Tag Archives: Lac-Mégantic

California Regulation, Crude By Rail, Hazmat notification, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Train speed

Oil train regulation passes in California Assembly

Repost from Reuters
[Editor: The bill is AB380.  For text, analysis and votes on the bill, see leginfo.ca.gov.  – RS]

Oil train regulation passes in California

By Jennifer Chaussee, Aug 29, 2014

(Reuters) – California lawmakers on Friday passed legislation requiring railroad companies to tell emergency officials when crude oil trains will chug through the state.

The bill would require railroads to notify the state’s Office of Emergency Services when trains carrying crude oil from Canada and North Dakota are headed to refineries in the most populous U.S. state.

It passed its final vote in the Assembly 61-1, with strong bipartisan support within the state legislature in Sacramento. The bill now goes to Democratic Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.

“We have a spotlight on this issue because of the seriousness of the risk to public safety that it presents,” said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, whose district encompasses parts of Sacramento along the trains’ route.

The legislation follows a disastrous oil train derailment in Canada that killed 47 people and spilled 1.6 million gallons of crude last year.

Worried that a similar spill could happen in California, firefighters and other safety officials have urged state lawmakers to increase safety regulations on oil trains and improve communication between railroads and first responders about when oil shipments are coming through.

President Barack Obama proposed new safety requirements last month that could lower speed limits for trains carrying oil and increase safety standards for oil tank cars.

The volume of oil shipped by train through California has increased dramatically in recent years, public safety experts told a legislative committee at a hearing in June.

The influx has been propelled by increased production in Western Canada and North Dakota without an accompanying boost in pipeline capacity.

Oil and rail industry representatives told lawmakers that they had already done much to improve safety. BNSF Railway lobbyist Juan Acosta testified that the company had agreed to slow its oil trains to 40 mph and increase inspections of its tracks.

Railroads are not currently required to proactively share their oil train schedules with first responders.

(additional reporting by Aaron Mendelson in Sacramento; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Simon Cameron-Moore)
Bakken Crude, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), State regulation

Examiner Op Ed: Our fight to stop the bomb trains traveling through our backyards

Repost from The San Francisco Examiner

Our fight to stop the bomb trains traveling through our backyards

By Suma Peesapati, August 28, 2014
Casselton, N.D.
Bruce Crummy/2013 AP file photo | An oil train derailed on Dec. 30 in Casselton, N.D. It was one of a handful of recent incidents of rail cars carrying crude oil exploding and going up in flames.

“This issue needs to be acted on very quickly. There is a very high risk here that hasn’t been addressed. We don’t need a higher body count before they move forward.”

It was a mark-my-words moment from National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman at her farewell appearance before stepping down from the position in April.

She was speaking about the explosive growth of the use of unsafe tanker cars to haul crude oil extracted from the Bakken reserve in North Dakota and Montana to refineries across our nation. When involved in derailments, many of these cars carrying the highly volatile fossil fuel are vulnerable to puncture and explosion upon impact. They were the cars that were involved in explosions in Aliceville, Alaska, in November, Casselton, N.D., a month later and, of course, last summer’s horrific reckoning in Lac Megantic, Quebec.

Not two weeks after Hersman made her remarks, a train carrying Bakken crude derailed in Lynchburg, Va., igniting a roaring blaze and prompting the evacuation of the entire downtown. The tankers involved, however, weren’t the cars that the former chairwoman was warning about. They were a tougher, supposedly safer car tank car that the rail and oil industry is slowly moving toward adopting. It begs the question, though, are these newer cars going to be safe enough?

This question recently hit home when a local news station exposed a clandestine crude by rail-loading operation in Richmond, here in the Bay Area, that had been flying under the radar for months. After making a backroom deal with the local air district, Kinder Morgan secured approval to introduce this highly explosive fracked crude through urban Bay Area neighborhoods without any public notice or environmental review.

Within two weeks after the story broke, Earthjustice sued the air district and Kinder Morgan, demanding a full public airing of the project’s risks to public health and safety. A hearing on the merits of this case is scheduled for Sept. 5 in San Francisco Superior Court. While we await our day in court, Kinder Morgan is unloading its crude just a half-mile from Washington Elementary School, in a low-income community of color that the air district recognizes as already overburdened by the very same carcinogenic toxic air contaminants released by handling Bakken crude.

Piling on to this environmental injustice, this crude is being loaded onto tanker trucks that are not certified by California. Those trucks then travel on Bay Area roadways until this dangerous commodity reaches its ultimate destination — the Tesoro refinery in Martinez.

Tesoro Martinez is also accepting Bakken crude from similar rail-to-truck crude transfer operations in Sacramento, thereby compounding the risk of accident. With some of the most treacherous mountain passes in the country, and a dilapidated railway system that was never designed or upgraded to transport such dangerous cargo, these trains are ticking time bombs.

The anemic response from state and federal regulators has been disappointing. Fortunately, our state and federal environmental laws gives private citizens a voice demand more than “business as usual.”

