Tag Archives: National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)

Bakken Crude, CPC-1232 standard, Crude By Rail, DOT-111

Outdated tank cars carry explosive crude in NY; feds seek refit

Repost from lohud.com, the Journal News
[Editor: Check out the map of rail routes in NY State showing schools, hospitals and shopping centers along the oil train tracks.  (Zoom in on the area about 35 miles north of New York City.)  – RS]

Outdated tankers carry explosive crude; feds seek refit

Khurram Saeed, August 16, 2014

When you see an oil train roll by, you’re probably looking at a DOT-111 tank car.

The DOT-111s are an industry workhorse. They’ve been around for decades and make up 68 percent of the 335,000 tank cars in active use.

Until recently, the non-pressurized cars weren’t used to haul oil. That changed with the Bakken oil boom and when rail became the modern-day pipelines.

The federal government now wants the industry to retrofit or replace them over the next two years in the name of safety. Currently, 100,000 DOT-111s move crude oil and ethanol but only 20,000 meet the latest safety standards, making the older models susceptible to ripping open in a derailment or collision.

Railroads like CSX own fewer than 1 percent of the tank cars; most are owned by the oil industry and leasing firms, the Association of American Railroads says.

The U.S. Department of Transportation wants new tank cars to have thicker outer shells, thermal protection, a full-height head shield, rollover safeguards for top fittings and removable handles on valves that protrude from the bottom of the cars to reduce the risk of opening in an accident.

Eric de Place, a policy director at Seattle-based think tank Sightline Institute, said the valves, which are used to drain fluid, likely would remain even though federal investigators have found they can shear off or open in derailments, causing the car’s contents to spill and possibly catch fire.

“Generally speaking, the oil producers — abetted by the oil shippers and the railroads themselves — have encouraged a go-slow approach to upgrading safety standards,” de Place wrote in an email. “They are principally concerned that requirements to use new tank cars or to retrofit existing ones would cost money and reduce the fleet available to move oil in the near term.”

Phil Musegaas, Hudson River program director for Riverkeeper, said the rules do not go “nearly far enough” to protect the public and the environment, and include loopholes. He said the safer tank cars would only have to be used on trains that have 20 or more rail cars hauling flammable liquids.

“If they don’t like these safety standards, they can continue to ship oil in mixed trains with 19 older DOT-111s on them,” Musegaas said. “It doesn’t take 20 of these cars to cause a horrific accident.”

Riverkeeper and other environmental groups have called on the DOT to ban use of the tank cars immediately, citing an imminent risk to the public.

“How we ship this oil can be figured out later,” Musegaas said. “We need to protect communities that live near these oil trains.”

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has been calling for stricter standards for the “dangerous, crude-carrying” DOT-111s since last year.

“These much-needed regulations will phase out the aged and explosion-prone DOT-111 tanker cars that are hauling endless streams of highly flammable crude oil through Rockland and Westchester counties and lead to commonsense safety measures — like speed limits, new braking controls and standards for a safer tank car — that will further safeguard local communities,” Schumer said.

A newer-model tank car known as the CPC-1232 features many of the higher standards the DOT is seeking but they are not invincible. On April 30, a 105-car CSX oil train derailed in Lynchburg, Va.  Several of the 17 tank cars that went off the track fell into the James River, and a CPC-1232 spilled about 30,000 gallons of Bakken crude oil, causing a massive fire. No one was injured.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which raised issues about the DOT-111s several years ago, said it has concerns about the newer tank cars.

