facility would draw increased transport of Canadian tar sands, which needs to be diluted or heated for loading or unloading, through the Lake Champlain region.

In contrast to Bakken field oil, tar sands oil is heavy. Cleanup of tar sands oil following accidents is extremely challenging. The oil sinks rather than floating, making containment difficult.

When a pipeline carrying tar sands oil broke near Kalamazoo, Mich., 850,000 gallons spilled. The resulting cleanup cost more than $1 billion (yes, $1 billion), and costs were “substantially higher than the average cost of cleaning up a similar amount of conventional oil,” according to a report prepared by the Congressional Research Service.

In November 2013, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation declared the proposed facility would have no significant environmental impacts.

However, public outrage led the department to reconsider that declaration, expand the public comment period and seek additional information from the proponents.

Still, the additional requested information touches only the tip of the facility’s impacts on the region. The facility should undergo a full environmental impact review that includes potential impacts on freight shipping throughout the region including along Lake Champlain.

In July, the Department of Transportation proposed new rules on rail safety. They include a phase-out of DOT-111s during the next few years, tightened speed limits, improved brakes and permanent requirements for railroads to share data with state emergency managers.

The federal department is accepting comments on the proposed rules until Sept. 30 and hopes to finalize them by the end of the year.

It’s a step in the right direction, but way too slow on getting rid of these risky cars. Delays in updating standards puts people, communities, Lake Champlain and other waterways at risk. The administration needs to act before another disaster like what occurred in Lac Megantic occurs here or elsewhere.

Train whistles echoing off the waters of the lake should elicit wistful thoughts of faraway places, not shudders of dread.

Mike Winslow is the staff scientist at Burlington-based nonprofit Lake Champlain Committee.

Rail concerns

A forum on rail transportation of crude oil along the western shore of Lake Champlain is planned for 7 p.m. – 9 p.m. on Aug. 24 at Plattsburgh City Hall.

For more information, contact the Lake Champlain Committee at lcc@lakechamplaincommittee.org or (802) 658-1414.
Emergency Readiness & Response, Insurance Industry, Tank car design, Tank car retrofit

Ca-ching: Oil-by-rail surge to benefit three commercial sectors

Repost from Benzinga
[Editor: Quick & dirty on the 3 sectors: Freight Car Designers And Refitters, Insurance Providers, and Emergency Services And Safety Training.  UNLESS … if we stop crude by rail in its tracks, the only CA-CHING will be in the alternative energy fields.  – RS] 

3 Sectors Expected To Benefit From The Oil-By-Rail Surge

Bruce Kennedy, Benzinga Staff Writer, August 11, 2014

It’s been just over a year since a freight train carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale fields in North Dakota derailed and exploded in a Quebec town near the U.S.-Canadian border, killing 47 people.

That accident, along with several others in its wake, drew attention to the enormous increase in shale oil now being transported from North Dakota and Canada by rail – and the vulnerabilities of that form of transport.

“More crude oil is being shipped by rail than ever before, with much of it being transported out of North Dakota’s Bakken Shale Formation,” Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox pointed out in a press conference last month. “In 2008, producers shipped 9,500 rail-carloads of oil in the U.S.; by just last year, that number skyrocketed to 415,000 rail-carloads — a jump of more than 4,300 percent.”

At that same press conference, Fox announced a rule-making proposal to improve the safe transportation of large quantities of flammable materials by rail – crude oil and ethanol in particular.

The increase in oil being transported by rail, as well as the new safety measures, might also be a windfall for companies in some related fields.

Freight Car Designers And Refitters

The proposed new safety rules for oil freight cars means a potential bonanza for firms like The Greenbrier Companies (NYSE: GBX). The Oregon-based group is a leading manufacturer and marketer of railroad freight car equipment in both North America and Europe.

Along with retro-fitting existing oil rail cars, Greenbrier is also designing a new genreration “Tank Car of the Future,”  with a thicker tank and bigger welds to ensure greater safety.

The new design, according to the Rigzone oil and gas industry web site, is “intended to meet anticipated new industry and government standards for tank cars transporting certain hazardous material.”

Insurance Providers

The Wall Street Journal reports that most, big North American railroads usually carry about $1.5 billion in liability insurance – but notes that accidents like last year’s deadly derailment and explosion in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, can end up costing billions of dollars more in cost, especially if that accident happens in a populated area.

“Even if it happens outside of town, the massive damage to property and the environment — you’re stymied when you have these kind of crude oil fires burning hot and big for days,” Karen Darch, president of Barrington, Illinois, told the newspaper.

This could lead to an increase in the need for insurance.

“With experts predicting that oil spill derailments may increase in frequency over the next decade, the insurance industry must be prepared to address this new coverage threat,” says the law industry tracker web site Law360 earlier this year, “including the coverage issues and potential exposure which may arise from these disasters.”

Emergency Services And Safety Training

Earlier this year, Minnesota’s state legislature passed an oil transport law. The measure, reportedly worth more than $6 million, took fees generated in part from oil and railroad companies and put that funding towards tanker and pipeline disaster training, as well as more state transportation safety inspectors.

As former National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman pointed out in a letter written this past January to the head of the Federal Railroad Administration, there is no mandate for the railroads to come up with comprehensive disaster response plans for oil train derailments

This means the rail carriers “have effectively placed the burden of remediating the environmental consequences of an accident on local communities along their routes,” the letter said.

According to the Association of American Railroads, the industry is providing $5 million to develop and fund specialized training for first responders handling a crude-by-rail accident, as well as developing “an inventory of emergency response resources and equipment for responding to the release of large amounts of crude oil along routes over which trains with 20 or more cars of crude oil operate.”

Crude By Rail, Rail industry

BNSF’s Proposal For One-Person Train Crews Concerns Rail Workers

Repost from KPLU News, Seattle

BNSF’s Proposal For One-Person Train Crews Concerns Rail Workers

By Ashley Gross, July 29, 2014
FILE – In this Nov. 6, 2013, file photo, a BNSF Railway train hauls crude oil near Wolf Point, Montana. | Matthew Brown AP Photo

Railroad workers are speaking out against a proposal by Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway to have single-employee freight train crews. They say the idea is unsafe, especially in light of the increasing transportation of crude oil by rail.

The controversy stems from a tentative contract agreement BNSF has reached with one of its unions, the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Union. If union members approve that deal, BNSF could operate freight trains with just an engineer onboard. That engineer would have help from a so-called master conductor who would not be on the train.

The company says it would only use single-person crews on trains that have a computerized collision-avoidance system, and not on trains carrying crude oil or other hazardous materials. But some workers say the proposal is still too risky.

“To be safe in the communities that we’re running these trains through, you need to remove as many hazards as possible, not add one giant one, which is essentially what this is doing,” said Jen Wallis, a BNSF conductor who is not part of the union that will vote on the deal.

Wallis says there’s nothing in the contract that prevents BNSF from using one-person crews to haul hazardous materials.

People have been paying close attention to rail safety in the wake of the deadly rail disaster in Quebec last year that killed 47 people. That train had one employee on duty who left it unmanned when the accident occurred.

The Federal Railroad Administration in the U.S. has said it plans to issue a rule requiring two-person crews on crude oil trains. Union officials did not return calls for comment.