Tag Archives: San Francisco Bay Area

BNSF Railway, California Regulation, Crude By Rail, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Union Pacific Railroad, Valero Benicia Refinery

Vallejo Times-Herald: Railroads sue California over oil train safety rules

Repost from The Vallejo Times-Herald

Railroads sue California over oil train safety rules

Union Pacific, BNSF Railway argue federal law pre-empts state regulations
By Tony Burchyns, October 9, 2014

California’s two major railroad companies filed a lawsuit this week to argue that the state lacks authority to impose its own safety requirements on federally regulated crude oil train traffic.

The lawsuit follows a new state law imposing regulations on the transportation of crude oil by rail in California. Union Pacific and BNSF Railway filed the case Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento to argue that federal law pre-empts California and other states from enforcing such regulatory regimes.

“The new state law requires railroads to take a broad range of steps to prevent and respond to oil spills, on top of their myriad federal obligations concerning precisely the same subject matter,” the railroads argue. “UP, BNSF and other members of (the American Association of Railroads) will be barred from operating within California unless a California regulator approves oil spill prevention and response plans that they will have to create, pursuant to a panoply of California-specific requirements.”

The railroads also will be required to obtain a “certificate of financial responsibility” from the state, indicating they are able to cover damages resulting from an oil spill. Failure to comply with the new state rules will expose railroad employees to jail time and fines, according to the lawsuit.

The California Office of Spill Prevention and Response, which was named as a defendant in the lawsuit, has declined to comment on the pending litigation.

The state law was passed in June following a sharp rise in crude-by-rail shipments in California from 2012 to 2013 and several high-profile oil train derailments in other states as well as Canada. In the Bay Area, crude-by-rail projects in Benicia, Richmond, Pittsburg, Martinez and Stockton have drawn local attention to the prospect of mile-long oil trains snaking through neighborhoods, mountain passes and sensitive habitats such as the Suisun Marsh.

Last week, California Attorney General Kamala Harris sent a letter to Benicia challenging plans to ship 70,000 barrels of crude daily by train to the city’s Valero refinery. Valero is seeking city approval to build a rail terminal to receive two 50-car oil trains daily from Roseville. The train shipments would originate in North Dakota or possibly Canada.

Harris, the state’s top law enforcement officer, criticized the city for underestimating the project’s safety and environmental risks. The letter was among hundreds received by the city in response to its initial environmental impact report. City officials say they are in the process of responding to all of the comments, and plan to do so before the project’s next, yet-to-be-scheduled public hearing is held.

California Regulation, Crude By Rail, Emergency Readiness & Response, Hazmat notification

California oil train bill heads to governor

Repost from The Sacramento Bee

Dickinson oil train bill heads to governor

By Tony Bizjak, Sep. 2, 2014
Special to The Bee by Jake Miill
A BNSF train carrying 98 tankers of crude oil passes through midtown Sacramento at 4 p.m. Monday en route from the North Dakota Bakken oil fields to a refinery in Richmond. | Jake Miille / Special to The Sacramento Bee

A bill by Sacramento Assemblyman Roger Dickinson requiring more disclosure about crude oil rail shipments has passed the Legislature and has been sent to the governor for his consideration. The bill is the last of several steps taken by the Legislature this summer to deal with safety concerns about the growing phenomena of 100-car oil trains rolling through Sacramento and other California cities on their way to coastal and Central Valley refineries.

The bill, AB 380, orders railroad companies to provide state and local emergency officials with information about oil and hazardous materials that may be shipped through their jurisdictions. It also also requires carriers, when shipping volatile Bakken crude oil, to provide the state with information about the volume of oil and timing of the shipment beforehand. The law also directs carriers to furnish the state with copies of the carrier’s hazardous material emergency response plan.

“The risk of catastrophic injury to life and property by rail accident has grown dramatically,” said Dickinson. “State and local emergency response agencies face new challenges when dealing with this amount of hyper-flammable or heavy crude oil. In order to prepare our emergency response agencies and protect our communities, it is essential that emergency response agencies have the information they need about the crude oil cargo in order to minimize any damage from an accident.”

A series of derailments and explosions has thrown a spotlight on the increasing numbers of crude oil train shipments in the United States. State energy officials say at this point only small amounts of California’s crude oil is arriving via trains from North Dakota and other areas of North America, but the amount is growing. Oil companies are building the capacity to accept as much as 23 percent of the state’s oil needs via train in 2016.

Reacting to statewide concerns, the Legislature and governor passed two budget bills in June to bolster state spill prevention and response efforts. One bill funded seven new rail and rail bridge inspectors for the state Public Utilities Commission. A second budget bill applied a fee to oil companies’ rail shipments to fund a state Office of Spill Prevention and Response program protecting inland waterways.

A last-minute bill, SB 1319, sought to impose a second fee on rail transports to support emergency hazardous materials response training. It died after oil industry officials complained the legislation duplicates other state and federal safety efforts, and that there was not adequate time to discuss and vet the bill.

Currently, only one rail company, BNSF, is transporting more than 1 million gallons of Bakken crude oil per train into California. According to reports the railroad is required to file with state emergency officials, a train carrying Bakken travels through Redding, Sacramento and Stockton on its way to a transfer station in the Bay Area several times a month, perhaps as often as weekly. The train uses the tracks that run through midtown Sacramento between 19th and 20th streets. BNSF has declined to offer more details about those shipments.

Air Quality, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Take Action

Bay Area Air Quality: Isn’t your family’s health more important than Big Oil profits?

From an email by Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter
[Editor: For details about participating in the upcoming meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, see below.  – RS

Isn’t your family’s health more important than Big Oil profits?

Jess Dervin-Ackerman, August 27, 2014

For too long, the Bay Area’s five oil refineries have been polluting our air and water and pouring money into local politics to ensure they can continue their dirty, harmful practices. In the Bay Area alone, air pollution kills nearly 2,000 people each year.

We need the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (the body tasked with regulating the refineries) to take strong and bold action to protect our communities from the toxic air pollution spewing from these facilities. Send a message to the Air District Board supporting a proactive approach to regulating refinery emissions now!

The Chevron refinery in Richmond is one of the worst offenders; two years ago this month, a huge fire at the facility sent upwards of 15,000 Richmond residents to the hospital with respiratory problems. Right now, the Chevron refinery is emitting fine particulate matter that causes heart and lung disease—and the rules allow them to do it. We need stronger regulations that prevent toxic polluters from poisoning Bay Area families, as well as specific action to cap fine particulate emissions from the Chevron refinery.

Add your voice to the growing movement in the Bay Area calling for strong and bold action to reduce dangerous emissions and carbon pollution from the refineries along the Bay.

Thank you for taking action to protect the health and safety of our community and the planet.

Jess Dervin-Ackerman
Conservation Organizer
Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter

P.S. — Forward this message to a friend!

Please attend the September 3rd Air District Board meeting to support cleanup and emissions restrictions.

Support  –  including emission limits in BAAQMD’s proposed Bay Area refineries rule.
Oppose – Big Oil’s proposal of a ‘monitoring only’ rule that threatens to study us to death.

What: Meeting of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District Board of Directors—write “For Cleanup” on your speaker card

When: Wednesday, September 3 (all morning—suggest arrival by 9 AM)

Where: BAAQMD offices, 939 Ellis Street, San Francisco, CA 94109 (Ellis near Van Ness Ave., about eight blocks from Civic Center BART Station)

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.