“We have found that the 1232 is also not as robust as is needed,” NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Lac-Mégantic, Massive increase in crude-by-rail

Time Magazine: A Year After a Deadly Disaster, Fears Grow About the Danger of Crude Oil Shipped By Rail

Repost from Time Magazine
[Editor: The message is getting out far and wide with this mainstream publication’s observance of the one-year anniversary of the killer wreck in Lac-Mégantic.  An intensely personal account of what it is like to live near these rolling “bomb trains.”  – RS]

A Year After a Deadly Disaster, Fears Grow About the Danger of Crude Oil Shipped By Rail

Sebastien Malo, July 10, 2014

When 21-year-old mother Kahdejah Johnson was told two years ago that she’d secured a spot at the Ezra Prentice Homes, a quiet housing project in Albany, she felt confident she’d found a stable home to raise her newborn son. With its manicured lawns and tidy beige row houses, the Ezra Prentice Homes are a far cry from the crumbling housing projects of large cities. “When people come into town they’re like ‘These are your projects? These are condos!’” says Johnson.

But today, Johnson is losing sleep over how close her house is to railroad tracks congested, day and night, with tanker cars carrying crude oil, visible just outside her bedroom window. The fear of an accident is so great that Johnson has taken to evacuating her apartment some nights, to spend the night at her mother’s home, further from the tracks. “Now I’m afraid to be in my own home,” she says. “Do you know how fast we could die here?”

Albany is one of a growing number of cities where residents like Johnson fear the devastating consequences of accidents involving railcars filled with crude oil. They have reason to fear—on July 6, 2013, a train carrying oil derailed in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, causing an explosion that destroyed more than 30 buildings and killed more than 40 people. This past Sunday, Johnson and other Albany residents held a vigil to commemorate the Lac-Megantic derailment—and draw attention to the growing opposition to transporting crude oil by rail

“Jo-Annie Lapointe, Melissa Roy, Maxime Dubois, Joanie Turmel,” participants in the vigil intoned into a microphone, naming Lac-Megantic residents killed in the explosions. In a line, they held portraits of each of the deceased and read their names, pinning the pictures to a black metal fence. “You may not say that they lived right next door to you, but they were your neighbors,” said Pastor McKinley Johnson, who officiated part of the ceremony. “You may not say that you understand all the language, but they’re your sister and your brother.”

As in Lac-Megantic, oil tankers containing highly flammable crude oil from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota and Montana roll right through their residential areas. Rows of train-cars filled with crude oil often stand idle for hours on the tracks that hug the curves of the housing project, so tightly only 15 feet at most separate the two in some areas. “Once I found out that these are the same tanks that were in Canada, I was like ‘Oh my God, someone pray for us, We’re in danger’,” Johnson said.

This fear is a consequence of the unconventional oil boom in states like North Dakota, where for the last several years producers have been using hydrofracking techniques to pump oil previously locked in underground shale rock. The new oil fields have helped America’s oil production rise to a 28-year high. But that crude oil has to get to refineries, most of which are located in coastal cities—and much of that oil is moving by rail. Nationally, transport of crude oil by train has jumped 45-fold between 2008 and 2013, according to a recent Congressional Research Service report.

While the U.S. has yet to experience a rail catastrophe on the scale of Lac-Megantic, the country has had its share of close calls. The National Transportation Safety Board counts five “significant accidents” of trains containing crude oil in the United States in the past year alone. The latest, in Lynchburg, Virginia, saw a train carrying crude Bakken oil derail and burst into flames in the town’s center this April, producing black plumes of smoke and billows of flames taller than buildings nearby. The crude oil also spilled into the James River, though one was injured.

The worrying trend has opened a new front to the national environmental debate. Some 40 cities and towns across the country scheduled similar events to mark Lac-Megantic’s one-year anniversary. Many of the rallies will take place in the usual hotbeds of environmental activism —in places like Seattle and Portland—but also in blue-collar tows like Philadelphia and Detroit, where activists will voice demands ranging from a moratorium on oil-trains traffic to increased safety controls.

But the problem has also presented environmentalists with a conundrum. One of the factors behind the rapid rise of railroad shipment of crude oil has been the shortage of oil pipelines, which could move greater quantities of oil from landlocked states to coastal refineries. Front and center to this debate is the multi-billion dollar Keystone XL pipeline project, which would connect the oil sands of western Canada to the Gulf Coast, but which President Obama has yet to approve—in part because of objections raised by environmentalists, who fear the potential for a spill.

