A matter of faith: Rail bridge conditions hidden from public view
By Chris Hubbuch, December 14, 2014
BNSF Railway workers reinforced this railroad bridge south of Stoddard with cribbing last June. The bridge has been scheduled for replacement in 2015. (Click image for 2 more photos.)
STODDARD — On the afternoon of June 6, Kevin Gobel pulled into town after work and noticed dozens of railroad workers and trucks gathered near the village’s only railroad crossing.
Perturbed at trucks parked across the tracks and blocking the road, Gobel, the village president, went looking for whoever was in charge to ask what was going on.
The answer: We’ve got a real problem at the bridge south of town.
Gobel, who is also a Vernon County supervisor, called Chad Buros, the county’s emergency management director. Together they drove about three quarters of a mile south on Highway 35 to where a swarm of crews were busy working on the BNSF Railway bridge over the mouth of Coon Creek.
As it turned out, the problem was an “incipient failure” on one span of the 112-year-old bridge, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Train traffic was halted for 12 hours as crews put timber blocking under the span and nine others “that appeared susceptible to the same mode of failure.”
But six months later, Gobel still has little information about the bridge, which carries an average of 16 million gallons of volatile crude oil each day.
“Nobody’s ever gotten an official report from BNSF” about happened in June, he said. “Local governments need to be informed of what’s going on. I haven’t seen any documents stating what the status of (those) bridges are.”
Local officials and the general public are largely in the dark about the nation’s freight railroads, which carry growing volumes of flammable crude oil, while state and federal governments have limited authority and oversight.
And when it comes to rail bridge safety, the industry is generally left to police itself.
Concerned citizens have documented cracked and crumbling rail bridges along the Wisconsin side of the Mississippi River that engineers say are troubling and that prompted federal authorities to take a closer look. BNSF assures the public the bridges are safe, but the government does not have structural engineers to independently verify their claims. And unlike highway bridges, inspection reports are secret, unavailable to the public and local officials.
There isn’t even an inventory of bridges.
“What makes me nervous is the responsibility of safety for railroad bridges rests with the owner of the track. You’d like to think they use good faith and safety and upkeep of the bridges … but it only takes some poor owners that don’t take it as seriously,” said Pat Salvi, a Chicago attorney who handles rail accidents. “The consequences are so potentially dramatic.”
BNSF says its bridges are inspected at least once a year — some twice or more — by trained bridge inspectors as well as structural engineers, consultants and contractors. Canadian Pacific, which carries far less oil, says it also has a rigorous inspection program. Both maintain inventories.
But neither the reports nor the inventories are available to the public.
Railroad bridge failures are rare, said Frank Douma, a research fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the Center for Transportation Studies.
Yet he acknowledges the stakes are higher when trains are hauling hazardous materials: “The difference between an oil train and a grain train derailing is what happens when it derails.”
Little oversight, little access
The Federal Railroad Administration is tasked with oversight and enforcement of rail safety.
In a 2007 report, the federal Government Accountability Office outlined how little oversight the agency exercises over rail bridges, more than half of which were built before 1920.
The GAO recommended, among other things, that the FRA devise “a systematic, consistent, risk-based methodology for selecting railroads for its bridge safety surveys.”
In addition, a joint FRA-industry committee recommended the agency create and maintain a detailed bridge inventory. That never happened.
Since the release of that report, the agency has created a bridge inspection program, which spokesman Mike England said entails audits of the railroads’ inspection programs as well as spot checks by FRA inspectors.
But there are just six inspectors for the nation’s estimated 76,000 rail bridges; only two are engineers.
“The railroad has the oversight of the bridge. The FRA has oversight of the railroad,” said Greg Baer, statewide railroad structure and track engineer for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.
According to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, in the four years since the bridge inspection program was adopted, the FRA has looked at just 14 Canadian Pacific bridges in eastern Wisconsin, and none in Minnesota. It has yet to conduct a regular inspection of a BNSF bridge on more than 1,800 miles of track in either state.
The FRA has yet to produce any documents in response to a September request for audit records. And while the FRA has access to the railroads’ structural inspection reports, those documents are hidden from public view.
England said the primary objective of FRA bridge inspections is to verify the bridge’s physical appearance matches what’s in the railroad’s report — to “make sure they’re not fudging anything” — but that inspections are thorough.
But inspection reports obtained by the La Crosse Tribune offer little detail.
An FRA inspector’s July 30 report of a Canadian Pacific bridge in Milwaukee, reads in full:
“Observation of Bridge 84.99 and review of the latest bridge inspection report. This bridge includes a TRT swing span over the Menominee River. This bridge has 3 spans, TRT and beams, concrete substructure, open deck, double track, and is 293’ long. Bridge conditions observed generally correspond with conditions reported on bridge inspection report dated 6/18/2014.”
“It’s a detailed inspection,” England said. “They’re not going to put anything in the report unless they find something wrong.”
The reports show that inspector looked at 13 bridges in a single day along nearly 45 miles of track in two counties.
By comparison, a recent DOT inspection report on a 262.4-foot viaduct on Copeland Avenue in La Crosse describes in detail minor cracks and other features. A routine inspection report on La Crosse’s Cass Street bridge is 86 pages.
