Category Archives: Bakken Crude

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Diluted bitumen (Dilbit), Emergency Readiness & Response, Evacuation, Fire, First responder training, Flash point, Funding for emergency response, Let it burn, Spill, Tar sands crude

Templeton California retired fire chief: ‘Do not understate risk of oil trains’

Repost from the San Luis Obispo Tribune

Retired Templeton fire chief: Do not understate risk of oil trains

HIGHLIGHTS
• Despite training, emergency responders may not be able to prevent hundreds of fatalities in a derailment
• Highly flammable Canadian crude more dangerous than California crude
• Project should be denied if safety requirements can’t be enforced

By Greg O’Sullivan, October 23, 2015

Columnist John Peschong in his Aug. 23 column “Local responders are up to task” describes the extensive training and dedication of our emergency responders. This (in his opinion) means “emergency medical technicians and fire crews stand ready to protect us from any disaster,” including an oil train derailment and fire.

Greg O’Sullivan
Greg O’Sullivan, Retired Templeton Fire Chief

Having retired from the fire service after 38 years in the profession, as well as being a qualified hazmat technician and hazmat incident commander, I feel I can speak with greater authority about the ability of local responders to respond to an oil train derailment involving a fire and/or spill.

Mr. Peschong is correct when he states that many hours and dollars have been spent to train our emergency responders and they are capable of mitigating most emergencies. What he doesn’t explain is that an oil train derailment involving multicar fires in a highly populated area could result in hundreds of deaths, despite herculean efforts of first responders. For the incident commander of a hazmat incident, the team’s first responsibility is the safety of the public and our responders. In the case of a multiple car derailment involving fire, evacuation would be the highest priority.

If a life hazard exists, efforts focus on fire suppression to protect rescue operations. The area is isolated, and mutual aid as well as other authorities are notified to assist in the emergency. If evacuation has been successful and no further life hazard exists, then, and only then, could tactical decisions be made concerning whether or not fire suppression should be attempted, or whether the fire should be allowed to burn. It should be noted the closest Type 1 or 2 hazmat team is in Santa Barbara County.

Phillips 66 recently delivered beautifully designed surveys to some area residents expounding the virtues of its oil train project. But nowhere does it explain that approval of the project means five oil trains per week coming through San Luis Obispo County, each train pulling 80 tank cars filled with highly flammable Canadian crude oil. (That would be 500 million gallons per year.)

Al Fonzi in his Oct. 9 Viewpoint “Fear campaign against Phillips” declares that the tar sands crude oil (dilbit) Phillips 66 wants to transport from Canada is no more dangerous than the California crude from San Ardo that has been transported through the county by train for several decades. Mr. Fonzi bases this claim on the fact that the Canadian crude and San Ardo crude have similar vapor pressures.

Vapor pressure is only one measure of the hazard of a liquid. Fire professionals are far more familiar with flash point as the main determinant of flammability of a liquid. The flash point of California crude, like that found in San Ardo, ranges 199 to 232 degrees Fahrenheit (MSDS Product 94-0007-02). In contrast, the flashpoint of Canadian crude is reported to be minus 30 degrees (MSDS Heavy Crude/Diluent mix), comparable to gasoline at minus 42 degrees, both of which are considered highly flammable.

An oil train derailment involving multicar fires in a highly populated area could result in hundreds of deaths, despite herculean efforts of first responders.

Suppose a derailment involves only a spill. What would a single car rupture spilling 30,000 gallons of oil in the Salinas River do to the water supply of Atascadero, Templeton and Paso Robles? The train tracks parallel the Salinas. Mr. Fonzi says opponents of the oil trains are running a “cynical campaign to terrorize the public.”

It is unfair and inaccurate to label the many organizations and individuals who oppose the Phillips 66 oil train project as uninformed, fearful citizens. Opponents of the oil train project include such well-respected bodies as the League of Women Voters, National Education Association and 40 public bodies including city councils, school boards, fire chiefs’ organizations and elected officials, as well as the editorial board of The Tribune.

