Repost from 6 ABC Action News, Philadelphia, PA [Editor: The derailment happened in the CSX Corp. rail yard, and was very near to Interstate 95, Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia Naval Yard. NBC Philadelphia reported that the tank cars remained upright but were “leaning.” See also The Morning Call, Allentown, PA. – RS]
11 train cars derail in South Philadelphia
January 31, 2015
Philadelphia firefighters and Hazmat crews swarmed the area near Lincoln Financial Field and the Philadelphia Naval Yard after 11 train cars went off the tracks early Saturday morning.
The derailment happened after 3:00 a.m. near South 11th Street just south of Interstate-95.
The cars were carrying crude oil.
After it was determined, there were no ruptured cars, crews turned the incident over to CSX.
CSX officials brought in cranes to upright the cars.
Repost from Reuters [Editor: Significant quote: “‘Look at the towns. All they’re getting are more trains in their backyard and all the risk with no financial benefits,’ said Dan McCoy, the County Executive in Albany, New York, where taxpayer funds have contributed to growing oil-train shipments.” – RS]
U.S. taxpayers help fund oil-train boom amid safety concerns
By Jarrett Renshaw, Dec 14, 2014
A crude oil train moves past the loading rack at the Eighty-Eight Oil LLC’s transloading facility in Ft. Laramie, Wyoming July 15, 2014. REUTERS/Rick Wilking
(Reuters) – For the past 18 months, Americans from Albany to Oregon have voiced growing alarm over the rising number of oil-laden freight trains coursing through their cities, a trend they fear is endangering public safety.
In at least a handful of places, the public is also helping fund it.
States and the federal government have handed out tens of millions in public dollars to rail companies and government agencies to expand crude oil rail transportation across the country, a Reuters analysis has found.
The public assistance in states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma and Oregon comes as railroads are posting record profits, and as state and federal authorities press for safety overhauls that the oil and rail industries have opposed, following several explosive derailments.
The Reuters analysis identified 10 federal and state grants either approved or pending approval, totaling $84.2 million, that helped boost the number of rail cars carrying crude oil across the nation.
The funds are a fraction of total public funding for railroads each year, and look small compared to the $24 billion railroads themselves are spending annually on infrastructure.
But with oil-train safety under heavy scrutiny, the public grants could be controversial and add to growing strains between the industry and some local communities who say they are ill-prepared to deal with oil spills or derailments.
“Look at the towns. All they’re getting are more trains in their backyard and all the risk with no financial benefits,” said Dan McCoy, the County Executive in Albany, New York, where taxpayer funds have contributed to growing oil-train shipments.
In May, Albany’s sheriff, Craig Apple, warned that regional emergency crews weren’t equipped to respond to any major derailment.
“I am not seeing any increases in tax revenue, but I am seeing an increase in the cost of emergency services,” McCoy said.
Since 2008, there have been at least 10 major oil-train derailments across the U.S. and Canada, including a disaster that killed 47 in a Quebec town last July.
Officials and rail executives offer a counter-argument: the funds help improve safety for an industry that is helping revive the economy in some places.
Last year, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo awarded CSX Railroad a $2 million grant to add a second 3.6-mile rail line just south of the state capital in a county that now handles about a fourth of the Bakken’s oil, a light, volatile crude whose vapors have exploded in several past derailments.
CSX spokesman Rob Doolitle said the new line allows the railroad to idle fewer trains in the region, block fewer crossings, and serve at least 200 different businesses more efficiently.
“Local communities benefit from increased capacity,” Doolittle said. CSX posted record revenues of $3.2 billion in the third quarter.
AN INDUSTRY TRANSFORMED
The taxpayer dollars are going to a rail industry that has transformed the U.S. energy market: Amid a shale-drilling boom that has overwhelmed the nation’s pipeline network, oil-train traffic has surged at least 42-fold since 2009, and 415,000 railcar loads of oil plied the nation’s tracks last year.
As oil-trains increasingly make up for a lack of pipelines, they share the tracks with passenger and other freight trains on some of the busiest U.S. rail corridors. Emergency responders in several regions have complained that they lack information to track them and quickly respond to accidents.
While federal law now requires rail operators carrying Bakken crude to report routes and the number of trains that transit through each state, railroads have been reluctant to share specifics publicly, citing security risks.
Philadelphia is one of the unlikely locales that has been both alarmed and enriched by the oil-by-rail industry.
