New oil-train safety rules will put public back in the dark
By Curtis Tate, McClatchy Washington Bureau, May 1, 2015
WASHINGTON — Details about rail shipments of crude oil and ethanol will be made exempt from public disclosure under new regulations announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation on Friday.
The department will end its requirement, put in place a year ago, that required railroads to share information about large volumes of Bakken crude oil with state officials.
Instead, railroads will share information directly with emergency responders, but it will be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act and state public records laws, the way other hazardous materials such as chlorine and anhydrous ammonia are currently protected.
After a CSX train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed and caught fire in Lynchburg, Va., on April 30 last year, federal regulators required railroads to notify emergency response agencies of shipments of 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude oil through their states.
The railroads complied, but asked states to sign agreements to keep the information confidential. Some agreed, but most refused, citing a conflict with their open records laws.
Using FOIA and state public records laws, McClatchy last year obtained full or partial data on Bakken rail shipments from 24 states. Another five states denied McClatchy’s requests.
CSX and Norfolk Southern, the dominant eastern railroads, sued Maryland to block the state from releasing its information to McClatchy. A trial is scheduled for next month.
McClatchy, however, was able to obtain some of the information about the Maryland shipments by going to Amtrak. Norfolk Southern uses a portion of the passenger railroad’s Northeast Corridor for its crude oil trains.
Last fall, the rail industry’s leading trade groups quietly asked the Transportation Department to drop the requirement.
In pretrial documents in the Maryland lawsuit, the railroads’ lawyers maintain that disclosure of the information – including the routes the trains take and the counties through which they pass – could compromise security, erode the companies’ competitive edge and harm their customers.
As of October, the Federal Railroad Administration disagreed. It said that information about the Bakken shipments was neither security nor commercially sensitive and was not exempt from public release. It also said it would continue the reporting requirement.
But on page 242 of the 395-page final rule the department published on Friday, it appeared that the railroads got their wish.
Starting next year, emergency responders will have access to information about shipments of all types of crude oil, not just Bakken, ethanol and other flammable liquids. The volume threshold will also be lowered to 20 or more cars of flammable liquid in a continuous block, or 35 or more cars dispersed throughout a train.
The shipments, however, will be classified as “security sensitive” and details about them shielded from the public.
“Under this approach,” the regulation states, “the transportation of crude oil by rail can…avoid the negative security and business implications of widespread public disclosure of routing and volume data.”
Day after derailment, cleanup and restoration begin
By Rusty Marks, Staff writer, Tuesday, February 17, 2015
MOUNT CARBON — Cleanup crews began removing the hulks of derailed and burned-out railroad tank cars Tuesday evening, and residents began to get water and electricity back, after a train carrying crude oil derailed, caught fire and exploded in western Fayette County on Monday.
Emergency shelters, set up after hundreds of residents were evacuated from the area, were closed Tuesday evening after CSX, the company whose train derailed, provided hotel rooms for them.
The CSX train, hauling 107 tank car loads of Bakken Shale crude oil from North Dakota to a transportation terminal in Yorktown, Virginia, derailed in Adena Village near Mount Carbon and Deepwater about 1:30 p.m. Monday, setting one house ablaze and causing numerous tank cars to burn and explode. The train also included two cars of sand, which were used as buffers at either end of the train, CSX officials said.
At a briefing Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said officials expected hundreds of residents without electricity to have service restored sometime Tuesday evening.
State officials said fewer than 800 people were affected by outages related to lines damaged by the initial fire. They also said they believed between 100 and 125 residents were evacuated or displaced, while the Federal Emergency Management Agency put that number at 2,400 in its daily report.
Local officials said about 100 people took refuge at emergency shelters Monday night at Valley High School in Smithers and the Armstrong Volunteer Fire Department.
Most people who had been staying at the shelters moved out once CSX offered hotel rooms, and others decided to stay with friends or relatives following the fire.
Billy Dunfee was the last to leave the shelter at Valley High School, having spent the night Monday. “They set us up on cots in the back gyms,” he said.
But the school didn’t have water Monday night, so Dunfee decided Tuesday morning to either stay with relatives or take CSX up on it’s offer for a hotel room. Dunfee wasn’t sure how long it would be before he would be allowed to return to his home.
Smithers police and volunteer firefighters from the area set up a makeshift water distribution center at Valley High School late Monday, and handed out water throughout the day Tuesday.
Smithers Police Chief Gerald Procter said the owner of J&J Trucking in nearby Canvas had a tractor-trailer filled with pallets of water, and took it upon himself to bring the truck to Smithers.
Volunteers had passed out water to about 60 cars by noon, with some drivers picking up water for friends and family members.
“I already came out and picked up water for six households before,” said Cannelton resident Jay Pauley. “I’m getting water for five more. There’s about 20 houses in the section where I live.”
CSX spokesman Gary Sease said the railroad was working with the Red Cross and other relief organizations to help those who had to leave their homes because of the train derailment.
The Federal Railroad Administration’s acting administrator, former Charleston resident Sarah Feinberg, and chief safety officer, Robert Lauby, were among several investigators from the FRA and the federal Pipeline Hazardous Materials Safety Administration who were on the scene Tuesday.
“Once the site is secured, officials will begin the investigation into the cause of the derailment,” U.S. Department of Transportation spokeswoman Suzanne Emmerling said Tuesday morning.
Officials at the West Virginia American Water treatment plant in Montgomery, downriver on the Kanawha-Fayette county line, were told to shut down their water intake as a precaution. The intakes were reopened Tuesday afternoon, after three rounds of testing by the company, with the help of the West Virginia National Guard, showed “non-detectable levels” of the components of crude oil in the Kanawha River.
