Tag Archives: Federal Regulation (U.S.)

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency planning, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Fire, Hazardous cargo transparency, Hazmat notification, Worst case scenario

House bill could shield oil train spill response plans from disclosure

October 16, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from McClatchyDC

House bill could shield oil train spill response plans from disclosure

By Curtis Tate, October 16, 2015

Oil burns at the site of a March 5, 2015, train derailment near Galena, Ill. A bill in Congress would require railroads to have comprehensive oil spill response plans, but would also give the Secretary of Transportation the ability to exempt the details from disclosure. EPA

HIGHLIGHTS

Six-year transportation bill includes section on oil trains
Obama administration supports public notifications of oil spills, etc.
Future transportation secretary could be empowered to protect data

WASHINGTON – A House of Representatives bill unveiled Friday could make it more difficult for the public to know how prepared railroads are for responding to oil spills from trains, their worst-case scenarios and how much oil is being transported by rail through communities.

The language appears in the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s six-year transportation legislation, which primarily addresses federal programs that support state road, bridge and transit projects. But the legislation also includes a section on oil trains.

The U.S. Department of Transportation is working on a rule to require railroads shipping oil to develop comprehensive spill response plans along the lines of those required for pipelines and waterborne vessels. It would also require them to assess their worst-case scenarios for oil spills, including quantity and location.

The House bill would give the secretary of transportation the power to decide what information would not be disclosed to the public.

The secretary would have discretion to withhold anything proprietary or security sensitive, as well as “specific response resources and tactical resource deployment plans” and “the specific amount and location of worst-case discharges, including the process by which a railroad carrier determines the worst-case discharge.”

The House bill defines “worst-case discharge” as the largest foreseeable release of oil in an accident or incident, as determined by the rail carrier.

Four major oil train derailments have occurred in the U.S. since the beginning of the year, resulting in the release of more than 600,000 gallons, according to federal spill data.

Numerous states have released information on crude by rail shipments to McClatchy and other news organizations. DOT began requiring railroads to notify state officials of such shipments last year after a train derailed and caught fire in Lynchburg, Va.

The disclosures were opposed by railroads and their trade associations, which asked the department to drop the requirement. The department tried to accommodate the industry’s concerns in its May final rule on oil train safety by making the reports exempt from disclosure. But facing backlash from lawmakers and emergency response groups, the department reversed itself.

Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, and Sarah Feinberg, the acting chief of the Federal Railroad Administration, said the department would continue the disclosure requirement and make it permanent. But a new administration could take a different approach.

“We strongly support transparency and public notification to the fullest extent possible,” Feinberg said in July.

In May, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed a bill that would require railroads operating in the state to plan for their worst-case spills.

In April, BNSF Railway told state emergency responders that the company currently considers 150,000 gallons of crude oil, enough to fill five rail tank cars, its worst-case scenario when planning for spills into waterways. A typical 100-car oil train carries about 3 million gallons.

Washington state requires marine ships that transport oil to plan for a spill of the entire cargo.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency conducted a mock derailment in New Jersey in March in which 450,000 gallons of oil was released.

California passed a similar bill last year, but two railroads and a major trade association challenged it in court, claiming the federal laws regulating railroads preempted state laws. A judge sided with the state in June, but without addressing the preemption question.

The House Transportation Committee will consider the six-year bill when lawmakers return from recess next week. The current legislation expires on Oct. 29, and the timing makes a short-term extension likely.

After the committee and the full House vote on the bill, House and Senate leaders will have to work out their differences before the bill goes to the president’s desk.

Samantha Wohlfeil of the Bellingham (Wash.) Herald contributed.

Derailment, Federal Railroad Administration, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Positive Train Control, Rail Safety, Train braking systems

Lawmakers Press Railroad Nominee on Safety Deadline

September 17, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from the New York Times

Lawmakers Press Railroad Nominee on Safety Deadline

By Ron Nixon, Sept. 17, 2015

An Amtrak train traveling from Penn Station in New York to Penn Station in Newark in August. There is a Dec. 31 deadline for railroads to start using positive train control technology, which increases safety. Credit Fred R. Conrad for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s nominee to lead the Federal Railroad Administration faced tough questioning by lawmakers on Thursday about the rail industry’s contention that it cannot meet a year-end deadline to install a safety technology meant to keep trains from derailing.

Sarah Feinberg, 37, who was nominated by Mr. Obama in May, has been acting administrator of the agency for about nine months. During that time, there have been several train crashes attributed to excessive speeds, including in May, when an Amtrak passenger train derailed in Philadelphia, killing eight people and injuring 200.

Under questioning by a Senate panel weighing her confirmation, Ms. Feinberg said the railroad administration would enforce the 2008 law that set Dec. 31 of this year as the deadline to have railroads install the technology, known as positive train control.

