Category Archives: Benicia Herald

Benicia Herald, DOT-111, Rail Safety, Valero Crude By Rail

Benicia’s Stan Houston: a host of safety concerns – preserving Valero’s future and Benicia’s

Repost from The Benicia Herald

Crude by rail: An opportunity to lead

March 26, 2014 by Stan Houston

THE VALERO REFINERY WANTS TO BRING IN A NEW FORM OF CRUDE OIL to process in their refinery here in Benicia. Union Pacific Railroad will be the transporter. There is a host of safety concerns, not the least of which is the volatility of this newer crude. Should a mishap in transportation cause any one of the tank cars to rupture, the resulting explosion and fire could destroy Benicia. The gravity of this situation and my personal experiences in the railroad industry demand I convey my assessment and participate in a conversation that may lead to a solution that works for everyone.

I was only 3 1/2 years old but can still remember my first steam-locomotive trip. My parents and I stood patiently at Southern Pacific’s Oakland terminal and watched the oil-fired locomotive billow out steam while the engineer reset the brakes and moved the engine forward a bit. It seemed an eternity before the conductor waved to my parents and we were allowed to board my grandfather’s private car on Southern Pacific’s Daylight train to Portland, Ore.

Ten years later I would find myself packaging freight car lubricant after school for one of my dad’s railroad customers. In another 20 years, I celebrated having worked at every roundhouse and rail yard in the United States, Canada and Australia. By the age of 37, I was a highly regarded plastics engineer whose father’s company was leading the railroad industry in replacing metal bearings and components with high-tech plastic materials. In the 40-plus years I spent “working on the railroad,” I was an invited guest speaker to the Association of American Railroads, a frequent presenter at the Facility for Accelerated Service Testing in Pueblo, Colo., a board member and keynote speaker of the Locomotive Maintenance Officers Association, and a recipient of the first Quality Assurance Award from General Electric under then-CEO Jack Welch.

I cut my teeth in the industry at the Southern Pacific and Western Pacific railroads. I spent most of my early years visiting SP’s Sacramento Locomotive Works, where I’d oversee the testing and installation of our new products. The shops had been home to my grandfather when he was master mechanic there in the 1940s and ’50s. And, it didn’t hurt that Southern Pacific’s vice president of research and development was my godfather; I was given a lot of access to the railroad many others only dreamed of. As I grew into my late 20s, I’d venture to the Midwest to visit the Union Pacific or Burlington Northern railroads, or I’d go back east and call on the C&O and B&O (CSX), or the Southern Railway System. I travelled almost every other week for the next 20 years, helping redesign parts on freight cars and locomotives. It was a busy time in my life and very rewarding. I learned how the locomotives and the freight cars and rails work together. And, suffice it to say, I know the people who make those freight cars, and build those locomotives, and lay those rails.

During the last half of the 20th century, railroads shifted from carrying almost everything we consumers bought to what is today a streamlined mix of industrial and consumer goods. The railroads are extremely agile in producing freight cars that look like they are designed to handle very specific products when, in fact, their agility and mechanical engineering prowess — along with the help of their supply industry — can quickly adapt a standard freight car into a specific commodity freight car with little alteration to its structural integrity. It wasn’t long ago that, as seasonal demand of grain cars oscillated wildly during harvest in the Midwest, standard box cars (the kind you see the homeless pictured riding in) were overnight turned into grain cars by inserting a cardboard barricade in the door openings and cutting a grain chute hole in the top. Not very space-age technology, but it worked extremely well.

Today the railroads are being tasked with carrying increasing amounts of oil in tank cars. In their heightened and predictable response to demand, they have rebuilt and built new tank cars at an unprecedented rate, yet still they have fallen short of what the growing demand requires. Because there are no government regulations requiring a specific type of tank car modification or a specifically designed car to address the newer types of crude now being carried, the railroads are carrying the newer materials in standard tank cars, some of them well over 50 years old. These cars are what the industry refers to as the DOT-111 class cars. Even the very newest modification to the DOT-111 class, made in 2011, does not adequately address the volatile nature of some of the newer crudes when under impact through derailment or collision. In addition, there has been no investigation into developing a far safer delivery system that employs tank car transport. It has been well documented that as a result of a derailment and collision, the subsequent breach of a tank car would cause an explosion of the newer crudes and destroy Benicia as we know it.