Douma notes that unlike highways and airports, which are built and maintained by government, railroads are and always have been private enterprises. They came into existence at a time when the federal government was much smaller, and at least as concerned about keeping the union together as moving people across the continent.
Prior to the 1980s, railroads were subject to strict economic regulation, but the rails have always been on private land and largely out of government oversight.
Earlier this year, the state of California launched its own rail bridge inspection program in response to increasing oil train traffic and what one report labeled “the dearth of information and lack of regulatory oversight regarding the structural integrity of California’s rail bridges.”
The FRA says it is the only such state-run program in the nation.
The PUC would not make officials available for an interview, but an agency spokesman said by email they are in the process of hiring two bridge inspectors and will implement the new program “as soon as possible.”
“I don’t mean to criticize the railroads’ programs, but for the public to have the confidence that bridges are in good shape, our role is to offer oversight,” PUC Rail Safety Deputy Director Paul King told the Sacramento Bee. “Given the heightened risk of one of these crude oil trains derailing and given the projections of significant increase in tonnage across these bridges, we need to fulfill this role.”
The FRA does have the authority to order a bridge closed, as it did in 1996, 1999 and most recently 2006. In each case, orders were issued only after the owners of the bridges ignored repeated warnings to repair serious defects.
The typical maximum civil penalty for violations is $25,000, though in cases of “grossly negligent violation or where a pattern of repeated violations has caused death or injury or an imminent hazard of death or injury” fines can reach $105,000.
“That’s not really much of a hammer,” Salvi said.
According to FRA records, BNSF settled 418 track safety violations in 2012, the most violations per mile of any of the seven Class 1 railroads. Those track violations resulted in fines of $865,000, of which BNSF paid $569,725.
Last year, BNSF reported a pre-tax profit of almost $6.7 billion on revenues in excess of $21.5 billion.
Bridge conditions spark concern
In June, when the swarm of workers showed up to fix the bridge in Stoddard, Guy Wolf started to get worried about the state of the bridges near his home in Mohawk Valley.
Wolf, a retired university retention specialist and avid angler, used a kayak to navigate up the mouth of Coon Creek to get a closer look at the emergency repairs.
“What really concerned me — they had things circled. Cracks,” he said. “You could begin to see that parts of the bridge were lower (than other parts). All this lumber stacked up under the bridge.”
He started looking at other bridges and was startled at their appearance. Over the summer, Wolf and La Crescent wildlife photographer Alan Stankevitz, who runs a blog where he tracks rail safety issues, began photographing rail bridges along the Mississippi River backwaters between La Crosse and Prairie du Chien.
They documented cracked supports, exposed reinforcing steel rods, and chunks of missing concrete.
But looks can be deceiving, according to the railroad, which assures all the bridges are sound.
“Railroad bridges are typically not pretty; but they are functional and safe,” BNSF spokeswoman Amy McBeth said. “The visual appearance of these structures is not indicative of their structural integrity.”
While it is impossible to determine a bridge’s structural integrity from photographs, four engineers who looked at the photos agreed there are signs of serious deterioration.
Al Ghorbanpoor, a professor and director of the Structural Engineering Laboratory at UW-Milwaukee, said while a thorough assessment would be required, “the photographs give the impression that the condition of these bridge structures should be of concern. There is clear evidence of excessive deterioration that could have negative impact on the structural integrity of these bridges.”
Most agreed the Coon Creek bridge was the most troubling, though John Zachar, a professor of architectural engineering Milwaukee School of Engineering, expressed concerns about the pictures of a bridge in Genoa where concrete breakage has left exposed rebar at the base of piers and on one of the spans.
“That is a significant structural deficiency,” Zachar said. “I’d say there’s no question about it. This is something we ought to look at.”
But John Bennett, a former vice president of planning and systems for Amtrak and policy adviser, said rail bridges can be sound even after losing some of their structural integrity.
“Many of these bridges were built 50 or 100 years ago, (when) standards weren’t as well known,” Bennett said. “Many of these bridges have been overbuilt in terms of strength.”
Wolf and other rail safety activists presented the photos to Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who wrote to the FRA in September urging a quick inspection of the bridges.
The FRA says it sent inspectors to look at a dozen Mississippi River bridges and a letter to Baldwin said neither BNSF nor its own inspections revealed any conditions “that inhibit the ability of these bridges to safely carry rail traffic.”
But the agency did not release those reports in response to a FOIA request and has declined to provide access to them.
According to the letter, the four bridges pictured were built between 1911 and 1923 and show deterioration — cracking and spalling concrete, exposed rebar — typical for rail bridges of that age.
The letter also notes that BNSF is monitoring the Coon Creek bridge, and the temporary blocking, through twice weekly inspection. The FRA went on to say BNSF is inspecting its bridges twice as often as required by the agency and accurately documenting conditions.
Reinvesting revenues
Railroads have enjoyed substantial growth in revenue and profit in recent years as the U.S. economy has recovered.
