Tag Archives: Kanawha River

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fire, Rail inspection

WV GAZETTE: Day after derailment, cleanup and restoration begin

Repost from WV  Gazette, Charleston, WV

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.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion

NY TIMES: Spilled Oil Keeps Flames Burning After a Train Derailment in West Virginia

Repost from The New York Times
[Editor:  A friend read this and observed, “A veteran of Iraq said it was ‘like a 500 pound bomb going off.’  Children were running barefoot down an icy road carrying their pets and said they ‘thought they were going to die.’  This should get everyone’s attention, even the numb skulls at DOT!”  – RS]

Spilled Oil Keeps Flames Burning After a Train Derailment in West Virginia

By Dan Heyman & Richard Pérez-Peña, Feb 17, 2015
A train that carried crude oil continued to smolder on Tuesday after derailing in southern West Virginia the day before and setting off multiple explosions. Smoke remained visible from miles away on Tuesday. Credit Marcus Constantino / Reuters

BOOMER, W.Va. — A train hauling millions of pounds of crude oil that derailed on Monday was still burning Tuesday night as oil poured from the wreckage.

Residents relied on bottled water that was trucked into town after the utility West Virginia American Water, fearing that oil had been dumped into the Kanawha River, closed a treatment plant downstream, in Montgomery, on Monday. The company reopened the plant on Tuesday afternoon, saying tests had shown “nondetectable levels of the components of crude oil” in the river. Still, aerial photographs appeared to show oil in a nearby creek, and the utility advised its 2,000 customers in the area to boil water before using it.

The CSX train, with 109 tanker cars and two locomotives, derailed about 1:20 p.m. here in the southern part of the state, sending fireballs ripping through the air. The governor’s office released a statement Tuesday saying that 26 tankers had derailed and that “19 of those tankers were involved in the fire.”

Scenes-from-WV-train-fire_WOAY

Spills and fires in derailments have prompted concerns about the safety of transporting oil by rail. In 2011, the American Association of Railroads required that new tanker cars meet higher standards to resist rupture in accidents, though it did not require refitting older cars. CSX said the tankers in Monday’s crash had all been built to the new specifications.

Scattered fires still burned in pools of oil late Tuesday, the dark plume of smoke visible from many miles away, and a bitter aroma of burning plastic filled the air. Several tankers were charred an oily black, all their markings obscured.

In the derailment, several tanker cars jumped the tracks entirely, piling against each other at odd angles or tumbling down the riverbank. There were multiple explosions, as flames shot hundreds of feet in the sky. Residents, some of whom were ordered to evacuate, said at least one house had burned to the ground in a few minutes, and firefighters from several surrounding departments fought the blaze in frigid conditions, with temperatures of 13 degrees or less.

“It was like a 500-pound bomb going off,” said Brandon Truman, 32, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who lives in this town, which is across the ice-clogged river from the crash site. “You could feel the pressure and the heat.”

He and his neighbors said the second blast had been the biggest, rattling their houses and their nerves. Residents noted the presence of chemical plants in the region and said their fear had initially been compounded by wondering what kinds of toxins might have been in the rail cars.

“We ran because we didn’t know what it was,” Mr. Truman said.

Leslie Bowles, who lives on the same short street, said, “It literally blew my door open.” Ms. Bowles said she had loaded her two small children into a car driven by her father-in-law and “just said, ‘Go.’ Just said, ‘Get out of here.’ ”

She and her husband, James, along with many of their neighbors, found their own vehicles stuck in the snow, and they fled on foot.

Cameron Sigmon, 12, said he and his sister had run down to the frozen road, without socks, carrying their dogs.

“Heck yeah, I was scared,” he said. “I thought I was going to die.”

About 200 to 300 people were ordered by the local authorities to evacuate on Monday. They took shelter in schools, a fire station and a community center, said Jennifer Sayre, the Kanawha County manager. “The railroad has made arrangements for some families to get hotel rooms,” she said.

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency in Kanawha and Fayette Counties on Monday. CSX and local officials said that one person had been treated for possible respiratory trouble related to the accident but that they knew of no other injuries. It was not clear if any structures were damaged, but several hundred homes lost electricity.

The train was carrying oil from North Dakota to a ship terminal in Yorktown, Va.

Such accidents have become more common as oil shipment by rail has soared with the boom in oil production from the Bakken shale formation underlying parts of the northern Plains states and central Canada. Before 2009, fewer than 10,000 tank cars of oil were transported by rail each year in the United States, according to the railroad association, but that traffic jumped to more than 230,000 cars in 2012, and more than 430,000 in 2013.