The approximately 2,000 customers of West Virginia American Water’s Montgomery system — including people in Montgomery, Smithers, Cannelton, London, Handley and Hughes Creek — were told to boil their water before using it. Bottled water stations were being set up at the Montgomery Town Hall and at Valley High School.
Kelley Gillenwater, spokeswoman for the state Department of Environmental Protection, said that the fires were keeping DEP officials from being able to fully examine the site of the derailment to determine what sort of containment and cleanup is going to be needed.
Full details of water sampling being done by the state were not immediately available, but Gillenwater said that so far the results had come back “non-detect.” She said that despite initial reports, none of the train cars that derailed actually ended up in the Kanawha River.
Tomblin declared a state of emergency in Fayette and Kanawha counties after the derailment. “It appears things are starting to come back to normal,” the governor said at Tuesday’s news conference.
Randy Cheetham, a regional vice-president with CSX, said at the same press conference that the section of track where the derailment occurred had last been inspected on Friday. He said CSX and transportation officials have not yet determined the cause of the wreck.
Cheetham said the derailment started with the third car behind two locomotives pulling the train, and continued to the 28th car. Work crews were able to pull most of the cars away from the site of the fire.
An engineer and conductor on the train were not hurt, Cheetham said. He said the tank cars set fire to one home at the site, and the homeowner was treated for smoke inhalation — the only injury reported related to the derailment.
The West Virginia University Institute of Technology in Montgomery canceled classes for the rest of the week. In a statement, WVU Tech officials said water service on campus isn’t expected to be restored for another two or three days, and the school’s residence halls would close at 5 p.m. Tuesday. WVU Tech students will be temporarily housed at the University of Charleston’s residence halls at the former Mountain State University in Beckley, and at the Marriott Courtyard hotel in Beckley if necessary.
In April 2014, a train carrying crude oil on the same North Dakota-Virginia route derailed in Lynchburg, Virginia — one of several incidents involving oil-carrying rail cars in recent months that have brought increased scrutiny to the transport of oil via rail.
In October, officials with the state Department of Homeland Security blacked out details about the frequency of CSX oil train shipments, the amounts of oil transported and the routes the trains took through West Virginia from a Charleston Gazette Freedom of Information Act request for data on Bakken crude oil shipments through the state, citing security concerns and saying some of the information was proprietary to CSX.
Asked Tuesday whether the state would reconsider that stance in light of Monday’s derailment, Tomblin said there were probably still security concerns over releasing the information. However, he said state officials would take another look at the question.
Amtrak’s thrice-weekly Cardinal service, which runs through Fayette County on its way between Chicago and New York City, listed today’s run as canceled on the Amtrak website. Friday’s run is listed as “sold out,” which the service often does to block ticket sales on annulled runs. Tickets are being sold online for Sunday’s run.
Staff writers Ken Ward Jr., Erin Beck and Phil Kabler contributed to this report.
By Mary Ann Thomas, June 20, 2014
Jason Bridge | Valley News Dispatch | A Norfolk Southern worker walks past damage from a derailed train next to the MSI Corporation building along First Avenue in Vandergrift on Thursday, on Feb. 13, 2014.
A broken railroad spike likely caused a Feb. 13 train derailment and crude oil spill in Vandergrift.
Federal investigators said the broken spike allowed the track to spread, becoming too wide for the Norfolk Southern train to pass safely.
Mike England, a spokesman for the Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration, confirmed the cause.
The investigation of the Vandergrift derailment was completed recently by the railroad agency and its report was obtained by the Valley News Dispatch through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Broken spikes do cause train derailments on occasion, England said.
No violations were reported during the federal review, and the investigation is closed, he said.
“Just because there is an accident, it doesn’t mean that the railroad did anything wrong,” England said
Dave Pidgeon, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, said he had nothing to add to the investigators’ report.
U.S. Sen. Bob Casey said the nation and industry must learn from rail accidents.
“The derailment in Vander-grift and others across the state should serve as a wake-up call that we need to improve rail safety,” he said in a statement on Friday.
“Dependable rail travel is vitally important to Pennsylvania’s economy and critical to the safety of the millions of Americans who live near rail lines. I will continue to push for improvements to prevent future derailments,” Casey said.
“Among other measures, it is imperative that the Federal Railroad Administration has the resources it needs to hire rail inspectors to prevent this from happening again,” he said.
Report details
According to the report, two trains used the Vandergrift track hours before the derailment without incident.
No injuries were reported among the engineer, locomotive engineer trainee and conductor on board the derailed train. Three MSI Corp. employees were evacuated when one of the rail cars went through the wall of a company building near the tracks.
The first car to derail was the 67th car in the train of 112 loaded cars and seven empty cars. The 67th through 88th cars derailed, including 19 loaded with crude oil and two with liquid propane gas.
The train originated in Conway, Pa., and was on its way to Harrisburg and points east.
After the derailment, the railroad “did a fair amount” of work on tracks in the accident area, where train traffic has resumed, Pidgeon said.
The Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration this year determined the Vandergrift derailment to be the 14th most significant involving crude oil or ethanol in the past eight years. That report stated that 10,000 gallons of oil spilled in the Vandergrift derailment.
In contrast, the Federal Railroad Administration report states that only 4,310 gallons of heavy crude oil was released.
Damage to equipment in the accident is estimated at $1.76 million, according to the report.
In addition, about $240,000 in damage was caused to the track and $30,000 to a signal.
