Tag Archives: Spill prevention and response

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Hazmat notification, Oil Industry, Oil spill, Rail Safety, Spill prevention and response, State regulation

Washington State rail regulators to Fine BNSF for not reporting leaks immediately

Repost from The Bellingham Herald

State rail regulators: Fine BNSF for not reporting leaks immediately

By Samantha Wohlfeil, March 19, 2015 
Ferndale Siding PAD
BNSF rail cars on the railroad siding in Custer, Friday Aug. 22, 2014. The railroad is building a new siding from Ferndale to Custer. PHILIP A. DWYER — The Bellingham Herald

Washington state regulators have recommended BNSF Railway be fined up to $700,000 for failing to properly report more than a dozen hazardous materials spills in recent months despite the fact state staff had reminded the company how to do so last fall.

On Thursday, March 19, the state Utilities and Transportation Commission staff announced it found BNSF had failed to report 14 releases of hazardous materials, including crude oil leaks, within a half hour of learning about the leaks, as required by state law.

In one case, crews at BP Cherry Point refinery found crude oil had leaked onto the sides and wheels of a tank car, which was found to be 1,611 gallons short. That was on Nov. 5, but the UTC didn’t find out about it until Dec. 3, when it got a copy of the report BNSF sent to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Railroads have 30 days to file that type of report.

When contacted about the incident by a McClatchy reporter in January, BNSF said the train was “not in transit, not on our property and not in our custody” when the spill was detected, and the company had submitted the required reports to state and federal regulators.

In another case from Jan. 12 and 13, a train hauling 100 cars of Bakken crude oil from North Dakota to the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes had more than a dozen leaking cars discovered in multiple stops as it crossed the state.

Although the UTC sent an investigator to look at the leaking cars as part of a Federal Railroad Administration investigation, BNSF didn’t report the incident to the state’s 24-hour hotline at the Emergency Management Division until two weeks later. The hotline duty officer is in charge of alerting the various state agencies that might need to respond to a spill.

When asked by The Bellingham Herald in February why the January incident was reported more than a week later, BNSF spokeswoman Courtney Wallace replied that BNSF staff members thought they were following proper protocols, and had amended their Washington reporting policy following discussions with the UTC in January.

But the investigation released by the UTC on Thursday shows that on Oct. 22, 2014, the UTC had emailed a copy of the state’s reporting requirements to Patrick Brady, BNSF’s director of hazardous materials and special operations, in an effort to make sure BNSF knew how to report accidents.

As copied into the body of the Oct. 22 email to Brady, the state law regulating accident reports ( WAC 480-62-310) lists the hotline number, which types of incidents must be reported, and states that railroad companies must call within 30 minutes of learning of the event.

On Dec. 3, Brady emailed the UTC again asking, “Can you send me the regulatory reference to spill notification to the UTC?” Staff members again emailed Brady the state law on reporting requirements, according to emails included in the investigation.

From Nov. 1, 2014, to Feb. 24, UTC staff found BNSF committed 700 violations of the reporting requirement. Every day an incident goes unreported counts as a separate violation, per state law.

In addition to the leaking crude oil incidents, the UTC announcement lists a variety of leaks that occurred throughout the state: a tank car dripping gas/oil from a bottom valve in Spokane Valley on Dec. 8, 2014; cars leaking “primary sludge” found in incidents in Seattle, Vancouver and Everett in December; two 100-gallon spills of lube oil from locomotives in December and January, among others.

The commission could opt to fine the company $1,000 per violation of the reporting law, but no fine has been issued yet. The commission will set a final penalty after BNSF gets the chance to have a hearing.

“When a company fails to notify the (state Emergency Operations Center) that a hazardous material incident has occurred, critical response resources may not be deployed, causing potential harm to the public and the environment,” the UTC announcement states.

BNSF was still reviewing the report when contacted for comment on Thursday.

“In regards to reporting releases in Washington state, we believed we were complying in good faith with the requirements from our agency partners,” BNSF’s Wallace wrote in a statement. “Following guidance from the UTC in January 2015, BNSF reviewed its reporting notification process and amended its practices to address concerns identified by the UTC. We will continue to work closely with the UTC moving forward on this issue.”

BNSF is the largest railroad company operating in Washington.

Parked trains, Spill prevention and response

Leak from rail car prompts evacuation of Pittsburg California homes

Repost from KTVU
[Editor: first reports were of a propane leak.  Later … “They ran a test and it came back to be lubricating oil which is not hazardous in this kind of quantity….”  Apologies for the commercial ad in the video.  – RS]

Leak from rail car prompts evacuation of Pittsburg homes

January 7, 2015

PITTSBURG, Calif. (KTVU) – A possible leak from a Union Pacific rail car led to the evacuation of six homes in Pittsburg Wednesday night.