The federal Department of Transportation has proposed even tougher standards for tankers, and the Canadian authorities have required the retrofitting of older cars by 2017.

State, federal and CSX investigators were headed to the scene of the crash here to determine the cause and the extent of environmental damage.

It was not clear whether the unusually low temperatures or the snowstorm barreling through the region at the time had played a role in the accident.

Dan Heyman reported from Boomer, W. Va., and Richard Pérez-Peña from New York.

 

Bakken Crude, CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Evacuation, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Fire, Hazmat notification, Oil spill, Tank car design, Tank car manufacture, Tank car retrofit

AP: Fire from W.Va. oil train derailment burns for 3rd day

Repost from The State, Columbia, South Carolina

W.Va. oil train derailment was 1 of 3 with safer tank cars

By John Raby & Jonathan Mattise, Feb 18, 2015,  UPDATED Feb 18, 2015 1:33pm ET
A fire burns Monday, Feb. 16, 2015, after a train derailment near Charleston, W.Va. Nearby residents were told to evacuate as state emergency response and environmental officials headed to the scene. THE REGISTER-HERALD, STEVE KEENAN — AP Photo

MOUNT CARBON, W.Va. — The fiery derailment of a train carrying crude oil in West Virginia is one of three in the past year involving tank cars that already meet a higher safety standard than what federal law requires — leading some to suggest even tougher requirements that industry representatives say would be costly.

Hundreds of families were evacuated and nearby water treatment plants were temporarily shut down after cars derailed from a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude Monday, shooting fireballs into the sky, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning down a house nearby. It was snowing at the time, but it is not yet clear if weather was a factor.

The fire smoldered for a third day Wednesday. State public safety division spokesman Larry Messina said the fire was 85 percent contained.

The train’s tanks were a newer model — the 1232 — designed during safety upgrades voluntarily adopted by the industry four years ago. The same model spilled oil and caught fire in Timmins, Ontario on Saturday, and last year in Lynchburg, Virginia.

A series of ruptures and fires have prompted the administration of President Barack Obama to consider requiring upgrades such as thicker tanks, shields to prevent tankers from crumpling, rollover protections and electronic brakes that could make cars stop simultaneously, rather than slam into each other.

If approved, increased safety requirements now under White House review would phase out tens of thousands of older tank cars being used to carry highly flammable liquids.

“This accident is another reminder of the need to improve the safety of transporting hazardous materials by rail,” said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Oil industry officials had been opposed to further upgrading the 1232 cars because of costs. But late last year they changed their position and joined with the railway industry to support some upgrades, although they asked for time to make the improvements.

Oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to more than 435,000 in 2013, driven by a boom in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and Montana, where pipeline limitations force 70 percent of the crude to move by rail, according to American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.

The downside: Trains hauling Bakken-region oil have been involved in major accidents in Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama and Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Reports of leaks and other oil releases from tank cars are up as well, from 12 in 2008 to 186 last year, according to Department of Transportation records reviewed by The Associated Press.

Just Saturday — two days before the West Virginia wreck — 29 cars of a 100-car Canadian National Railway train carrying diluted bitumen crude derailed in a remote area 50 miles south of Timmins, Ontario, spilling oil and catching fire. That train was headed from Alberta to Eastern Canada.

The train Monday was bound for an oil shipping depot in Yorktown, Virginia, along the same route where three tanker cars plunged into the James River in Lynchburg, Virginia, prompting an evacuation last year.

The train derailed near unincorporated Mount Carbon just after passing through Montgomery, a town of 1,946, on a stretch where the rails wind past businesses and homes crowded between the water and the steep, tree-covered hills. All but two of the train’s 109 cars were tank cars, and 26 of them left the tracks.

Fire crews had little choice but to let the tanks burn themselves out. Each carried up to 30,000 gallons of crude.

One person — the owner of the destroyed home — was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries were reported, according to the train company, CSX. The two-person crew, an engineer and conductor, managed to decouple the train’s engines from the wreck behind it and walk away unharmed.

The NTSB said its investigators will compare this wreck to others including Lynchburg and one near Casselton, N.D., when a Bakken crude train created a huge fireball that forced the evacuation of the farming town.

No cause has been determined, said CSX regional vice president Randy Cheetham. He said the tracks had been inspected just three days before the wreck.

