West Virginia train derailment causes massive fire, evacuations
By Ryan Parker, Feb 16, 2015, 1:31pm
A train derailment Monday afternoon in West Virginia caused multiple explosions and a massive fire, officials said.
At least one home near the derailment in Fayette County caught fire and has been destroyed, according to Lawrence Messina, the state’s public safety spokesman.
The derailment happened about 1:20 p.m. Eastern time, Messina said. Three hours later, the fire was still burning, he said.
The CSX train was hauling crude oil, which is leaking from at least one of the cars, Messina said. There are no reported injuries, he said.
“Our concern is oil is leaking into the Kanawha River,” he said. Two water intakes downstream from the treatment plant have been shut down, he said.
CSX acknowledged that the company was aware of the situation. “We are working with first responders on the scene to ensure the safety of the community,” it said on Twitter.
Some of the tanker cars exploded, and oil on a portion of the river is on fire, according to the office of Kanawha County Emergency Management & Floodplain Management, which was assisting in the response.
Kanawha County is downriver from Fayette County.
Adena Village, near the derailment, has been evacuated, and authorities were beginning to evacuate homes across the river from the fire about 4:30 p.m., Messina said. At least 100 people have been evacuated, he said.
Fayette County is about 60 miles southeast of Charleston.
Pictures on social media, which a spokesman for the Montgomery Fire Department confirmed were of the scene, showed fire engulfing the train.
Heavy snow is falling in the area, but Messina said it is unclear if that will help extinguish the fire.
Repost from YouTube [Editor: See also Clément’s and Sophie’s website, The Takeoff. – RS]
The Condor and The Eagle
A documentary film directed by Clément Guerra
In April 2014, Clément and Sophie Guerra began their epic journey here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Interviewing many of us who are working to stop Crude By Rail in our refinery towns, they have now released “The Condor And The Eagle – Mini Series – Episode 1- The Bay Area.”
Our project started 10 months ago in the Bay Area, CA. There is currently this feeding frenzy in 5 communities of the Bay of proposed projects to retool the refineries to receive, transport and refine dirtier bottom of the barrel oil: Bakken and Tar Sands. The communities are now coming together, ready to fight back and make sure that California won’t take part of this devastating mega projects that are Alberta tar sands. People are rising, more and more people come together. Nothing is done yet, it will take a lot of work to give the movement the kind of form that will make a difference. It’s about re-creating the foundations of an inclusive dynamic, focused on how to bring onboard those who aren’t yet.
Featuring:
– Pennie Opal Plant
– Andres Soto
– Marilyn Bardet
– Kalli Graham
– Ed Ruszel
– Bill Nichols
– Greg Karras
– Nancy Rieser
Twin Cities hospitals are front line in treating Bakken burn victims
There are no specialty centers near Bakken fields.
By Maya Rao, February 14, 2015
Kyle, 27, recovers at Regions Hospital after a fire on an oil site where he was working in the Bakken badly burned his legs. Photo: Maya Rao, Star Tribune
Flames seared the pants off Kyle’s legs as he raced across a bed of ruddy red rocks, screaming for help.
A pipe on a machine processing oil at high heat had burst, soaking him in methanol and sparking a fire.
“You could just feel it cooking my legs,” he said. “It almost sounded like chicken frying in an oiler.”
Hours later, Kyle woke up at Regions Hospital in St. Paul last month, after a 600-mile plane ride from the oil fields of North Dakota. His legs were burned so deeply that the bottom layer of skin would never grow back. It was the worst pain he’d ever felt.
Burn injuries among North Dakota workers have surged to more than 3,100 over the past five years, as the once nearly barren prairies have become the epicenter of a massive oil-drilling boom. Despite the flammability of Bakken crude and the danger of oil-rig work, North Dakota has no burn centers. The Twin Cities is the closest place to go for patients like Kyle, 27, who agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his last name not be used.
While other kinds of injuries may be more common, oil field burns are among the most painful and costly to treat. An oil field worker’s treatment at a burn unit can cost $1 million.
“The burns from the oil fields can be pretty dramatic,” said Bill Mohr, a surgeon at Regions.