In 2012, The Carlyle Group led a rescue of the East Coast’s biggest refinery, which had been slated for closure, aided in part by a state-backed aid package that included $10 million to build a new rail terminal.
The 335,000-barrel-a-day plant is making money once again thanks in large part to the rail terminal, which receives six miles of oil-laden railcars daily from North Dakota’s Bakken.
In September, Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES), an oil refining complex controlled by hedge fund Carlyle Group, announced plans to sell shares in its crude-by-rail terminal, a move that may fetch hundreds of millions of dollars and reduce its corporate tax burden.
Carlyle declined comment, but the company has previously said that government assistance helped to save at least 850 jobs at PES and boost Pennsylvania’s economy.
Earlier this year, six railcars transporting Bakken oil to the PES rail terminal derailed on a bridge over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia’s Center City. No oil spilled from the CSX-operated train, but images of railcars teetering above the city’s vital waterway shocked locals and prompted protests.
“It spooked a lot of people in Philadelphia, and really raised the profile of the issue of crude by rail, an issue most people don’t think about,” said Matt Walker, a director with the local Clean Air Council.
CONGESTION RELIEF
Citing high costs, oil and rail industry groups have resisted some of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s recent proposals to enhance crude-by-rail safety, which include quick retirement or retrofitting of older, accident-prone railcars, lower speed limits, and mandatory electronic railcar braking systems.
Railroads and local transport authorities say public grants are a public good.
Since 2011, Oklahoma has received two federal grants worth $8.6 million that were used to fund privately-held FarmRail System, a regional rail operator, to move more crude by rail out of the state’s Anadarko Basin.
“We see these grants as improving public safety, much like you spend money on improving a highway,” said Gary Ridley, the head of the Oklahoma’s transportation agency. Trains are better than oil trucks, which clog up roads, he said. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin recently announced a $100 million spending package to upgrade rail crossings in the state.
In Oregon, oil terminal giant Global Partners successfully lobbied state and county officials to fund $8.9 million in upgrades to the Portland and Western Railroad, which runs next to the Columbia River. As a result, Global was able to increase the number of oil-trains to its private rail hub in the state by more than a third, to 38 per month. Global declined comment.
“It really doesn’t matter whether the train is carrying crude oil or cotton puffs, they have the right to pass through,” Jerry Cole, the mayor of Rainier, Oregon, where oil-trains pass through daily. “All I can do is to make it as safe as possible.”
(Reporting by Jarrett Renshaw, editing by Jonathan Leff and John Pickering)
Repost from The Wall Street Journal [Editor: This is a must-read. IMPORTANT – See the Wall Street Journal site for an excellent video report and an interactive U.S. map showing the weekly average number of crude oil trains from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota that pass through each county. – RS]
Oil Trains Hide in Plain Sight
Rail Industry’s Secret: Volatile Crude Routes Often Kept From Cities and Towns
By Russell Gold, Dec. 3, 2014
Finding the locations of oil-filled trains remains difficult, even in states that don’t consider the information top secret. WSJ’s Leslie Eaton and Simon Constable discuss. Photo: AP
NEWARK, Del.—Early last year, a new kind of pipeline full of volatile oil appeared in this college town, halfway between Philadelphia and Baltimore.
If it had been a traditional pipeline, there would have been government hearings and environmental reviews. There would be markers or signs along the line’s route and instructions for nearby residents on how to react in an emergency. A detailed plan for responding to a spill would be on file with the federal government.
None of that happened here in Newark. In fact, nobody initially notified the city’s fire chief about the new line, which can carry more than a hundred thousand barrels of oil a day along Amtrak’s busiest passenger-rail corridor.
This was possible because the oil here is transported by a virtual pipeline: mile-long strings of railroad tanker cars that travel from North Dakota to a refinery in Delaware. In Newark, the cars are especially easy to spot as they often sit for hours on tracks 10 feet away from passing passenger trains, waiting for an opening at the nearby PBF Energy Inc. plant.
While the existence of this virtual pipeline is obvious to its neighbors—trains are visible from homes, the local commuter rail station, a park and a popular jogging trail—it is officially secret. Delaware Safety and Homeland Security officials contend that publicizing any information about the oil trains parked there would “reveal the State’s vulnerability to terrorist attacks,” according to a letter to The Wall Street Journal.
A Norfolk Southern Corp. train in a refinery in Delaware, waiting to unload its cargo of crude oil from North Dakota. Russell Gold/The Wall Street Journal
Finding the locations of oil-filled trains remains difficult, even in states that don’t consider the information top secret. There are no federal or state rules requiring public notice despite several fiery accidents involving oil trains, including one in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people.