Fewer pipelines has meant more oil moved via rail. “If Keystone had been built we wouldn’t be moving nearly the volume of oil that we’re moving by rail,” said Charles Ebinger, the director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution.

That has exposed the Keystone’s opponents to criticism that by standing in the way of pipeline projects, they are raising the risk of rail accidents. Though hazardous material like crude oil makes its way safely via rail 99.998 percent of the time, according to the Association of American Railroads, a plethora of research suggests that pipelines result in fewer spillage incidents, personal injuries and fatalities than rail. That includes an authoritative environmental review the State Department released last January, which concluded that “there is… a greater potential for injuries and fatalities associated with rail transport relative to pipelines.”

Still, environmentalists like Ethan Buckner of ForestEthics, the group coordinating the string of events to commemorate the Lac-Megantic tragedy, reject that dichotomy. “The industry is trying to present Americans with a false choice between pipelines and rails,” he says. “We want to choose clean energy.”

Back in Albany, the vigil was deemed a success, drawing a crowd of about a hundred. But Kahdejah Johnson wasn’t among them. Why not? Her fear, she said, got the best of her. “Honestly, I don’t really hang by my house,” she said. “I don’t like to be in that area if I don’t have to be there.” She is now on a waiting list to be transferred to another development—something she’s told could take up to four years. In the meantime, the trains will keep rolling.

Bakken Crude, CPC-1232 standard, DOT-111, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Volatile gases

Fox Guarding Henhouse: Oil-By-Rail Standards Led by American Petroleum Institute

Repost from DeSmogBlog

Fox Guarding Henhouse: Oil-By-Rail Standards Led by American Petroleum Institute

By Justin Mikulka, July 9, 2014

“How did it get missed for the last ten years?”

That was the question Deborah Hersman, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), posed to a panel of industry representatives back in April about how the rail industry had missed the fact that Bakken oil is more explosive than traditional crude oil.

“How do we move to an environment where commodities are classified in the right containers from the get go and not just put in until we figure out that there’s a problem,” Hersman asked during the two-day forum on transportation of crude oil and ethanol. “Is there a process for that?”

The first panelist to respond was Robert Fronczak, assistant vice president of environmental and hazardous materials for the Association of American Railroads (AAR). His response was telling.

“We’ve know about this long before Lac-Megantic and that is why we initiated the tank car committee activity and passed CPC-1232 in 2011,” Fronczak replied, “To ask why the standards are the way they are, you’d have to ask DOT that.”

So, now as the new oil-by-rail safety regulations have been sent from the Department of Transportation (DOT) to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, it seems like a good time to review Hersman’s questions.

How did we miss this? Is there a process to properly classify commodities for the right container before they are ever shipped?

Missed or Ignored?

Fronczak stated that industry knew about the explosive danger of Bakken crude long before the Lac-Megantic disaster, but it was up to the Department of Transportation to do something about it. That begs the question: what did the department know?

In a letter sent by Thomas J. Herrmann of the Federal Railroad Administration (a division of DOT) to the American Petroleum Institute’s CEO Jack Gerard on July 29, 2013, just 23 days after the Lac-Megantic disaster, it would appear the DOT was well aware of Bakken crude classification issues.

FRA audits of crude oil loading facilities indicate that the classification of crude oil being transported by rail is often based solely on Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) data that only provides a material classification and a range of material properties. This MSDS information is typically provided by the consignee to the shipper, and the shipper is unaware of validation of the values of the crude oil properties.

FRA‘s audits indicate that MSDS information is not gleaned from any recently conducted tests or from testing for the many different sources (wells) of the crude oil. For example, a shipper provided information to FRA showing that crude oil being transported by rail had a flash point of 68° F, or a Packing Group I hazardous material. However, the crude oil had been improperly classified as a Packing Group III material and was being transported in AAR class tank cars that were not equipped with the required design enhancements.