“On Jan. 1, we will enforce the deadline and the law,” Ms. Feinberg said. She said the agency would work with the rail companies to help them with technical and financial challenges they face in trying to install the safety technology. But she emphasized, “We do not have the authority to extend the deadline.” That authority belongs to Congress.

The deadline to install positive train control, which dominated the questions at the hearing, has become a contentious issue. Some members of Congress have proposed pushing back the deadline. A Senate bill passed in July would extend it to 2018. But many safety advocates say the industry has known of the deadline for years and should be able to install the technology on time.

A report on Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that no railroad would be able to fully install the technology by the end of the year. The investigators recommended that Congress extend the deadline. Many railroad operators say they will refuse to carry crude oil or hazardous chemicals after Jan. 1 if Congress does not do so.

At the hearing, Ms. Feinberg received tough questioning from Democrats and Republicans, who asked if the agency had contingency plans if the railroad industry did not meet the deadline.

“If you know that they aren’t going to be in compliance at the end of the year, what are you going to do?” asked Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri.

Senator Roger Wicker, Republican of Mississippi, said he and other panel members were frustrated by the “lack of a specific proposal concerning an extension.”

Ms. Feinberg was introduced at the hearing by Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, whom she has known since she was a child. Mr. Manchin called Ms. Feinberg “uniquely qualified to lead the agency.”

Ms. Feinberg, a former Facebook executive and White House adviser, has dealt with several high-profile rail accidents during her tenure at the railroad administration. In addition to the Amtrak wreck, a train derailment in Oxnard, Calif., killed the engineer and injured about 30 people, and an oil train derailment in West Virginia caused the evacuation of about 100 people from their homes.

During her tenure, higher domestic oil production has caused a significant increase in the amount of crude oil traveling by rail, setting off concerns about the safety of those shipments through cities and towns.

Before she became acting administrator, Ms. Feinberg’s most relevant transportation experience was the nearly 18 months she spent as chief of staff to Anthony Foxx, the transportation secretary. Mr. Foxx, whose department oversees the railroad agency, has said that Ms. Feinberg has his full confidence.

Railroad administrators without transportation experience are not unprecedented. Recent examples include Gilbert E. Carmichael, who led the agency from 1989 to 1993 and was active in Mississippi Republican politics before he became administrator. Likewise, John H. Riley, who led the Federal Railroad Administration from 1983 to 1989, worked as a Senate aide before being appointed to lead the agency by President Ronald Reagan.

During her time as acting administrator, Ms. Feinberg has issued a crude-by-rail rule that imposes significant new safety requirements and has started a partnership with Google to integrate the railroad administration’s grade crossing data into its mapping software, allowing users to receive audio and visual alerts about railroad crossings.

Crude By Rail, Empty tank cars, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Hazardous cargo transparency, High Hazard Flammable Trains (HHFTs), North American light crude oils, Oil prices, Open-records request, Parked trains, Rail industry, Residue train

Held up in court for a year, Maryland oil train reports outdated

September 13, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from McClatchyDC

Held up in court for a year, Maryland oil train reports outdated

By Curtis Tate, September 12, 2015

HIGHLIGHTS
• McClatchy received reports it asked for in 2014
• Documents contained data previously revealed
• Economics of crude by rail have shifted since

After more than a year, McClatchy finally got the oil train reports it had requested from Maryland.

And they were badly out of date.

Last year, McClatchy filed open-records requests in about 30 states for the documents, and was the first news organization to do so in Maryland, in June 2014.

Maryland was poised to release the records in July 2014, when two railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, sued the state Department of the Environment to block the disclosure.

Finally last month, a state judge ruled in the favor of the release, marking the first time a court had affirmed what many other states had already done without getting sued.

The documents McClatchy and other news organizations ultimately received were dated June 2014, not long after the U.S. Department of Transportation began requiring the railroads to notify state officials of shipments of 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude oil.

After more than a year, however, the economics of shipping crude by rail had changed substantially.

Amid a slump in oil prices, refineries once receiving multiple trainloads of North American crude oil every day have switched, at least temporarily, to waterborne foreign imports.

The trend is reflected from the East Coast to the West Coast, where long strings of surplus tank cars have been parked on lightly used rail lines, generating rental income for small railroads but also the ire of nearby residents.

The documents released in Maryland show that in June 2014, Norfolk Southern was moving as many as 16 oil trains a week through Cecil County on its way to a refinery in Delaware.

But McClatchy has known that since August 2014, when it received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Amtrak.

The Delaware News Journal reported that the PBF Refinery in Delaware City, Del., now receives only about 40,000 barrels a day of crude by rail. That’s about 56 loaded tank cars, or half a unit train, nowhere close to the volume of mid-2014.

The June 2014 Maryland documents also show that CSX was moving as many as five oil trains a week on a route from western Maryland through downtown Baltimore toward refineries in Philadelphia.