BNSF says it is sinking record amounts of that money back into its infrastructure: the railroad spent $5.5 billion last year on capital improvements, and has announced plans to spend $6 billion this year — about half of that on maintaining its physical infrastructure, such as tracks and bridges.
Indeed, workers this fall cut an access road to the Coon Creek bridge in preparation for its replacement, which BNSF said was scheduled for 2015 even before the most recent problems were detected.
The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the railroad industry a C+ in its most recent report card on U.S. infrastructure, which Bennett said is largely due to the investments the big four railroads are making in their infrastructure.
In fact, Bennett said, railroad infrastructure is generally better funded than highways.
“One of the good things about the railroad, they have a business model that actually works — they’re able to extract enough profits from operations to invest in infrastructure,” he said. “As opposed to highways. … The highway bridge systems are much more perilous in terms of getting funding.”
“It’s certainly in our best interest to prevent accidents and keep our infrastructure sound,” McBeth said. “That’s why you see record investments in infrastructure.”
Repost from Inside Climate News [Editor: This is the longer text-and-video version of the ICN / Weather Channel BOOM video. Highly recommended, especially for its focus on bridge safety. – RS]
By Marcus Stern and Sebastian Jones
An investigation by InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel, in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
U.S. regulators knew they had to act fast. A train hauling 2 million gallons of crude oil from North Dakota had exploded in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. Now they had to assure Americans a similar disaster wouldn’t happen south of the border, where the U.S. oil boom is sending highly volatile crude oil every day over aging, often defective rails in vulnerable railcars.
On the surface, the response from Washington following the July 6, 2013 explosion seemed promising. Over the next several months, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued two emergency orders, two safety alerts and a safety advisory. It began drafting sweeping new oil train regulations to safeguard the sudden surge of oil being shipped on U.S. rails. The railroad industry heeded the call, too, agreeing to slow down trains, increase safety inspections and reroute oil trains away from populous areas.
But almost a year and a half later—and after three railcar explosions in the United States—those headline-grabbing measures have turned out to be less than they appeared. Idling oil trains are still left unattended in highly populated areas. The effort to draft new safety regulations has been bogged down in disputes between the railroads and the oil industry over who will bear the brunt of the costs. The oil industry is balking at some of the tanker upgrades, and the railroads are lobbying against further speed restrictions.
And rerouting trains away from big cities and small towns? That, too, has been of limited value, because refineries, ports and other offloading facilities tend to be in big cities.
InsideClimate News, The Weather Channel, and The Investigative Fund have monitored the regulatory response to oil train explosions this year, focusing on whether the agency that oversees the railroads—the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA)—is able to ensure that the nation’s aging railroad infrastructure can safely handle its latest task: serving as a massive, rickety network of pipelines on wheels.
We found that regulators don’t have the resources to catch up with—let alone get ahead of—the risks posed by exploding oil trains. That has left the FRA politically outgunned by the railroad industry, leaving it largely to police itself.
Among the issues we identified:
Too few government inspectors. The railroad agency has only 76 track inspectors, assisted by a few dozen state inspectors, to oversee the operations of some 780 railroad companies that manage 140,000 miles of track, plus railroad bridges. By its own estimate the agency can inspect less than 1 percent of the railroad activities under its oversight each year.
Little oversight of railroad bridges. The FRA has set no engineering standards for railroad bridges, relying almost entirely on individual railroads to inspect, maintain and repair their own bridges and trestles, some of them built more than a century ago. The agency doesn’t keep an inventory or even a count of the bridges, estimated to number between 70,000 and 100,000.
Secrecy. State and local governments can’t independently assess the condition of local rail infrastructure because their inspectors don’t have access to the railroads’ design and maintenance records, or to the tracks, trestles and bridges themselves. The railroads consider such information proprietary; the tracks and bridges are their private property and disclosure of those materials is voluntary.
Meager penalties. Fines are low, on the theory that the cost and consequences of an accident are sufficient incentive for railroads to properly maintain their tracks and bridges. In 2013, the FRA issued $13.9 million in fines to an industry whose top-seven revenue gainers alone took in nearly $84 billion.
“How did it get missed?” Deborah Hersman, former chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, asked at an April NTSB hearing about the hazards of shipping crude oil by rail. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen too much of a tombstone mentality. Did it take derailments and body count for us to understand?”
But Then the Oil Trains Started Exploding
The economic rebirth of America’s railroads is deeply entwined with the gusher of oil that began flowing from North Dakota’s Bakken shale in the mid-2000s. With few pipelines to carry this liquid gold to refineries, producers turned to the railroads. Why wait to build politically contentious pipelines when they could transport huge volumes of crude by train?
Railcar shipments of oil soared from 9,500 in 2008 to more than 400,000 in 2013– most of it crude from North Dakota. Railroad revenue from transporting crude during that period rose from $25.8 million to $2.15 billion.
This bit of industrial alchemy helped keep oil prices from rising during the ongoing turbulence in the Middle East and created billions of dollars in investments in rail loading and unloading facilities, bringing more jobs to parts of America beyond North Dakota.
But then the oil trains from North Dakota started exploding. First in Lac-Megantic, Canada. Then in Aliceville, Ala.; Casselton, N.D.; New Brunswick, Canada, and Lynchburg,Va.