The letter goes into detail on several other issues with Bakken crude and recommends that “shippers evaluate their processes for testing, classifying, and packaging the crude oil that they offer into transportation via railroad tank cars.”

So it is clear that as of July 2013, the Federal Railroad Administration was well aware of issues regarding misclassification of Bakken crude oil based on its own audits.

Several of the panellists at the NTSB hearing in April made the point that Bakken crude was different.

“We are just not sure what we’re handling,” Fronczak said. “We’ve done some minor sampling, you know a few samples that indicate that the crude oil does have a high vapor pressure and a fairly high amount of dissolved gas and so we feel a pressure car is more appropriate.”

A pressure car is currently the safest possible tank car the new regulations could require.

William Finn of the Railway Supply Institute echoed this sentiment, “For years we’ve transported crude oil in one eleven cars [DOT-111], what’s changed here is the introduction of the unit train and the question of what’s happening with the Bakken crude oil and the high vapor pressures.”

Greg Saxton, chief engineer for tank car manufacturer Greenbrier Companies, said: “The crude we are moving today, we think its different than what we were moving five or ten years ago.”

If the exploding trains weren’t enough to convince people that the Bakken crude oil is different, those comments should remove any doubt.

API Concludes Bakken Oil Poses No “Special Risks”

In April, DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx commented to the Associated Press on how important proper crude oil classification was regarding oil-by-rail safety, saying,  “One of the most fundamental questions that cuts across everything in crude oil-by-rail is how it is classified.”

So who gave the presentation at the NTSB conference on classification of crude oil? The American Petroleum Institute.

Lee Johnson gave a presentation on the API’s current crude oil classification working group, which he stated, “is going to come up with the standard which is going to have guidance on how often you should do that [testing], what tests you should take, sampling techniques, lab techniques.  It’s going to be a very comprehensive standard.  At this point there is no industry standard.”

During his presentation, Johnson highlighted one of the main efforts of the API’s work on classification. The North Dakota Petroleum Council was hiring a firm to conduct testing on Bakken crude for classification purposes.

The results of that Bakken classification testing have since been released and were reported in the Wall Street Journal as follows:

Crude oil from the Bakken Shale formation doesn’t pose special risks to rail transport and shouldn’t require a separate classification regime than other hazardous liquids, North Dakota oil producers said.

This is what happens when you let an industry self-regulate. They make up their own rules and reality. In May, APICEO Jack Gerard made his position clear:

“It is essential to separate fact from fiction as we work to enhance the safe transportation of crude oil. Multiple studies have now debunked the idea that Bakken crude is meaningfully different than other crudes.”

However, not everyone was buying these results. New York’s Senator Chuck Schumer told Reuters that these test results should be “taken with a grain of salt.”

And the Canadian Crude Quality Technical Association said, “We would consider the data suspect.”

The main reason for the association’s suspicion is the sampling technique that was used. The samples were taken using open containers, which allow the volatile gases to escape before testing.

That’s the kind of thing that happens when there are no standards for sampling and testing.

The New Regulations

So as the new oil-by-rail safety regulations are about to be released by the White House, there still are no enforceable standards on how to properly sample, test and classify Bakken crude oil. The only testing data that’s been released up to this point is from the oil industry’s lobbying groups.

The Department of Transportation has taken samples of Bakken crude and conducted testing — however, the report on their results is still pending and there is no scheduled release date. It is nearly a year after the department’s initial letter to Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute.

Further, the Department of Transportation is not ultimately responsible for developing new standards for testing and classifying crude oil.

To understand how the regulatory agency in charge of an industry is not responsible for developing these standards, you must look at the wording of legislation signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996 called “The National Technology Transfer and Advancement Act of 1995.”