But that had been clear since at least October 2014, when the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency released its oil train reports showing an identical number of CSX trains crossing from western Pennsylvania into Maryland, then back into southeast Pennsylvania.

CSX told the Baltimore Sun that it had not regularly moved a loaded oil train through Baltimore since the third quarter of 2014. The company had earlier told the newspaper that it moved empty oil trains through the city and state.

Federal regulators never required railroads to report empty oil train movements.

The vast majority of loaded CSX oil trains move to Philadelphia via Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, N.Y., and northern New Jersey, according to records from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.

Blast zone, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Evacuation zone, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Public Health, Public Safety, Schools

5.7 Million children attend U.S. schools in an oil train blast zone – sign the petition

September 10, 2015 Roger Straw

Repost from ForestEthics

Here’s a number you need to see: 57 MILLION CHILDREN

Join ForestEthics in telling U.S. safety officials and railroad execs: No More Oil Train Secrets. The first step in making our schools safe from oil trains is to release critical documents that the rail companies are hiding from the public.

5.7 Million K-12 age children attend U.S. schools in the oil train blast zone–the area that must be evacuated in case of a derailment or fire from an oil train.

Massive growth of oil train traffic–over 5,000% since 2008 in the U.S.–means more derailments, oil spills into waterways, and massive explosions. 2015 alone has seen five explosive derailments in the U.S. and Canada. We now know that oil trains threaten 5,728,044 million children in 15,848 schools every day in the U.S. Our children deserve better.

But we don’t even know the details on the dangers of these trains–and neither do our first responders or our elected leaders. We don’t know because oil train companies like BNSF, Union Pacific, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Canadian Pacific and Canadian National are keeping four critical types of information hidden:

The routing choices they make through cities, towns and sensitive areas;
The worst case scenario models they create for your town;
The insurance amount they have to cover themselves; and
Their emergency response plans when the unthinkable happens.

We are calling these documents The Oil Train Secrets. The Federal Railroad Administration, the agency in the U.S. that is responsible for making the companies release these documents, isn’t doing its job–and neither is its boss, the U.S. Department of Transportation. But our future and our children are too important to let these critical documents stay secret.

Join ForestEthics in telling U.S. transportation officials (and the Railroad Execs themselves): the next step in making our schools safe from oil trains is to release The Oil Train Secrets.

To: US Safety Officials and Railroad Executives
From: [Your Name]

To: Anthony Foxx of the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation and Sarah Feinberg, Director of the Federal Railroad Administration
Re: Request for Release of Documents

Secretary Foxx and Director Feinberg:

On Tuesday, September 8th, 2015, ForestEthics released its estimate of the number of K-12 age students in schools in the evacuation zone for oil trains: 5.7 million. 5.7 million K-12 age students are among the 25 million Americans living in this blast zone.

Many local emergency planning and response agencies have testified in Congress and state and local legislatures that, in the absence of railroad risk analyses, they have been struggling to develop their own ability to respond to potential crude oil derailments. Local safety officials need information to protect our communities, especially schools. In the interests of public safety, we are formally asking your assistance in releasing the following documents:

1. Rail Companies own calculated Worst Case Scenarios for a potential oil train emergency in urban and sensitive environmental locales. Local and state officials have stated that they have never seen this essential crude oil release scenario information.

2. We also need to see rail company documentation on the levels of catastrophic insurance coverage each railroad company has been able to buy for potential serious releases in each jurisdiction. The insurers apparently have seen the railroads’ Worst Case Scenarios and have demonstrated a healthy and cautious concern about the scale of costly disasters that their companies might be responsible for covering. If the insurers can see it, so can the public.

3. We require the rail companies’ internal Comprehensive Emergency Response Plans for high hazard flammable trains (oil trains), both generic and for specific typical locations, urban and rural.

4. We also need rail companies’ up-to-now secret route analysis documentation and route selection results in each jurisdiction, pursuant to Congress’s 2007 Public Law 110-53, for urban hazmat safety and security routing for the currently covered cargoes of chlorine and ammonia, as well as for the newly-recognized “key trains” of crude oil and ethanol.

We are publicly demanding that you promptly assist the rail companies, who will be receiving a copy of this letter, to provide these key risk documents, up to now withheld from public view. Not only because our first responders and governments need them, but because our communities have a right to know to what chemical disaster risks various hazardous operations are exposing them. It is our assessment that the publication of these documents would aid your agencies in protecting the public and assisting first responders. Our children deserve nothing less than the safest learning environment and the best-informed first responders.

Sincerely,

ForestEthics and the undersigned,

++++++++++

Cc: Matt Rose
Executive Chairman, Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad

Cc: John Koraleski
CEO, Union Pacific

Cc: Michael Ward
CEO, CSX

Cc: James Squires
CEO, Norfolk Southern

Cc: E. Hunter Harrison
CEO, Canadian Pacific

Cc: Claude Mongeau
CEO, Canadian National