Suma Peesapati is an attorney for San Francisco-based Earthjustice.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Massive increase in crude-by-rail

Concerns Raised About Oil Trains In The Adirondacks

Repost from Vermont Public Radio

Concerns Raised About Oil Trains In The Adirondacks

By Mitch Wertlieb & Melody Bodette, August 28, 2014
Government offices, track-side warehouses and Monitor Bay Park campground surround the tracks on the south end of Crown Point, New York. The Adirondack Council has raised concerns about oil trains in the Adirondacks. | Adirondack Council

Ever since the train disaster last summer at Lac Megantic, Quebec, people in our region have been taking more notice of the oil trains traversing our rails.

Concerns have been raised on the New York side of Lake Champlain, where the Canadian Pacific railroad tracks run close to the water.

“In some places they are literally right next to the water,” said Mollie Matteson, a senior scientist for the Center for Biological Diversity. “They run through towns like Plattsburgh, Essex, and Westport, and then eventually they end up down in Albany. From there they go on down south either to refineries or to other places by ship.”

The shipments are relatively new, having begun in the past two years.  Matteson said the trains were brought to the attention of more people by the disaster in Lac Megantic.  The unit trains, as they are sometimes called, are trains entirely of tank cars of crude oil.

“What’s unique is this cargo and this new phenomenon of carrying crude oil by rail. And it’s something that’s been happening all around the country, but only just in the last couple years we’ve seen tremendous growth around the country,” Matteson said. “What’s happening here locally is that we have this new cargo, that has proven to be highly dangerous explosive and obviously if there’s a derailment and a spill it could severely damage our aquatic ecosystems and drinking water for thousands and thousands of people.”

A demonstration was held in Plattsburgh in July and some protestors expressed concern about whether the local emergency services are prepared to deal with a potential derailment and disaster.

Matteson said a starting point would be to make sure the transportation is safer. “These tank cars have been known for 20 years to be very puncture prone in any kind of derailment, even a low speed derailment. We need to get the oil off the rails. It’s simply not a sensible way to be transporting a hazardous material through thousands of small towns and cities around the country, exposing millions of people to this risk.”

The bigger question, Matteson said is should we be extracting more fossil fuels from the ground?

“Really what we need to be looking at is transitioning to a different energy regime.”

There are proposed rules to require upgrades to safer tank cars, but they would be phased in over a number of years and Matteson said, the Center for Biological Diversity believes the trains need to be off the rails immediately until there are safer cars in place, and there needs to be adequate oil spill response plans.

This oil is coming from the North Dakota Bakken oil fields to the terminal in Albany, a company called Global Partners. They are looking to expand their operations in the port. The Center for Biological Diversity has been involved in lawsuit against the company and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation over the proposed expansion plans.

Global Partners did not respond to a request for comment.

A community forum on the oil trains will be held on Thursday, August 28, from 7-9 p.m. at the Plattsburgh City Hall.

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

USA Today: Rail deliveries of U.S. oil continue to surge

Repost from USA Today
[Editor: Nothing new here, but good that mainstream publications are taking notice.  – RS]

Rail deliveries of U.S. oil continue to surge

Wendy Koch, August 28, 2014
oil trains
(Photo: Connor Lake AP)

Amid a boom in U.S. oil production, the amount of crude oil and refined petroleum products moved by rail continues to climb.

There were 459,550 carloads of oil and petroleum products transported during the first seven months of this year, up 9% from the same period in 2013, according to the Association of American Railroads.

More than half of these carloads carried oil, moving 759,000 barrels of crude per day and accounting for 8% of U.S. oil production.

The surge in oil trains began in mid-2011. At that time, weekly carloads of oil and petroleum products averaged about 7,000. In July, they reached nearly 16,000, according to the AAR.

“The increase in oil volumes transported by rail reflects rising U.S. crude oil production, which reached an estimated 8.5 million barrels per day in June for the first time since July 1986,” the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported Thursday.

The use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing or fracking has made it possible to extract huge amounts of oil from underground shale deposits. The Bakken Shale, mostly in North Dakota, accounts for much of the growth in U.S. oil production. One of every eight U.S.-produced barrels comes from North Dakota, now the second-largest oil producing state.

Between 60% and 70% of the state’s oil was moved by rail to refineries during the first half of 2014, according to the North Dakota Pipeline Authority.

Spurred by this surge in oil-carrying trains and several recent tragic accidents, the Obama administration proposed stricter rules last month for tank cars that transport flammable fuels.

The Department of Transportation proposal will require the phaseout, within two years, of tens of thousands of tank cars unless they are retrofitted to meet new safety standards. It will also require speed limits, better braking and testing of volatile liquids, including oil. It will require that cars constructed after October 2015 have thicker steel.

The DOT proposed rule, which will take months to finalize after a 60-day comment period, applies to shipments with at least 20 rail cars carrying flammable fuels, including ethanol.

In May, an oil-carrying freight train derailed in Lynchburg, Va., spilling 30,000 gallons of oil into the James River. Last year in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, an oil train exploded and killed 47 people.