This legislation essentially privatized the development of standards. The act states:

“All Federal agencies and departments shall use technical standards that are developed and adopted by voluntary consensus standards bodies, using such technical standards as a means to carry out policy objectives or activities determined by the agencies and departments.”

So, for there to be new enforceable regulations regarding the classification of Bakken crude, several things would have to happen. An external standard developer like ASTM International would have to develop standards. Then members of industry or their lobbyists would have to volunteer to petition the DOT to adopt those standards as part of the regulations. This would require a new DOT rulemaking process separate from the one currently in progress, which could take several years.

A Fundamental Question Goes Unanswered

So, on the eve of new regulations, the fundamental question of how to properly sample and test Bakken crude oil for appropriate classification has not been answered. And the only group currently working on an “industry standard” for this is the American Petroleum Institute, which has already concluded that Bakken crude is no different from other crude oils  — at the same time API is having private meetings at the White House regarding the new regulations.

Chair Hersman resigned shortly after the forum in April, ending her 10-year career with the NTSB. At the time she told the AP she had, “seen a lot of difficulty when it comes to safety rules being implemented if we don’t have a high enough body count. That is a tombstone mentality. We know the steps that will prevent or mitigate these accidents. What is missing is the will to require people to do so.”

If the current process regarding new oil-by-rail regulations in the U.S. is any indication, apparently we haven’t achieved a high enough body count yet.

Bakken Crude, Climate Change, Crude By Rail, Derailment, donner, DOT-111, Rail routing, Tank car design, Tar sands crude, Uprail communities

Open letter from Davis to Benicia: Stop crude by rail

Repost from The Benicia Herald
[Editor: A year ago, almost to the day, I wrote an Op-Ed for The Benicia Herald titled, “Valero crude-by-rail: ‘Down-wind’ and ‘up-rail’.”  A few months later, I was contacted by Milton Kalish and Lynne Nittler of Davis, and we’ve stayed in touch.  They – and their wonderful group of activist friends in Cool Davis, Yolano Climate Action and 350 Sacramento – have continued their CBR organizing efforts with great energy and creativity.  This open letter by Lynne serves as a detailed primer of all the reasons why CBR must be stopped.  A must-read.  – RS]

Open letter to Benicia: Stop crude by rail

July 10, 2014 by Lynne Nittler

IN RESPONSE TO JIM LESSENGER’S OPED OF JULY 4, “Open letter to the City Council: Support CBR,” I write today urging Benicia to deny the proposed Valero Refinery Crude-by-Rail Project until all safety measures listed below are in place.

I have been carefully following the proposed Benicia project, reading articles from a wide variety of sources including many reports and, most recently, the Draft Environmental Impact Report.

I follow a number of environmental topics closely, particularly those related to climate change. I am on the board of Cool Davis, a nonprofit organization that helps the city of Davis implement its Climate Action and Adaptation Plan.

I have an “uprail” perspective that is important to add to the conversation on the Valero proposal, as the impact of the daily trains would be significant in my community.

I have six reasons Benicia should deny the CBR project. They are as follows:

1. The project is far from contained within Benicia’s 3,000-acre Industrial Park.

Benicia is fortunate to have a buffer area of industries and vacant land around Valero Benicia Refinery. Valero has even promised that the oil trains will not cross city streets during Benicia’s rush hours (though neither Valero nor the city of Benicia can enforce that promise).

Davis and other uprail communities are not so fortunate. The trains will pass through downtown Davis, including residential neighborhoods, the center of downtown, university housing and the entire Mondavi Performing Arts Complex and Conference Center.

Train travel through Davis is made more dangerous because there is a curve with a 10-mph left-handed cross-over between the main tracks several hundred feet east of the Amtrak station, right downtown. All other crossovers on the line are rated for 45 mph. This 10-mph spot in particular is an accident waiting to happen.

While the trains would hopefully avoid rush hour in Benicia, that will surely not be the case for all uprail communities.