The final Environmental Impact Report is nearing completion, which will bring the project before the Planning Commission. Because of the serious local and regional safety issues of the project, I agree with and support the League of Women Voters that the Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors must “insist upon full and enforceable mitigations” for all risks, and that if these safety requirements cannot be enforced by the county, the project should be denied.

As a retired fire service professional, I believe protecting the safety of communities along the rail corridor outweighs any perceived benefit of the project. Don’t be misled by PR firms (similar to the one John Peschong represents) who are paid to spin the topic for Phillips 66. Please take the time to get the facts for yourself.

Greg O’Sullivan spent 38 years in the fire service, including 12 years as Templeton fire chief. After retiring, he served four years on the Board of Directors of the Templeton Community Services District.
Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Fire, Lac-Mégantic, Rail Safety, Tar sands crude

Oil Train Response 2015 – activists gather in Pittsburgh

Repost from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
[Editor:  The report below is the only mainstream media coverage of the Nov. 14-15 event “Oil Train Response 2015” that I could find.   Facebook users can check out photos and brief comments at Bay Area Refinery Corridor Coalition and IWW Environmental Unionist Caucus.  Tweeters can catch a few pics via past tweets by Ethan Buckner.  Here is the agenda, and here is a related 1-hour video “Oil Train Webinar” organized in advance of the event by ForestEthics.  – RS]

Local officials tout alliances to push for stronger oil train regs

By Daniel Moore / November 14, 2015 12:00 AM

What Marilaine Savard remembers most is hearing the blast, seeing the flames out her window and a plume of black smoke dimming the sky — but being unable to do anything about it.

It was July 2013 and Ms. Savard was visiting a friend in Lac-Mégantic, a town in rural eastern Quebec that serves as the central hub for about a dozen small communities. It had banks, post offices and bars. Now, she said, the downtown is a desert with all the buildings demolished and the soil contaminated.

The town is now eponymous with the worst rail disaster since a boom in North American oil production put more of the commodity on the rails.

Ms. Savard, who said she now lives and works in Lac-Mégantic to help the community rebuild, was one of dozens of people who gathered in Pittsburgh on Friday to hear from panels of elected officials and academics on what is being done to prevent and respond to derailments of trains carrying crude oil.

The Heinz Endowments organized the daylong conference in a packed hotel ballroom in Oakland. Roughly 60 to 70 trains carrying crude oil — mainly extracted from the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota and destined for refineries on the East Coast — travel through Pennsylvania each week.

In February, a train carrying crude oil derailed and displaced 100 people near Charleston, W.Va.

The two main carriers, Norfolk Southern Corp. and CSX Corp., were not present as organizers wanted to focus the conversation on community engagement with elected officials.

“Individual communities are largely powerless,” said Grant Oliphant, president of the Heinz Endowments, in an interview. “I think what you are beginning to see is momentum building nationally to address the issue.”

Local officials who flew in from places like New York and Washington state stressed the importance of forming partnerships to put pressure on the U.S. Department of Transportation — the sole regulatory authority over the railroad industry — to enact stricter rules.

Ben Stuckart, chair of the city council in Spokane, Wash., said he helped start the Safe Energy Leadership Alliance, a coalition of local, state and tribal leaders across the Pacific Northwest united by concerns over traffic from coal and oil trains.

“So then, when I go to D.C. and sit with Transportation Secretary (Anthony) Foxx, I’m not just representing citizens of Spokane. I say I’m representing SELA,” Mr. Stuckart said.

“By us all acting together, we make a stronger case for it,” he said.

The conversation was at times testy, as local and state emergency management officials sought to assure the audience they were prepared for a range of disasters.

Environmental groups and others have demanded railroads publicly release specific information on what hazardous materials are being transported on what lines. Local emergency officials have insisted railroads provide them with enough information to respond to incidents, but that information has never been divulged publicly.