The rail car in question is parked along Parkside Drive, not far from homes.

Union Pacific workers were doing a routine inspection when they noticed something was amiss on one car and thought there was a leak.

Since each tanker car carries about 30,000 gallons of highly flammable butane, the workers called Contra Costa County Fire Department for help.

“Absolutely it’s a scare. We want to make sure everybody was as safe as possible,” said Fire Marshall Robert Marshall.

Fire crews evacuated half a dozen nearby homes.

“I just heard the helicopters and stepped outside to see what was going on,” said Brian Gillespie, a neighbor. People in the area were alerted by the commotion of the fire crews and police descending on their neighborhood.

“My concern was just the safety of the people in the area,” said Gillespie.

Firefighters called in Contra Costa County’s Hazardous Materials team.

First, they took an air sample from 50 feet away. That test came back negative.

Later, a second team climbed onto the rail car and took a sample of an oily substance that is not usually found on these tankers.

“They ran a test and it came back to be lubricating oil which is not hazardous in this kind of quantity,” said Marshall.

Fire officials lifted the evacuation order at 8:10 p.m.

Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Spill prevention and response

Lessons from a 2011 derailment: the 911 call, BNSF no-show, first responders, timelines

Repost from Sightline Daily

What Happened When a Hazardous Substance Train Derailed on a Puget Sound Beach

True story from 2011 raises questions about railroad’s ability to manage oil trains.
Eric de Place, November 21, 2014

If you’ve ever wondered how an oil train derailment might go down on the shores of Puget Sound, it might look a bit like the winter night derailment in 2011 that spilled sodium hydroxide on a beach at Chambers Bay south of Tacoma. It was hardly the kind of disaster that has resulted from oil trains derailing, but it still makes for a rather instructive lesson in how these things happen.

Sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as lye, is used as a chemical base in the production of pulp and paper, textiles, drain cleaners, and other products. (It’s also the major ingredient that makes lutefisk unpalatable.) It’s caustic, corrosive to metal and glass, and it can cause fairly serious burns. You want to be careful handling it but—notably unlike the volatile shale oil traveling daily on the very same rail line—it does not erupt into 300-foot-tall fireballs.

If it had been an oil train, things could have been much, much worse.

Chambers Bay derailment by WA Ecology_2

What happened is this: around 8 pm on February 26, 2011, a north-bound freight train derailed, sideswiping a south-bound train that was carrying (among other things) four loaded tank cars of sodium hydroxide in a liquid solution. One of those cars was damaged in the collision and leaked a relatively modest 50 gallons onto the beach before response crews plugged the leak.

At the time, of course, no one knew how serious the incident was—and things did not go smoothly that night. The 911 call went out at 8:02 and firefighters were responding by 8:10. At 8:31 the Pierce County Sheriff alerted the National Response Center, the agency that in turn notifies all the relevant federal and state agencies. The Department of Ecology learned of the accident at 8:52.

By contrast, BNSF, owner of the railway and operator of the train—not to mention the nation’s leading carrier of volatile Bakken shale oil—did not contact emergency management authorities until 8:56. And then things got worse. As the government responders assembled—sheriff’s deputies, fire fighters, US Coast Guard officials, oil spill clean-up experts—they were unable to get the railway to respond to their requests for information, or even to show up at the fire department’s incident command post.

By 11:00, three hours after the accident, the responders held their incident briefing to plan how to enter the site yet they still were unable to get BNSF officials to appear. According to Ecology’s official account, “local, state, and federal responders did not know who was participating on BNSF’s response team, their level of training nor their plan of action.”

Chambers Bay derailment by WA Ecology_1

Finally, at 11:45, almost four hours after the derailment and still without a line of communication to BNSF, local fire fighters moved into the scene. Not until 11:50 did a railway representative show up and at that point responders were finally able to establish reliable communication with the railroad. But it was almost too late: just as the fire fighters were entering the scene, BNSF began moving rail cars on the site, putting them directly into harm’s way.

Local and state responders were eventually able to secure the site and clean up the material. Yet it took days to accomplish, during which time several high tides inundated the spill area. And the story wasn’t over: a few days later, on March 1, a contractor for the railway spilled another 100 gallons of sodium hydroxide when the equipment operators lost control of a damaged tank car they were removing from the shoreline.