2. Valero owns the property but should not be allowed to set profits ahead of public health and safety.

No corporation operates in a vacuum. Valero’s decision to import North American crude has profound effects beyond its own improvement that cannot be ignored.

Valero’s change to crude by rail from crude by ship would allow it to import both Canadian tar sands and Bakken crude, and would add additional dangerous trains to the tracks all the way back to their points of origin, most likely in North Dakota or Alberta, Canada. That means the trains endanger and disrupt towns and cities across our country on their way to Benicia. These tracks are already impacted by oil trains taking precedence over trains transporting grain and other local crops and commuter trains. More importantly, people are endangered by the highly volatile Bakken crude — there have been 12 significant derailments since May 2013, with six explosions — and our precious marshes and waterways are threatened by the possibility of toxic spills of tar sands bitumen, which quickly sinks to the bottom and cannot be removed. The Kalamazoo River, Mich. cleanup of 1 million gallons of leaked tar sands dilbit is still unsuccessful after four years and $1 billion.

In California, the trains would come over the Sierra Nevada Mountains or wind through the Feather River Canyon (rated as a “rail high-hazard area” by the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services), or possibly even come from Oregon down through Redding and Dunsmuir, site of a 1991 derailment of a fertilizer tank car that killed fish for 40 miles. In any of these routes, major rivers would be crossed where an accident could contaminate much-needed drinking and irrigation water.

3. The project will clearly affect the environment.

A wider view of “environment” raises serious concerns. California considers the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of products. Extracting, refining and burning heavy, sour crude is a nasty job, start to finish.  That’s why tar sands is called a “dirty” fossil fuel, noted for its energy-intensive carbon footprint. This deserves a full discussion which is beyond the scope of this letter. The recently completed Valero Improvement Project was intended to allow the refinery to handle refining the heavy, sour crude as efficiently as possible, which is laudable, but that is not to say it is a clean process. Setting aside the forests destroyed and the unlined toxic tailing ponds leaking into the waterways in Canada at the point of extraction, we must note that processing tar sands bitumen will produce more of the byproduct petcoke that is so polluting it cannot be burned in the U.S. (It can be sold abroad and burned for energy there. Ironically, when it is burned in China, some of the smog blows back across the ocean to Southern California.)

The heavy crude is high in sulfur and toxic metals, which corrode refinery pipes. The Richmond refinery fire in 2010 was traced partly to corrosion from refining tar sands. Emissions must be carefully monitored to ensure toxic fumes do not escape to neighborhoods or endanger workers.

The 2003 “improvement” project enabling Valero to refine heavy crude opened the door for California to refine more of the world’s dirtiest bitumen, running contrary to our state goals under AB 32 to conserve energy and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by moving to renewable energy sources. In fact, according to California Energy Commission figures, California reduced its total consumption of oil from 700 million to 600 million barrels in the last year, primarily through conservation — i.e., adopting lower-emissions vehicles and Energy Star appliances, changing transportation habits to walk-bike-public transport, and making our buildings more energy efficient. We are moving away from our dependence on oil by reducing our consumption of it.

4. The project will be safer, but not safe.

The outgoing chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has some strong words for the rail industry and the way certain hazardous liquid is transported.

Deborah Hersman’s strong remarks are tied to older-model rail tank cars known as DOT-111s, which carry crude oil and ethanol through cities across the U.S. and Canada. Hersman told an audience that DOT-111 tank cars are not safe enough to carry hazardous liquids — in fact, she said her agency issued recommendations several years ago. “We said they either need to remove or retrofit these cars if they’re going to continue to carry hazardous liquids,” Hersman said on April 22, 2014.

Right now, four California legislators are urging the Department of Transportation to take action on critical safety measures. After a hearing of the joint houses of the Legislature on June 19 chaired by Sen. Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, Congressmembers John Garamendi, D-Davis, Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, Mike Thompson, D-Napa, and George Miller, D-Martinez, sent a letter to Anthony Foxx, secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation, stating that “we cannot allow communities to be in danger when viable solutions are available.”