The desire for secrecy seems wrongheaded to some experts. “If you don’t share this information, how are people supposed to know what they are supposed to do when another Lac-Mégantic happens?” asked Denise Krepp, a consultant and former senior counsel to the congressional Homeland Security Committee.
She said more firefighting equipment and training was needed urgently. “We are not prepared,” she said.
In May, federal regulators ordered railroads to tell states about the counties traversed by trains carrying combustible crude oil from the Bakken Shale in North Dakota so local first responders could be notified.
The Journal submitted open-records requests to all 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia and received at least some information from all but 14: Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont and West Virginia.
Mapping data received from the disclosing states, the Journal found a lot of other cities in the same situation as Newark. On its way to refiners on the East Coast and along the Gulf of Mexico, oil often sits in tank cars in railroad yards outside Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Penn., and passes through Cleveland, Chicago, Albany, Seattle and a dozen other cities.
Bakken oil is flowing in two directions from North Dakota: west toward Portland and the Puget Sound; and east through Minneapolis, then southeast through Chicago, and across the northern edge of Indiana and Ohio. There it splits into three routes: One heads to Albany; another goes to Yorktown, Va., where the crude is transferred to barges for trips up and down the East Coast. The third heads to Philadelphia through Ohio, which is one of the states that doesn’t disclose data, but the Journal was able to deduce the routes by following available maps.
Other oil trains run south from Oregon to California, from Minnesota to Texas, and from Wisconsin toward the Gulf Coast.
Maryland previously had attempted to release oil-train information, but was successfully sued by Norfolk Southern Corp. and CSX Corp. Norfolk argued that these trains were carrying “highly volatile cargo” that could be a target for terrorists.
Railroads have continued to press for secrecy; in August, the Association of American Railroads and the American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association wrote a confidential letter to the federal government asking that routing information be kept from the public. The request was denied.
“The rail industry is concerned making crude oil route information public elevates security risks by making it easier for someone intent on causing harm,” said AAR spokesman Ed Greenberg. The group said it supports sharing information with local officials.
Neither the oil nor the railroad industry anticipated the rapid and dramatic rise of oil shipments by train. In 2009, U.S. railroads transported about 21,000 barrels a day of oil; today they carry 1.1 million barrels a day, according to data from the Surface Transportation Board, a federal regulator. Last year, railroads generated about $2.15 billion in revenue from moving crude.
Shipments of hazardous material, especially crude oil, have soared recently, even for railroads whose routes are far from the oil fields of North Dakota. Norfolk Southern and CSX, which serve the East Coast, moved 53,001 carloads of oil in the three months ended September, compared with just seven carloads during the same period of 2009, according to data from the federal Surface Transportation Board. They transported 156,731 carloads of industrial chemicals, some of which are hazardous, in the third quarter of this year, up 8% from five years ago.
Trains are the new pipelines, and have become a vital link in the energy infrastructure, said Dave Pidgeon, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern. “We are the keystone, the bridge, between the source of where the energy is extracted and where it is refined,” he said. Moving hazardous material like crude, he added, is “safe and getting safer.”
Trains offer the energy industry flexibility to move oil where it can fetch the highest prices. Building the needed loading and unloading terminals is fast and inexpensive, and an extensive rail network connects the Midwest to the East and West coasts.
While these virtual pipelines can be created in months, traditional pipelines have become increasingly difficult to install as environmental groups seek to block permits for new energy infrastructure.
“What we are seeing on rail is largely due to opposition to and uncertainty around building pipelines,” said Brigham McCown, who was the chief pipeline regulator under President George W. Bush . Pipelines, he adds, are far safer than trains.
Since Lac-Mégantic, several trains have derailed and exploded. Most of these accidents have happened in relatively rural areas like Casselton, N.D., a town of about 2,500 people 24 miles west of Fargo. But one occurred in downtown Lynchburg, Va., forcing the evacuation of much of the downtown in a city with 78,000 residents.
In response, railroads agreed to slow oil trains to 40 miles an hour in urban areas, and federal regulators have proposed a broader speed limit for older tank cars carrying volatile crude oil.
The rules don’t apply to other freight trains or Amtrak trains that share tracks in Newark with oil trains; about 85 Amtrak trains run through Newark every day, according to a spokesman, at speeds of up to 100 miles an hour. In addition to Norfolk Southern, which operates on the outskirts of town, CSX runs oil trains on a wholly separate track heading north toward refineries near Philadelphia.