A tanker train carrying North Dakota Bakken crude oil burns after derailing in western Alabama outside Aliceville, Ala. in November 2013. (Credit: Alabama Emergency Management Agency)
The explosions triggered protests, lawsuits and stormy community meetings: In Albany, N.Y., where Bakken crude is offloaded from railcars and sent down the Hudson River on barges; in Chicago suburbs that are crisscrossed with tracks; in Portland, Ore., a transit point for oil headed to Vancouver, Wash., and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where refineries receive the oil shipped in ocean tankers from Vancouver—and directly by rail from North Dakota.
“When you look at what could happen—and all of us are vulnerable—you’d think there would be more urgency,” said Karen Darch, president of the Village of Barrington, one of several mayors in cities around Chicago alarmed by the rise of oil train traffic through their towns. “… But it looks like the regulators are still keeping their fingers crossed that the next bad accident doesn’t happen.”
NTSB board member Christopher Hart said regulators need to respond to the new reality of oil by rail.
“Sometimes business models change quickly, and we need to figure out a way to keep the regulator up to speed with those changes—so that we don’t have a disconnect between what’s happening in the real world and where the regulations are,” Hart said in an interview. Hart is now the NTSB’s acting chairman.
Government officials and industry trade groups are still sparring over why North Dakota’s crude is much more volatile than traditional heavier crude oil, but many outside experts say the answer is clear: The Bakken’s light crude is more like gasoline and rich in volatile natural gas liquids, including methane, ethane, propane and butane.
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There’s an ongoing controversy about how, and how much of, the natural gas liquids should be removed. Currently, North Dakota doesn’t have the equipment and pipelines to process and transport the gases for resale. Instead, some of the gas-laden oil is being shipped to coastal refineries, which are equipped to handle them. There, they can be sold separately, generating additional profits—but creating new dangers along the way.
During the rail journey, the natural gas liquids separate from the oil and become gaseous, forming an explosive propane-butane blanket on top of the oil. If a railcar ruptures—and if some of the gas comes into contact with the outside air and a spark occurs—the railcar will explode and act as a blow torch on the car next to it. The result is a series of explosions like those captured on cellphones after the Lac-Megantic, Aliceville, Casselton and Lynchburg accidents — mushroom-shaped fireballs rising hundreds of feet into the sky.
The danger is compounded when trains are very long. The push to get North Dakota’s oil to refineries as quickly as possible is so strong that trains sometimes stretch for a mile and a half, commonly pulling about 100 railcars. Each car can carry roughly 30,000 gallons of oil, which means a single train can haul as much as 3 million gallons of oil—enough to fill a football field almost as high as the goal posts.
In the past, a train might have included five or 10 cars of crude oil, said the NTSB’s Christopher Hart. Today, “the entire train is nothing but this crude oil.”
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Dangers of Tanker Cars Known Since 1991
The type of railcar typically used to carry North Dakota’s oil—the DOT-111—was never intended to haul volatile crude oil. Designed in the 1960s, the cars originally carried corn syrup and other less explosive cargo.
Since 1991, the NTSB has warned repeatedly that the cars are prone to rupture during a derailment. Still, the ethanol industry used the DOT-111 as a workhorse in the mid-2000s, when the United States became the world’s largest ethanol producer. It remained the ethanol industry’s railcar even after 13 DOT-111s ruptured at a railroad crossing in Cherry Valley, Ill. in 2009, igniting a fire that killed a woman sitting in her car. Three people were seriously injured and 600 homes had to be evacuated.
The NTSB said the accident demonstrated “the need for extra protection such as head shields, tank jackets, more robust top fittings protection, and modification of bottom outlet valves on DOT-111 tank cars used to transport hazardous materials.”
The accident prompted the Association of American Railroads, the industry trade group, to petition the U.S. Department of Transportation to require similar standards for tankers. When the Transportation Department didn’t act quickly, the railroad association issued its own industry standard urging that all tank cars built after October 2011 have those features.
But the vast majority of railroad cars are owned or leased by oil producers, refineries and the ethanol industry—not by railroad companies. And those businesses chafed at the estimated $3 billion price tag, arguing that it was impossible to design a tanker to withstand every crash scenario. The solution, they said, was for the railroad companies to make their tracks safer.
“DOT has proposed tank car standards and other measures that would cost shippers billions of dollars to build new tank cars to carry crude and ethanol over old tracks,” David Friedman of the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers, a refineries trade group, wrote to the Transportation Department. “That approach to risk is backwards: it is far more effective to prevent a derailment than mitigate impacts from it.”
Century-Old Bridge Supports New-Era Oil Trains
While regulators have focused on the failings of DOT-111s since Lac-Megantic, less attention has been paid to railroad infrastructure and operations.
The regulatory system’s weaknesses are apparent in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where a 116-year-old bridge supports oil trains as they cross the Black Warrior River and into the city’s downtown.
The steel bridge is buttressed by wooden trestles that rise about 40 feet above public parks and jogging trails on either side of the river. On one bank sits the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater, where concert-goers can gaze up at trains silhouetted romantically against moonlit skies. Nearby is a construction site where condos are going up. Less than a mile downriver is a major oil refinery.
When InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel visited the bridge in May, a train of DOT-111s filled with crude oil happened to be parked overhead. At the base of the bridge, many of the pilings that support the trestle appeared to be rotted. Scores of pilings had what looked like makeshift concrete braces where the piling had cracked. Cross braces that keep the track from swaying were hanging loose or lay on the ground beneath the structure. One stretch of the trestle had been blackened by fire.
The M&O Bridge and the surrounding track are the responsibility of Alabama Southern Railway, one of 30 short-line railroads owned and operated by Watco Companies, LLC, a transportation conglomerate. Watco’s chief commercial officer, Ed McKechnie, said trains on that particular line carry heavy crude oil from Canada, not the explosive light crude from North Dakota. But Watco doesn’t rule out moving North Dakota crude across the bridge if a customer comes along, McKechnie said.
Many rail industry officials, academic engineers and regulators say that even 19th century bridges that appear rundown can be safe, because redundancy is built into the bridges and the defects are usually cosmetic. They note that rail bridge collapses are rare. According to FRA accident records, only 58 train accidents were caused by the structural failure of railroad bridges for the 27 years from 1982 through 2008. But most of the surge in oil has come since then.
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For the public or even local governments, confirming that a specific bridge is safe enough to handle the new oil trains is almost impossible.The M&O Bridge is inspected annually, McKechnie said, with the most recent inspection on June 14. But he would not disclose or summarize the results. Because railroad companies aren’t required to file that information with federal regulators, there’s no database to check.
In 2009, Congress ordered the FRA to draft railroad bridge safety regulations, but the rule that emerged in 2010 is so narrow that it provides little help. Railroad operators are required to have a maintenance plan for each bridge and conduct at least one annual inspection. But they are not required to submit those plans to the FRA or to give the FRA an inventory of the bridges unless the agency requests that information.
The only direct oversight the rule called for was having the FRA, already dreadfully short of personnel and resources, conduct spot audits of the plans—not the bridges.
A Freedom of Information Act request for any documents related to safety inspections of the M&O bridge produced a January 2006 FRA inspection that found no structural problems but noted that the railroad “has no written policy on bridge inspection and/or maintenance practices.”
An FRA inspection in January 2010 found several problems, including a crushed cap. A cap is a horizontal timber that plays a key role in supporting the elevated track. The railroad took the bridge out of service for four hours to replace the cap.
Summaries of Federal Railroad Administration reports on M&O bridge. (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
The inspection report said Alabama Southern is using an outside contractor to inspect its bridge, but noted that “with few exceptions” the railroad “is not following the repair recommendations….” (Emphasis in report)
When asked to comment on the report, Watco’s McKechnie said, “We continue to believe that an on-going maintenance program has kept the bridge safe and in use.”
An FRA spokesman said the agency investigates every complaint about a bridge or track and invariably finds that the bridges are safe. But it’s unclear how those judgments are made, because the federal government has no engineering standards for bridges.
McKechnie said Watco abides by industry standards produced by The American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA). AREMA’s Manual for Railway Engineering is available to the public for a fee, $1,370. The chapter on timber structures (purchased for $290) did not address what percentage of pilings may be rotted or otherwise defective without undermining the structural integrity of a bridge.
“It would be difficult to arrive at an allowable percentage of deteriorated piles that would cover all timber railroad bridges because of the variations in geometry, loading, and amount of deterioration among different timber structures,” an AREMA representative wrote in an email. “The decision as to what is safe is left to the bridge engineer.” Watco’s vice president of engineering, Tony Cox, made a similar argument. He said the M&O Bridge is safe.
And what does the FRA say about the absence of federal or industry standards?
“A numerical standard for defective bridge pilings would be an insufficient standard, as every bridge is unique, and the structural integrity of every bridge must be considered in its proper context,” a spokesman for the rail agency explained by email. “Every bridge must be evaluated by an appropriate expert, and within the context of its construction, operational environment, and operational loading.”
Ultimately, the railroad decides whether a bridge is safe.
Crossties Missing or in Decay
Federal regulators have set safety standards for track, but whether they are adequate is another question.
Environmentalist John Wathen pushes a stick into the rotting piling of a rail bridge near Tuscaloosa. (Credit: The Weather Channel)
In June 2014, a train carrying fuel oil derailed just west of Tuscaloosa, a few miles before it reached the M&O Bridge. Local environmentalist John Wathen, an opponent of shipping crude by rail, posted pictures of the track at the derailment site on his blog. They show crossties in varying stages of decay or completely missing.
“Rotten crossties, missing rail plates, dips and waves in the tracks,” Wathen wrote on the blog.
Watco’s McKechnie reviewed Wathen’s photos for InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel. He described the track as “typical Class I track,” meaning it is the lowest grade of track with speed limited to 10 mph. The train that derailed was complying with that regulation, he said, attributing the accident to “a thermal displacement or a ‘sun kink’ caused by the rail overheating.”