“They’ll look at train handling, look at the track, look at the cars. But until they get in there and do their investigation, it’s unwise to do any type of speculation,” he said.

By Tuesday evening, power crews were restoring electricity, water treatment plants were going back online, and most of the local residents were back home. Initial tests showed no crude near water plant intake points, state Environmental Protection spokeswoman Kelley Gillenwater said.

State officials do have some say over rail safety.

Railroads are required by federal order to tell state emergency officials where trains carrying Bakken crude are traveling. CSX and other railroads called this information proprietary, but more than 20 states rejected the industry’s argument, informing the public as well as first-responders about the crude moving through their communities.

West Virginia is among those keeping it secret. State officials responded to an AP Freedom of Information request by releasing documents redacted to remove nearly every detail.

There are no plans to reconsider after this latest derailment, said Melissa Cross, a program manager for the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Contributors include Joan Lowy in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana; and Pam Ramsey in Charleston, West Virginia. Mattise reported from Charleston.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, CSX, Derailment, Explosion

CSX apologizes for derailment as fire still burns

Repost from Metro News, Charleston, WV

CSX apologizes for derailment as fire still burns

By Shauna Johnson, February 17, 2015 at 5:58PM
U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin at the train derailment site on Tuesday.

FAYETTE COUNTY, W.Va. – A CSX spokesperson offered an apology Tuesday as fire continued to burn at the site of a train derailment that forced 1,000 people to evacuate.

“I would like to apologize for the significant disruption in the lives of a lot of people in those communities there, and let me pledge that we’re working to get everything back in order as quickly as we can,” Gary Sease told MetroNews “Talkline.”

Sease and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin gave addressed Monday’s accident where 26 tanker cars that were part of a 109-car train hauling Bakken crude oil derailed near Mount Carbon and Deepwater. At times, 19 of those cars were on fire.

Flames shoot skyward after the CSX train derailed near Mount Carbon, W.Va. on Monday.

Claiming none of those burning cars made it into the Kanawha River or its Armstrong Creek tributary, Sease said officials determined “to let the fire burn out.”

Seven of the cars that derailed did not rupture and were being uprighted, while 79 other cars that stayed on the tracks had been pulled away from the derailment scene by Tuesday. Sease estimated each of the cars contained 29,500 gallons of oil.

Sease could not provide an estimate on how much crude oil may have spilled from the ruptured tanker cars and could not confirm the speed of the train at the time of the derailment.

No one was seriously injured, though one home was destroyed. Evacuated residents were not being allowed back into their homes 24 hours later and officials gave no indications of how long the evacuation would last.

State officials said 85 residents were in two emergency shelters on Monday night.

“We have arranged a number of hotel rooms,” Sease said. “We are trying to move people from shelters to the motel rooms which are more comfortable so they can stay there until the all-clear is sounded and they can get back to their homes.”

About 700 homes and businesses in Fayette County did not have power Tuesday morning because of damage blamed on the derailment and the subsequent explosion and fires that sent flames hundreds of feet into the air.

“It’s not extensive damage (to the power system), but the conditions are a little different,” said Phil Moye, spokesperson for Appalachian Power.

Moye said crews equipped with air monitors entered the derailment site to make power repairs Tuesday morning. He estimated power could be restored as soon as Tuesday afternoon.

Laura Jordan, spokesperson for West Virginia American Water Company, said the Montgomery Water Treatment Plant resumed operations at shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday, though it could take as along as two days to restore service throughout the system.

The intake for the facility was closed as a precaution Monday after initial derailment reports indicated a car and its oil tumbled into the Kanawha River.

“There were no rail cars that actually made it into the river,” Jordan said, referencing information CSX provided. “In fact, the (place) where the accident occurred was right at the mouth of Armstrong Creek, which is at the mouth of the Kanawha River, but not in the Kanawha River itself.”

Jordan said three water tests were taken from Kanawha River samples and none showed crude oil in the water at the intake for the Montgomery treatment plant.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Transportation said the Federal Railroad Administration would be visiting the scene.

The CSX train was en route from North Dakota to Yorktown, Va. Last April, 17 tanker cars derailed on the same line in Lynchburg, Va., with several of the cars spilling into the James River.

A State of Emergency was still in effect for both Kanawha County and Fayette County on Tuesday.

Crews and equipment lined up along state Route 61 in Montgomery Tuesday ready to begin derailment cleanup once they get the okay.