Raymond DeMichiei, deputy coordinator for the city’s Office of Emergency Management and Homeland Security, defended keeping the information private, citing the potential for acts of terrorism.

“We have an obligation to make sure the bad guys don’t get the information,” Mr. DeMichiei said.

During a later question-and-answer session, members of the crowd raised the question of secrecy again. “What advantage does it provide for you to know in Downtown Pittsburgh how many day care centers are within a mile on either side of the railroad tracks?” Mr. DeMichiei countered to a question about why such information is private.

“Because this is a democracy,” responded one audience member.

Ms. Savard, who was not on a panel, said most residents who haven’t been forced to relocate away from Lac-Mégantic, she said, are still in a state of shock. Without a downtown hub, the entire region is coping with where to go for basic services.

She hopes, by sharing the struggles of residents two and half years after the explosion, that a movement can begin to influence real change.

“They are not able to see the big picture right now,” she said. “They are trying to survive.”

This story was updated on November 18, 2015 with the correct number of crude oil trains that travel through Pennsylvania.

Bakken Crude, Clean energy, Climate Change, Climate change denial, Global warming, Tar sands crude

This Changes Everything – The Film

Repost from thefilm.thischangeseverything.org
[Editor:  This excellent film was shown nearby recently.  You can find out where it is showing now, or arrange to have it shown in your community here.    Check out the TRAILER and read more below!  – RS]

This Changes Everything

What if confronting the climate crisis is the best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world?

“Purposely unsettling… Ultimately encouraging”
– Variety Magazine

“Genuinely moving”
-Entertainment Weekly

“The realization that a solution is possible, well, that changes everything”
– Globe & Mail

“Klein and Lewis paint a picture of a post-fossil-fueled, post-capitalist future that seems not only within reach, but like a place where we actually want to live”
– YES Magazine

“Klein and those impassioned protesters provide something that has been in short supply in the predecessors — namely, a modicum of hope for the future”
– LA Times

What if confronting the climate crisis is the best chance we’ll ever get to build a better world?

Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.

Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.

Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.

Over the course of 90 minutes, viewers will meet…

Crystal, a young indigenous leader in Tar Sands country, as she fights for access to a restricted military base in search of answers about an environmental disaster in progress.

Mike and Alexis, a Montana goat ranching couple who see their dreams coated in oil from a broken pipeline. They respond by organizing against fossil fuel extraction in their beloved Powder River Basin, and forming a new alliance with the Northern Cheyenne tribe to bring solar power to the nearby reservation.

Melachrini, a housewife in Northern Greece where economic crisis is being used to justify mining and drilling projects that threaten the mountains, seas, and tourism economy. Against the backdrop of Greece in crisis, a powerful social movement rises.

Jyothi, a matriarch in Andhra Pradesh, India who sings sweetly and battles fiercely along with her fellow villagers, fighting a proposed coal-fired power plant that will destroy a life-giving wetland. In the course of this struggle, they help ignite a nationwide movement.

The extraordinary detail and richness of the cinematography in This Changes Everything provides an epic canvas for this exploration of the greatest challenge of our time. Unlike many works about the climate crisis, this is not a film that tries to scare the audience into action: it aims to empower. Provocative, compelling, and accessible to even the most climate-fatigued viewers, This Changes Everything will leave you refreshed and inspired, reflecting on the ties between us, the kind of lives we really want, and why the climate crisis is at the centre of it all.

Will this film change everything? Absolutely not. But you could, by answering its call to action.