“While the observation of this track can lead to concerns, the track should be able to handle trains moving at 10 mph or less,” he said in an email. McKechnie said an inspection of the track in June found “minor deviations which were corrected immediately.”
According to federal track safety standards, 19 out of 24 crossties can be defective and the track still considered safe.
But where do these track safety standards come from, and how do we know they’re sufficient?
Holly Arthur, a spokeswoman for the industry’s Association of American Railroads said the standards were enacted in 1971 and modified in 1982 and 1998 “through decisions by the Federal Railroad Administration… so best asked of FRA.”
When an FRA spokesman was asked whether a track with 19 out of 24 crossties could be safe, he replied, “The track segment being evaluated must be considered in its totality.”
The state of Alabama offered no help in determining whether the M&O Bridge or the nearby tracks where the train derailed are safe. State DOT spokesman Tony Harris said Alabama “does not have any regulatory authority over bridges of that nature. Those are owned by the railroads themselves. Federal law requires the railroads to inspect those and we are not vested with that duty or responsibility.”
Industry Derails Regulations
After the Lac-Megantic tragedy, senior Transportation Department officials vowed to prevent a similar accident from happening in the United States. Cynthia Quarterman, the Transportation official who oversaw the regulatory response until her resignation in October, and Joseph Szabo, the FRA head through the end of this year, assembled working groups for three issues: train securement, crew size and hazardous materials.
Between September 2013 and April 2014, the three groups met, debated and thrashed out their recommendations.
A drafting session of the hazardous materials working group was held on January 27, in a large meeting room at the headquarters of the National Association of Home Builders, five blocks from the White House. About 60 people sat most of the day facing one another around a large rectangular configuration of conference tables.
FRA staffers occupied one line of tables, including Karl Alexy, head of the agency’s Hazardous Materials Division and chair of the meeting. The other seats were occupied by representatives from industries that ship hazardous materials by rail, including the Association of American Railroads, American Petroleum Institute, Chlorine Institute, American Chemistry Council, Fertilizer Institute and the Institute of Makers of Explosives.
Several railroads that run oil trains on their track also attended, including Canadian National Railway, Union Pacific, Watco and BNSF, the largest shipper of crude. Warren Buffett’s investment firm, Berkshire Hathaway, acquired BNSF for $44 billion in 2009, just as the crude-by-rail boom was taking off. Railroad worker unions were at the session, too, including the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
Throughout the day, the FRA’s Alexy floated safety recommendations drawn up by his staff. But none got past Michael J. Rush, the railroad association’s watchful attorney. Rush interjected, objected and parried with Alexy, dominating the discussion and delaying or diluting the recommendations.
The railroad association denied a request to speak with Rush, who was paid nearly $1.2 million in 2012 by the association and related organizations, according to the association’s tax filing that year, the most recent filing available.
At one point, Alexy proposed that railroads carrying large volumes of crude oil be required to have a comprehensive spill response plan, just as oil pipeline companies must have. Canada’s Transportation Safety Board had made that one of its key recommendations after the Lac-Megantic derailment, and the U.S. NTSB had taken the unusual step of endorsing Canada’s recommendations, simultaneously announcing them from Washington.
But Rush was having none of it.
Swiveling in his chair as he swung the microphone to his lips, he said, “With all due respect to the NTSB, they completely misunderstood this regulation and this topic.”
After some more back and forth, Alexy did what he would do throughout the day: He deferred to Rush.
“I agree, unless there’s any objection,” Alexy said.
There was none.
At one point, Alexy offered a recommendation that would have required better communication between shippers and railroads, to make sure railcars carrying heavier loads don’t travel over bridges that aren’t strong enough to support them. A typical oil train places roughly 15,000 tons of pressure on structures that could be as much as 150 years old.
“I’m not sure we have a problem with this in the industry,” Rush said.
Alexy cited a recent incident where it had been a big problem—a bridge had collapsed under the weight of railcars it wasn’t certified to support, resulting in a derailment. But after a few minutes of discussion, the group “parked” that recommendation, too.
An exchange between Alexy and Cynthia Hilton, executive vice president of the Institute of Makers of Explosives, reflected the tone of the meeting.
Hilton said she believed the goal that day was to produce recommendations that would give the industry guidance, not requirements that would force them to take specific actions.
“And now I’m reading that ‘the shipper must develop and adhere to a sampling and testing program,’” she said. “That doesn’t sound like a guidance document.”
“You’re right and I agree,” Alexy assured Hilton. “This is of course open for editing, ideas and suggestions. I circled the word ‘must’…. ‘Should’ is probably a little more appropriate.”
In April, the hazardous materials working group produced four narrow, technical recommendations. For instance, one recommended a definition for what constitutes an oil train. Another offered a definition for what constitutes an empty rail car.
None of the staff recommendations that Rush had objected to during the drafting session made the cut. Nor did any of the NTSB recommendations, such as the one that would have required railroads to have emergency plans.
The regulations are still under consideration by the Transporation Department without a formal deadline.
In July, California tried to fill part of the regulatory gap by imposing a 6.5-cent per barrel fee on oil shipped into the state by rail. The money will help communities develop emergency response plans for possible spills. BNSF, Union Pacific, and the Association of American Railroads have since filed suit against California, arguing that such matters are the province of the federal government.