The summary of their requests, dated July 1, 2014, is as follows:

• Provide a report on the level of compliance by the railroad and petroleum industry to the May 7 Emergency Order.

• Issue rulemaking that requires stripping out the most volatile elements from Bakken crude before it is loaded onto rail cars.

• Expedite the issuance of a final rulemaking to require the full implementation of the Positive Train Control (PTC) technology for all railroads transporting lighter crude, and provide a status report on the progress of PTC implementation to date.

• Expedite the issuance of rulemaking that requires phasing out old rail cars for newer, retrofitted cars.

The Benicia decision comes at a critical moment. Benicia’s approval of the Valero proposal before DOT takes action would undercut what our legislators are trying to do to protect not just Benicia citizens, but all uprail citizens all across the U.S. Regulating that the volatility of crude be reduced will force the industry to build small processing towers — aptly called stabilizers — that remove natural gas liquids (a product that can be saved and sold) from the crude before it is loaded, as they do in other parts of the country (Eagle Ford shale reserves in Texas, for example).

Obviously, creating this necessary infrastructure will increase the cost of Bakken crude. The industry will no doubt balk at the additional expense, as will the refineries. On the other hand, it’s immoral to expose many millions to explosive trains of Bakken crude when there is a remedy! One Lac-Mégantic tragedy is enough.

The trains rumbling into Benicia are the first trains to pass daily through our region to the Bay Area, but others will follow. The approval of this project cannot be viewed in isolation. This fall the DEIR will be available for review for the Phillips 66 Santa Maria Refinery Rail Spur Project that would bring another daily train through my community in Davis, through yours in Benicia, across the aging Benicia rail bridge, along the beautiful Carquinez Strait, through the East Bay and on down the Capitol Corridor to San Luis Obispo County. Based on California Energy Commission data, the Sacramento Bee says we can expect five to six trains daily in the next few years as California receives 25 percent of its crude by rail.

We put ourselves at grave risk to proceed with any rail projects now until we firmly lock in place the safety measures requested by our U.S. congressmembers. In this country, protection for the public must come first.

5. The CBR proposal makes no economic sense for Benicia and for the nation.

We live in a WORLD economy. Rather than destined for domestic purposes, the refined oil from all five Bay Area refineries is sold on the world market for greatest profit. That’s why gasoline rates at the pumps have not decreased during this oil boom.

Considered from the perspective of the weather of our planet, which will become a pivotal concern in the coming years, it makes no sense, financial or otherwise, to extract another drop of fossil fuel from the Earth. We need to put all our attention on renewables and conservation, and cut back drastically on our oil consumption. Realistically, this means refineries will need to produce far fewer products, and the oil extraction frenzy will die down.

6. The Valero refinery cannot befriend Benicia and then turn around and foul the air, risking the health and safety of our children.

Valero may mean well when it makes charitable contributions, but its intentions mean little if it then creates unsafe conditions for those who are in receipt of its generosity. It is not surprising that salaried employees, wage earners and grant recipients would stand up in favor of most anything proposed by the “friendly giant.” But it is incumbent on us all to look at the big picture — and a big picture that contains oil trains is not a pretty one.

In summary, I recommend a “no” vote on the Valero Crude-by-Rail Project until all safety measures requested by our four local congressmembers in Washington are firmly in place, and enough new tank cars are designed and produced to safely convey the crude oil from its source to Benicia, ensuring that no communities or waterways are in danger.

This “no” vote would send a strong message to DOT that their work is urgent, and that the regulations they make will be closely monitored. A “yes” vote, however, would undercut the important work our legislators are doing on our behalf.

Lynne Nittler lives uprail from Benicia in Davis. She devotes much of her time to Cool Davis, a nonprofit that focuses on helping Davis reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a changing climate and improve the quality of life for all. She has followed the oil train issue closely since last September.