Chambers Bay derailment by WA Ecology_3

For jeopardizing incident responders, and for failing to coordinate with state agencies as required under Washington law, Ecology fined BNSF $3,000. The state also sent the railway a bill for $6,370 to cover the response and clean up costs. (By way of comparison, BNSF regularly reports quarterly earnings in the billion-dollar range.)

The Chambers Bay derailment should be seen as a cautionary tale because it all could have been much worse if the train had been loaded with 3 million gallons of Bakken shale oil, a typical quantity for the several oil trains that pass over that very same rail line several times a day. Not only might the oil explode catastrophically — as it has on at least four occasions recently — but it would almost certainly contaminate the Sound and beaches that the tracks run alongside. It’s worth noting too that the incident occurred directly adjacent to the Chambers Bay Golf Course, which will be hosting the 2015 US Open and a projected 235,000 fans.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Pacific Northwest, Rail traffic, Spill prevention and response

Tacoma City Councilman and County Executive form Safe Energy Leadership Alliance, call for action

Repost from The News Tribune, Tacoma WA

Pierce County gets all risks, no rewards for surging oil train traffic

By Ryan Mello and Dow Constantine, October 24, 2014
Rail Delays
An oil-tank train with crude oil from the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota travels near Staples, Minnesota, in April. MIKE CRONIN — The Associated Press file

As this editorial page has noted, Washington has seen a stunning increase in the amount of Bakken crude oil transported on our railroads, to an estimated 2.87 billion gallons each year. Much of that highly flammable oil rolls across the central Puget Sound region, through downtown Tacoma and past Steilacoom in aging tank cars.

The surge in train traffic has created an unprecedented risk to our people, our economy, our traffic and our environment. Our communities assume all of the risks while big oil companies get all of the rewards.

There’s the immediate risk to public safety when flammable fuel passes through heavily populated areas like Tacoma and Seattle and past our neighborhoods, schools and parks. Since July 2013, there have been nine serious train derailments across North America – more than we experienced during the past four decades combined. An oil-train explosion last year in Quebec, Canada, killed 47 people and wiped out half a downtown area.

There’s also the increased risk of oil spills contaminating Puget Sound and undermining the progress we’ve made in waterfront development and cleaning up the Foss Waterway. It’s a scenario we saw earlier this year when an oil train spilled more than 20,000 gallons of crude oil into the James River just outside Lynchburg, Virginia.

We work hard to ensure that our first responders have the equipment and training they need to respond to oil-train derailments, spills and fires. But we need state and federal action to prevent these potentially life-threatening tragedies from occurring in the first place.

That is why we brought together more than 100 other elected leaders from across the Northwest and British Columbia to form the Safe Energy Leadership Alliance. It’s a broad coalition of local leaders from urban and rural areas who share a mission to better understand the potential safety and economic impacts from oil and coal trains, and call for stronger safety standards.

Having multiple mile-long trains – each carrying 3 million gallons of crude oil – roll through Pierce and King counties snarls our traffic and makes it more difficult for our emergency personnel to respond to calls. The proposed increase in oil traffic would also harm our local businesses, manufacturers and farmers who rely on our limited rail capacity to transport their goods to overseas markets.

Displacing Washington state agriculture and manufactured products that create jobs to make way for crude oil would benefit only oil companies.

Perhaps what’s most concerning is that there is the potential for all of these risks and impacts to substantially increase over the next six years if proposed facilities are built along the Pacific coast.

The Department of Ecology estimates that the amount of crude oil that comes through our state could triple – to nearly 9 billion gallons each year – by 2020. The number of fully loaded oil trains that cross our state each week could go from 19 to more than 100 within the next few years.

That’s why we applaud Gov. Jay Inslee for fast-tracking the state’s Marine and Rail Oil Transportation study and the Department of Ecology for hosting a public meeting Thursday in Olympia (see box). This study shines a light on the risks and costs to our communities, and makes recommendations to strengthen disclosure of hazards and emergency preparedness.

We urge our state lawmakers to act swiftly on these recommendations, and enact provisions that maintain public safety. The costs to protect our communities and prevent delays in rail crossings should fall to the oil industry and not local governments.

Our long-term goal is to establish the Northwest as a global exporter of clean energy. In the meantime, we will work together to ensure that oil and coal companies don’t take up our limited rail space, put our communities at risk and harm our local economy.

Tacoma City Councilman Ryan Mello and King County Executive Dow Constantine are members of the Safe Energy Leadership Alliance.
Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/2014/10/24/3448437_pierce-county-gets-all-risks-no.html?sp=/99/447/&rh=1#storylink=cpy