Alexy declined through the railroad agency press office to be interviewed for this article. At an NTSB hearing in April, however, he responded to a questioner who asked him to characterize the results of the working group’s activities.
“A lot of things that we took up initially were overcome by events,” he explained.
Fred Millar, an advocate for tighter hazmat rail regulations and a longtime observer of the FRA, had another explanation: “Industry had veto power over everything.”
“Who Was the Guardian of Public Safety?”
If train safety is the topic, the longtime head of the Association of American Railroads, Ed Hamberger, will be there to argue against what the industry sees as unnecessary or wrongheaded regulations. Attending these events is part of the reason the AAR and related organizations paid Hamberger almost $3 million in 2012.
At an NTSB hearing in April, Hamberger stressed the industry’s safety record. He said that since 1980, the railroads had spent $550 billion on capital investments and maintenance, decreasing their overall accident rate by 79 percent.
“2011 was the safest year on record in terms of accident rate until 2012, which itself was the safest year on record until 2013,” he said. “Preliminary data indicate that 2013 will be the safest year on record. With respect to hazardous materials, you’ve heard the number: 99.997 percent of hazardous materials go from origin to their destination without any accidental releases.”
That figure, 99.997 percent, is derived from 2013 data showing that of the 2.4 million railcars carrying hazardous materials, only 78 “released their contents” before reaching their destinations, according to the railroad association’s Ed Greenberg. This calculation does not factor in the magnitude of the spills, any environmental damage they may have caused, or any injuries, inconvenience or cost to nearby residents.
The aftermath of the Lac-Megantic crude railcar explosion in 2013. (Credit: Axel Drainvile via Flickr) (CLICK TO ENLARGE)
Because the Lac-Megantic accident occurred in Canada, it isn’t included in the railroad association’s safety statistics. But the accident was very much a “Made in America” event. The railroad was based in Hermon, Maine. The oil came from North Dakota, where it was loaded onto American-made railcars and sent on its way to Canada on U.S.-owned track. Because the disaster occurred about 10 miles from Maine, U.S. firefighters rushed to the scene to help fight the fires.
“It felt like an earthquake,” Lac-Megantic resident Yannick Gagne recalled in an interview. After the initial explosion rocked his house, he saw an orange flash. “Our windows were open and we felt the heat come in the house. My children started to cry.”
Gagne and his family survived, but the bar he owned, the Musi-Café, burned to the ground still full of patrons enjoying live music on a festive Saturday night. No remains were found for five of the 47 people who died in the conflagration; the fire vaporized them.
In its final report on the disaster, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada outlined a long list of contributing factors, including a poor safety culture at the railroad, the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic.
But Wendy Tadros, who oversaw the investigation as the head of the safety board at the time, identified a deeper underlying issue: the failure of railroad regulators to keep up with the rapidly evolving safety challenges posed by North America’s energy boom.
“Who was the guardian of public safety?” she lamented during a press conference releasing the report. “That is the role of the government…and yet this booming industry, where trains were shipping more and more oil across Canada and across the border, ran largely unchecked.”
This article is part of a project supported by the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the George Polk Award program at Long Island University, the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Fund for Environmental Journalism. It was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
Credits
Publisher, InsideClimate News: David Sassoon
Executive Editor, InsideClimate News: Susan White
Editor, The Investigative Fund: Sarah Blustain
Independent Investigative Projects Editor: Keith Epstein
Video Executive Producers, Weather Channel: Greg Gilderman, Nail Katz and Shawn Efran
Video Producer, Weather Channel: Greg Gilderman
Associate Video Producer, Weather Channel: Katie Wiggin
Video Editors, Weather Channel: Brandon Kieffer and Jason Rudge
Fact Checking, The Investigative Fund: Allison Pohle
Additional Video by The Weather Channel
Additional research by Andy Blatchford
Cover Image: Steve Poulin via Flickr
Multimedia Production, InsideClimate News: Zahra Hirji and Sabrina Shankman
Special thanks to local environmentalist John Wathen for raising questions about the Tuscaloosa bridge and for the access to his library of videos and photos.
About
Boom: North America’s Explosive Oil by Rail Problem is an investigation by InsideClimate News, The Weather Channel and The Investigative Fund.
InsideClimate News is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers clean energy, carbon energy, nuclear energy and environmental science — plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped. Our mission is to produce clear, objective stories that give the public and decision-makers the information they need to navigate the heat and emotion of climate and energy debates. We have content partnerships with leading global media outlets, and our groundbreaking work is regularly part of the national conversation on climate and energy issues.
Repost from KQED Science [Editor: ExcellentMina Kim audio interview with Tony Bizjak below. New information on Union Pacific derailment frequency, bridge inspection and other issues. – RS]
As More Crude Oil Rolls In, a Push for Better Track Inspection
By Mina Kim and Molly Samuel | KQED Science | October 22, 2014
Union Pacific owns the tracks that would deliver crude oil to the Valero refinery in Benicia. (Deborah Svoboda/KQED)
Shipments of crude oil by rail are expected to increase in the Bay Area and the rest of the state in the near future. BNSF Railways is already transporting crude oil into Richmond, including the kind of oil that exploded from a derailment and killed 47 people in a Quebec town last year.