Just 17 percent of North Dakota residents can be transported by air or ground to a burn center within two hours — fewer than every state but Alaska and Montana. The extra time it takes to move patients poses a medical challenge, since care administered in the first day factors into burn patients’ long-term recovery.
Mohr said oil field burns are three or four times bigger than those of the average patient and that Bakken burn victims who come in to Regions are more likely to need ventilators.
One died after arriving with 98 percent of his body burned. Some needed limbs amputated and had burns that bore down into the bone. Many never returned to the oil fields.
Shortage of burn doctors
Hospitals nationwide have been closing burn units and are grappling with a shortage of burn doctors. States with low populations, like the Dakotas, Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, have not been able to justify opening such expensive, specialized facilities.
When a truck carrying crude crashes and explodes, or an oil rig blows out, burn victims are initially taken to a hospital in the Bakken. The staff assesses whether the burns are severe enough to fly them to burn centers in the Twin Cities, Salt Lake City or Denver.
Gary Ramage, medical director at McKenzie County Healthcare Systems in North Dakota, said he sends patients out of state if the burns affect their respiratory system, face or hands — the most difficult areas to treat — and at least 10 percent of their body.
Oilfield workers are brought to Regions almost once a month, including a patient last month who had been working on an oil heater near Mandaree, N.D., that ignited. He died.
Another dozen Bakken burn victims have been treated at the Hennepin County Medical Center in the last three or so years, according to its burn unit director, Ryan Fey.
HCMC paid closer attention to oil field burns after a train carrying Bakken crude derailed in Casselton, N.D., 13 months ago. While no one was injured, members of the medical staff are examining how they would address an oil train accident that caused mass burn injuries.
“That’s become more and more of an issue because we have all these Bakken oil trains that come rolling through just one after another,” Fey said.
Bakken hospitals are looking at how to improve burn care. Two nurses at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Dickinson, N.D., recently traveled to a Galveston, Texas, hospital to learn burn management techniques. And doctors at Regions regularly travel to the Bakken to talk to medical staff about treating burns in the early stages.
Serious oil field burns destroy what’s known as the dermis, or the thicker, second layer of skin that contains blood vessels and sweat glands. Burn doctors excise the damaged skin to prevent infections. Then they apply bioengineered tissue made of cow collagen and shark cartilage to function as the new dermis. They harvest the top layer of skin from a healthy part of the body and graft it over the artificial skin tissue.
Even after recovering from those surgeries, patients must still do months or years of physical therapy to fix the loss of flexibility in their skin. And then there is the emotional recovery: Severe burn patients can face post-traumatic stress disorder on par with soldiers.
Lighting a cigar
Advances in burn treatment mean that some oil workers who would have died a decade or two ago now have a chance.
One is Casey Malmquist. The head of a Whitefish, Mont., construction company, Malmquist came to the Bakken to build housing for oil workers. In July 2013, he stepped onto the deck of one of the newly finished homes for Halliburton employees and leaned over to light a cigar.
There was a whoosh and then an explosion. He flew off the deck. His shirt, he recalled, lit up like a lantern.
The cause appeared to be leaking propane gas that had not been properly odorized to alert him that he was near a flammable substance. He fell into a coma and woke up three weeks later at Regions, 68 percent of his body burned. The Bemidji native, then 56, seemed destined to die.
But after three months at Regions and many surgeries, Malmquist returned to Montana. He still goes to physical therapy daily and hasn’t returned to some of the activities he once loved, like hockey, because his skin is fragile and managing his body temperature is difficult.
He said living in his new body “is like wearing a wet suit that’s five times too small, and there’s ground glass between you and the wet suit.”
In November, Minneapolis attorney Fred Pritzker sued Horizontal Resources on Malmquist’s behalf, claiming the company was negligent in not odorizing the propane.
Nightmares
Kyle moved to Williston, N.D., in 2011 with his pregnant wife, Shawna, after he was laid off as a plumber in Helena, Mont.
He found work as a maintenance roustabout, checking oil tanks, pumping units, well heads and other equipment.
Last month, Kyle and a co-worker went to an oil pad just south of Ross, N.D., and noticed a unit by the oil treater was frozen. Oil treaters separate oil from water and gas before it moves to storage tanks. After they worked to thaw it with water from a hot oil truck, Kyle said he tried to fix a misplaced valve.