 

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Local Regulation, Tar sands crude

North Paso Robles County residents meet to oppose oil train rail spur

Repost from the Paso Robles Daily News

North County residents meet to oppose oil train rail spur

By Jackie Iddings, November 10, 2015 7:44 am
Tankers courtesy Mesa Refinery Watch Group
Tankers courtesy Mesa Refinery Watch Group

–A group of concerned North County residents met earlier this month at Congregation Ohr Tzafon in Atascadero for a public forum about Phillip 66’s plans to run oil trains through California to its Mesa refinery in Nipomo. Phillips 66 has applied to the county for a permit to build a rail terminal to unload oil trains carrying tar sands oil crude from Alberta, Canada.

Federal laws prohibit state and local governments from passing laws and regulations that control trains passing through their jurisdictions, but the group believes that San Luis Obispo County is in a unique position because denying Phillips 66 the permit will not only prevent the oil trains from running through San Luis Obispo County, it can significantly reduce oil-train traffic in California.

Phillips 66 proposes to bring mile-long oil trains, each carrying 2.4 million gallons of low grade tar sands crude, through San Luis Obispo county five times a week for the next 20 years. Once refined at the mesa refinery, the oil will be transported by train to the San Francisco Bay area for further treatment, then exported to the highest bidder.

Phillips 66 says importing the lower qualilty crude is necessary because it is running out of California crude, putting jobs at the Nipomo Mesa refinery at risk. The Mesa Refinery Watch Group challenges the oil company, stating “Phillips’ corporate executives have stated in writing that they want their entire company to process lower-cost crude oil in order to generate higher profits.” A statement on the Mesa Refinery Watch Group’s web site says, “The issue is about higher profits by switching to rail delivery, not about protecting jobs.”

Beth Kean from the California Nurses Association, and Lee Perkins from ProtectSLO presented concerns that would impact San Luis Obispo county in the event of an oil train accident.

Kean and Perkins stated the danger of derailments and explosions are very real. More than 95,000 people in San Luis Obispo County live, work, or attend school within a one mile blast zone around the Union Pacific tracks that would be used by the oil trains, they said. Retired Templeton fire chief Greg O’Sullivan spoke from Sunday night’s audience stating that an oil train derailment and explosion would tax local first responder resources and could result in hundreds of deaths in a populated area. O’Sullivan stated that the risk to public safety and environmental resources such as water, is just too high to be balanced by any claimed safety measures.

On October 7, 2015 the Los Angeles Times published a table showing 31 oil-train crashes between January 2013 and July 2015. Over half of thesewere credited to track issues. In an April 2015 press release announcing the Department of Transportation’s intent to improve transport safety the DOT reported the number of accidents involving trains carrying crude oil “is unprecedented.” “Operation Safe Delivery Update” a DOT report released in July 2014 reported the “potential devastating consequences of a crude oil train derailment.” Another DOT press release issued in May 2014, “Upon information derived from recent railroad accidents and subsequent DOT investigations, the Secretary of Transportation has found that an unsafe condition or an unsafe practice is causing or otherwise constitutes an imminent hazard to the safe transportation of hazardous materials.”

The DOT released derailment projections in an August 2014 issue of the Federal Register in which it presents a high end risk assessment for derailment of crude oil shipments at 5 to 15 events between 2015 and 2034. The assessment includes 10 additional events in the same time frame of “higher consequences.” These higher consequences total up to environmental damages, injuries and deaths costing between $1.15 and $5.75 billion for a single event.

A July 2013 oil train derailment in Lac-Megantic,Ontario, resulted in 47 deaths and clean-up costs were estimated at over $180 million. The railroad, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway folded because it was only carrying $25 million in liability insurance, leaving Canadians responsible for financing the costs.

A draft of the Phillips 66 environmental impact report (EIR) is available for public view on the web site for the San Luis Obispo County Planning Department. The final EIR may be released in early 2016 and public hearings can start as soon as on month after that release. Opposition to oil trains is growing in San Luis Obispo county and across the state as well as in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation.

Kean and Perkins are making presentations at the San Miguel School Board meeting at 6:30 on Nov. 12, and to the Templeton School Board meeting at 6 p.m. on Dec. 10.