The Valero refinery has asked Benicians for their support to be able to bring these newer crudes to their Benicia refinery. It is irresponsible to close our eyes and NIMBY our way out of this predicament. It is in our best interest to do everything we can to insure the profitability and volume of output from Valero, as they provide a significant amount of money to our General Fund and donate hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to needy Solano County enterprises. In fact, we should be encouraging Valero to make as much product as they can and working with them to facilitate an increase in their margins so that we reap sustainable benefits, too. Isn’t that what we already do for our other businesses? Isn’t that what tourism does for the First Street businesses and the Economic Development Board does for our other businesses? Shouldn’t we treat Valero the same as any other contributor to our welfare? Shouldn’t we insist that any threat to Valero’s ability to operate is hereby not acceptable?

In the absence of government mandates that would require a safer tank car or a safer delivery system for newer crude, it is up to Benicia to safeguard Valero’s cash flow to us so that our livelihoods continue. In our conversation with our benefactor, Valero, we must insist they deliver this message to the railroad industry: “This is not the time to fabricate a piece of cardboard and retrofit a boxcar. Rather, this is a time of great opportunity that will require the cooperation of the stakeholders of the Union Pacific Railroad and the tank car companies to look into the future and develop a brand new product and delivery system. Round up your best ME’s (mechanical engineers) and maintenance-of-way gurus and put together a delivery system that includes a modern, high-tech tank car with a robust safety factor and a delivery system that insures the continued operation of the Valero Refinery and the health and welfare of every township your system touches.

“And, until you can provide us with testing data that shows the newer car and newer delivery system is adequate, you can’t ship into Benicia anything that threatens the current cash flow of Valero funds to our stakeholders and the city of Benicia.”

Stan Houston lives and works in Benicia.

Benicia Herald, Take Action, Valero Crude By Rail

Standing Room Only – community meeting in Benicia – Stop Crude by Rail!

Repost from the Benicia Herald
(Click here for the video presentations – please be patient, the videos will be a bit slow to load)

Rail plan opponents pack library

March 11, 2014 by Donna Beth Weilenman

CallToAction_sign-in

More than 100 hear of dangers of crude oil shipments by train

More than 100 people packed the Doña Benicia Room of the Benicia Public Library on Monday night to hear a panel of authors, scientists and organizers urge opposition to the proposed Valero Crude-By-Rail project that is currently undergoing environmental review.

Filmed testimony by Marilaine Savard, a survivor of the July 6, 2013 derailment and explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, came early in the program. Savard had spoken Feb. 26 at a similar event in Martinez.

Her views of the tragedy that killed 47 people and destroyed much of the town’s business area were echoed by such activists as Benicia residents Marilyn Bardet and Andres Soto, author Antonia Juhasz and Damien Luzzo, a Davis environmental business owner.

They urged Benicia residents to join neighbors in other refinery cities who object to transporting crude oil by train.

No one from Valero Benicia Refinery, nor anyone who supports its Crude-By-Rail project, spoke Monday.

The meeting was one of many rallies, gatherings and activities planned to galvanize opposition to the proposal to deliver domestic crude to Valero Benicia Refinery by train, said Jan Cox Golovich, a member of the steering committee of Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Environment, one of the groups that organized Monday’s “call to action” meeting.

The panelists reminded their audience that while Benicia city officials are considering a project proposed solely to bring in 50 rail cars of oil twice a day into the local refinery, the San Francisco Bay Area has other cities with refineries that also could bring crude from North Dakota’s Bakken fields into the area.

The problem with the Valero project, as with delivering Bakken fields crude to refineries in Richmond, Rodeo, Martinez and Pittsburg, they said, is that the North Dakota crude has properties similar to gasoline.

It is more flammable than heavier “sour” crude such as that obtained from Canadian tar sands. Poured into a glass, Bakken crude resembles light beer, Bardet said, and has a low flashpoint under pressure.

In contrast, another panelist, Diane Bailey, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Canadian tar sands from Alberta looks like dark, goopy coffee grounds or peanut butter.

That heavier crude has its own dangers, Bailey said. It, too, can spill, polluting environmentally sensitive lands. It’s dirtier than lighter crudes, with more heavy metals and a higher percentage of other toxins.