Without oil trains, the local PBF Refinery might not be operating. Opened in 1956 on the Delaware River, the refinery handled imported oil that arrived by water from overseas; it was mothballed in 2009 as the economics of importing crude oil soured and demand for gasoline slumped.
PBF bought the refinery in 2011, reopened it the next year and began adding facilities to unload crude from trains. The company owns or leases 4,000 tank cars, has 1,900 more on order and said it is committed to using the safest cars available.
The refinery built a double loop that can accommodate two trains, each holding 70,000 barrels of crude. It can take workers 14 hours to unload each train by connecting hoses to drain out the cargo.
The Bakken crude contains a lot of butane, making it volatile but useful for mixing with heavier oils or as a refined byproduct, said refinery manager José Dominguez. On a recent afternoon, the refinery was running mostly Bakken oil, along with some diluted crude from Canadian oil sands and a ship’s worth of light sweet oil from Basra, Iraq.
When Norfolk Southern began routing crude trains through Newark, it didn’t notify the local emergency officials. Last March, a year after trains started turning up, Fire Chief A.J. Schall sat down with officials from the railroad and refinery to discuss the crude shipments.
“It shows a lack of communication,” he said. By the summer, Norfolk Southern and PBF paid for Mr. Schall and another local fire chief to fly to Colorado and attend a three-day class on crude-by-rail trains.
Some people who live and work along the tracks say that they are disquieted by the increased traffic and especially of the new presence of mile-long strings of black tanker cars, but unaware of any new accident-preparedness plans.
Demitri Theodoropoulos, who manages a record store facing the intersection, said that since 2004 his security cameras have recorded 14 collisions, including one in 2012 when a train smashed into a large truck.
“We have major, major freight traffic here,” he said. “I see trains with crude every day or so. I don’t like it, but this is the way it is.”
Editorial, The Record, November 26, 2014
An air permit issued on Nov. 6 by the state Department of Environmental Protection allows Buckeye Partners to accept large amounts of Canadian tar sands oil at its newly renovated oil terminal in Perth Amboy. | DON SMITH/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
SHARPLY INCREASING the amount of oil transported by rail through New Jersey is not a “minor modification” and should not have been approved by the state without public notice.
The result is that the public continues to remain largely in the dark about trains carrying crude oil through the area.
The lack of disclosure started with officials saying they feared that providing specifics about the trains and their contents could make them a target. What is known is that trains pass through 11 Bergen County towns on the way to a refinery in Philadelphia.
Without a public hearing, the state Department of Environmental Protection issued a permit on Nov. 6 to let Buckeye Partners accept large amounts of Canadian tar sands oil at its Perth Amboy terminal and also granted its request to increase the amount of oil it can transfer there annually to almost 1.8 billion gallons.
This means that an additional 330 oil trains could travel New Jersey’s freight lines each year, while as much as 5 billion gallons of crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota already pass through. The extra trains would add on average a little less than one train a day, which does not seem like much. But the lack of communication is disturbing.
Local emergency personnel and environmentalists fear the disaster they would face if a train derails. The tar sands oil can sink in water and is difficult to remove if spilled. Crude from the Bakken region is highly flammable. Having these materials hurtle through local neighborhoods — going by schools, hospitals and homes — brings major risks.
We know this isn’t an easy problem to solve. Oil has to be transported, and everyone enjoys cheaper prices at the gas pumps. However, DEP officials were wrong to say the 603-page permit was a “minor modification” that required no public participation.
New York officials faced a similar application from another company. That prompted a public hearing and a review of whether to allow the transport of large amounts of heavy crude because of these risks. New Jersey should at least have given this the same thorough — and public — review.
DEP officials say they can only regulate what happens on Buckeye’s property.
“We regulate emissions and have requirements for how materials are handled, stored or discharged, but we cannot limit how much is processed or how much is transported,” said Larry Hajna, a DEP spokesman.
While the federal government regulates the cargo carried on railroads, the DEP can cap the amount of emissions a facility can put in the air. That, according to environmentalists, could be an indirect way to limit the amount of oil moved through the state.
While rail industry officials say 99 percent of trains reach their destination without incident, it’s the 1 percent that worries us.
If anything, the number of oil trains barreling through New Jersey looks to be on the rise. That’s only more reason for the state to stop its silence on the issue.
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