A pipe blew out and soaked him with gas. It was so uncomfortable that he took off the flame-retardant pants over his jeans just before a fire ignited.
Several men who saw Kyle ablaze tackled him and blasted him with a fire extinguisher, ordering him to roll on the ground.
As the ambulance took him to a hospital in Stanley to be stabilized, Kyle said he thought, “How am I going to support my family now?”
He woke up in Regions with a breathing tube, his legs stapled and wrapped in casts.
Kyle can walk; he strode down the hall to pick up Forrest Gump from the hospital’s movie selection after his wife joked that she’d make him watch Titanic. But it hurts.
As OSHA investigates, Kyle said he doesn’t blame his company and considers it a freak accident. He hopes to get his old job back one day.
Memories of the fire shake him. “I keep having nightmares about it,” Kyle said. “I’ve been trying to take a nap all day and … I jump and think that I’m back in the fire.”
Revised Oil-Train Safety Rule Said to Delay Upgrade Deadline
by Jim Snyder, February 12, 2015
(Bloomberg) — The Obama administration revised its proposal to prevent oil trains from catching fire in derailments, giving companies more time to upgrade their fleets but sticking with a requirement that new tank cars have thicker walls and better brakes.
The changes, described by three people familiar with the proposal who asked not to be identified because the plan has not been made public, are in proposed regulations the U.S. Transportation Department sent to the White House last week for review prior to being released.
The administration is revising safety standards after a series of oil-train accidents, including a 2013 disaster in Canada that killed 47 people when a runaway train derailed and blew up. Earlier this month a train carrying ethanol derailed and caught fire outside of Dubuque, Iowa. No one was hurt.
Companies that own tank cars opposed the aggressive schedule for modifying cars in the DOT’s July draft, saying it would have cost billions of dollars and could slow oil production. That plan gave companies two years to retrofit cars hauling the most volatile crude oil, including from North Dakota’s booming Bakken field.
Railroads and oil companies fought the brake requirement and proposed a standard for the steel walls that was thinner than suggested by the agency.
‘Too Long’
Karen Darch, the mayor of the Chicago suburb of Barrington, Illinois, and an advocate for safer cars, said she was encouraged that the rules included stronger tank cars and upgraded brakes. She disagreed with adding years to the retrofit deadline.
“Taking more time on something that’s already taken too long is problematic,” Darch said Thursday in a phone interview.
Officials in the President Barack Obama’s Office of Management and Budget could change the proposal before the final version is released, probably in May. Darius Kirkwood, a spokesman at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, the Transportation Department unit that wrote the rule, said he couldn’t comment on a proposed rule.
“The department has and will continue to put a premium on getting this critical rule done as quickly as possible, but we’ve always committed ourselves to getting it done right,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said this month in a statement about the timing of the safety rule.
Rolling Deadlines
The current proposal would require companies to first upgrade tank cars known as DOT-111s, which safety investigators have said are prone to puncture in rail accidents, according to one of the people. Cars with an extra jacket of protection would remain in use longer before undergoing modifications, according to one of the people.
A newer model known as the CPC-1232, which the industry in 2011 voluntarily agreed to build in response to safety concerns, would have a later deadline than the DOT-111s for modification or replacement, three people said.
The CPC-1232s have more protection at the ends of the cars and than the DOT-111s and a reinforced top fitting.
The draft rule also would require that new tank cars be built with steel shells that are 9/16th of an inch thick, the people said. The walls of the current cars, both DOT-111s and CPC-1232s, are 7/16th of an inch thick.
A joint proposal from the American Petroleum Institute and the Association of American Railroads argued to set the tank-car shell thickness at half an inch, or 8/16ths.
Company Lobbying
Railroads and oil companies also lobbied against a proposal that the trains have electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, which are designed to stop all rolling cars at a same time.
The Association of American Railroads in June told Transportation Department officials that the electronic brakes would cost as much as $15,000 for each car and have only a minimal safety impact.
Trains often haul 100 or more tank cars filled with crude. These trains have increasingly been used to haul crude as oil production has boomed in places, like North Dakota, that don’t have enough pipelines.
Rail shipments of oil surged to 408,000 car loads last year from 11,000 in 2009.