Valero officials have said repeatedly the Benicia refinery isn’t equipped to process tar sands oil, but Bailey said such crude can be diluted with solvents — chemicals like benzene that pose their own health threats.

Juhasz said the ability to drill horizontally and use the same fracking technique that is used to obtain natural gas has opened the Bakken oil fields.

A significant amount of that oil is moved by rail, she said, since pipelines aren’t available and the oil fields are nowhere near navigable waters — which has led to a dramatic increase in the number of spills.

More barrels of oil were spilled in 2013 alone than were spilled from 1975 to 2012, Juhasz said.

Not only do the fracking process and the spills worry her, she’s also concerned that there is little regulation that protects public safety.

In fact, Juhasz noted, the National Transportation Safety Board has been asking for better crude-carrying rail cars for 20 years. While some individual railroad companies, such as BNSF, have announced they aren’t waiting for federal regulators to require better oil cars, Juhasz said stricter regulation of the rail delivery of crude “is practically nonexistent.”

The country’s older pipelines aren’t much better, and have burst, sending crude into sensitive wetlands, panelists said.

The Bakken fields have made North Dakota the biggest oil-producing state except for Texas, Juhasz said. Yet, noted the author of “The Tyranny of Oil and “The Bush Agenda,” the increase in domestic crude hasn’t lowered gasoline prices because much of the oil is being sold outside the United States.

Ed Ruszel, whose woodworking company sits next to rails that belonged to the Southern Pacific Railroad when he first purchased his company’s land in the Benicia Industrial Park, said the much shorter trains that operate near his business tie up traffic for 15 to 20 minutes at a time.

Those are 15-car trains. Ruszel said the 50-car trains proposed as part of the Valero Crude-By-Rail project would have a greater impact on Industrial Park traffic.

Nor does he expect that the Union Pacific Railroad would limit the trains to 50 cars each twice a day. He said he suspects the railroad would bring even more rail cars in during the weekend and let them sit, stored on Industrial Park tracks.

Andres_SotoSoto, an activist who has moved to Benicia, his parents’ hometown, after working for years in Richmond, said because crude by rail doesn’t just affect Benicia, residents should join their neighbors to prevent train delivery of oil to Conoco Phillips, Shell, Chevron and other Bay Area refineries.

He also asked the audience to monitor the Bay Area Air Quality Management District as it looks at the cumulative effects of the change to rail deliveries. “It’s caving to industry pressure,” he said. Residents should tell the agency to do “our will” or get a new staff.

If cities with oil refineries have worried residents, municipalities where those trains would pass through also have concerns, said Damien Luzzo, who asked Benicians to object to the Valero project not only for themselves but also for “uprail” cities like Davis.

An explosion the size of the one last year in Quebec “would incinerate half of our town,” he said of Davis, which he described as a city with environmental awareness.

“We’re wondering what we can do,” Luzzo said. “We don’t have the jurisdiction.”

Benicia Herald

Valero CBR top Benicia news story in 2013

Letter to the editor, The Benicia Herald
Friday, February 07, 2014
By Sabina Yates

In your Jan. 30 edition of the Benicia Herald, the top 13 stories of 2013 starts with No. 13, “Community pitches in to save beaten dog,” and ends with No. 1, on page 5, ”Valero Crude-by-Rail project delayed.”

You should put the top story on page one.

First things first! The Valero-Crude-by-Rail project is something that will affect Benicia far more than a beaten dog. There has been an increased number of derailments and fires around the country because of the huge increase in rail transport of crude. Union Pacific, which would be hauling the Valero crude, has not been involved in any of these fiery rail accidents – but have their older tank cars been upgraded to new safety standards proposed by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board many times over the past years?

These measures would include requiring double-hulled cars that are more puncture resistant. However, the companies that actually would be responsible for most of the costs associated with improving rail car safety are the oil companies themselves.

In a recent New York Times article, the American Petroleum Institute states that ”the first step is to prevent derailments by addressing track defects and other causes of all rail accidents.” Sounds like “buck-passing” to me. And what about local and regional emergency response plans to alleviate the risk to public safety? There are a lot of reasons why the Valero Crude-by-Rail project rightfully deserved the top priority of the Benicia news of 2013, but isn’t this where there could have been more “inches” of type? And not on page 5.

-Sabina Yates