In response to concerns about the risks of crude by rail, the state’s other large rail company, Union Pacific, began to boost its rail inspection program by dispatching vehicles with lasers that can find tiny track imperfections, as the Sacramento Bee reports:
The new cars will patrol the main mountain routes into the state, Union Pacific officials said. Northern California sites will include Donner Pass, the Feather River Canyon and grades outside Dunsmuir. The state has designated all those areas high hazards for derailments.
The Bee’s Tony Bizjack spoke with Mina Kim about the program, which began last month. Bizjack explained that Union Pacific is particularly worried about California’s mountain passes because they’re considered more high-hazard areas, “often because they’re curving, they’re on slopes, and they have to deal with more extreme weather,” he said.
Bizjak rode on one of the track inspection vehicles. He said they’re equipped with ultrasound to look into the rails to find weaknesses and lasers to measure variations in rail height and alignment.
In the last five years, Union Pacific has had about 180 derailments in California, Bizjack said. “Derailments are surprisingly frequent, but generally very minor,” he said. “Most of those derailments, however, the train cars ended up standing up, not falling over.”
About half of all derailments are caused by track problems, said Bizjack. Others are caused by human and equipments errors. “So tracks are important, that’s sort of the front-line of defense — PUC and FRA think — in reducing the chance these new crude oil shipments can derail, explode.”
Union Pacific is not yet bringing volatile Bakken crude to California. But there are plans in the works for Union Pacific to bring crude oil both to and through the Bay Area, Bizjak explains. A project at the Valero refinery in Benicia would bring two 50-car trains a day through Sacramento and along the I-80 corridor. Another proposal in Santa Maria, by Phillips 66, would bring trains through Sacramento, the East Bay, San Jose and down the coast.
“If you ask anybody in the Office of Emergency Services here in California, or first responders, fire departments, there is a real level of concern about the safety with more crude oil coming in,” Bizjak said.
Repost from Courthouse News [Editor: Significant quote: “They claim that the EIR’s analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is ‘riddled with flaws’ because instead of discussing mitigation measures to curb emissions, it assumed that the refinery’s emissions will be ‘reduced to zero’ by participating in the state’s cap-and-trade program, and thus concluded that ‘these emissions are not significant.'” – RS]
Greens Fight SoCal Tar Sands Oil Project
By Rebekah Kearn, October 13, 2014
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) – Kern County illegally approved expansion of a local refinery that will let it transport and process 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day, environmentalists claim in court.
The Association of Irritated Residents, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club sued the Kern County Board of Supervisors and the Kern County Planning and Community Development Department, on Oct. 9 in Superior Court.
Alon U.S.A. Energy, of Texas, and its subsidiary Paramount Petroleum Corp. are named as real parties in interest.
“The lawsuit challenges Kern County’s unlawful approval of a massive oil refinery and rail project that will further harm air quality in the San Joaquin Valley and subject residents in several states to the catastrophic risks of a derailment involving scores of tanker cars filled with explosive Bakken crude oil,” plaintiffs’ attorney Elizabeth Forsyth, with Earthjustice, told Courthouse News.
Bakken crude is from northern Montana and North Dakota, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Much of it is extracted by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing.
“The San Joaquin Valley is already overburdened by industrial pollution,” Forsyth said. “Kern County officials should put the health of their residents over the profits of oil companies.”
The groups claim the county’s approval of the Alon Bakersfield Refinery Crude Oil Flexibility Project and its allegedly inadequate environmental impact report violated the California Environmental Quality Act.
The project quintuples the Alon Bakersfield Refinery’s capacity to import crude oil, “from 40 tank cars per day to 200 tank cars per day, or up to 63.1 million barrels of crude per year,” the 27-page complaint states.
“This influx of cheap, mid-continent crudes, including Canadian tar sands crude and Bakken crude from North Dakota, would allow the shuttered refinery to reopen and run at full capacity, processing 70,000 barrels of crude oil per day,” according to the complaint.
“The project’s massive ramp-up in oil transport and processing poses alarming health and safety threats to the residents of Bakersfield and to those who live along the crude-by-rail route. Restarting the refinery will significantly increase harmful air pollution that will only exacerbate the poor air quality and respiratory illnesses that plague San Joaquin Valley communities already unfairly burdened with industrial pollution.”
Bakken crude oil is “highly volatile,” and shipping it across several states “over treacherous and poorly maintained mountain passages” without adequate safety regulations will expose everyone who lives along the shipping route to the risks of derailment, the environmentalists say.
Trains carrying Bakken crude have derailed and exploded, including the July 2013 disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, which killed 47 people and leveled half of downtown Lec-Mégantic, according to the complaint.
Bakersfield, pop. 464,000, between Los Angeles and Fresno, is the ninth-largest city in California. Kern County produces more oil than any other county in the state, and boasts the fourth largest agricultural output in the country.
Its air quality is abysmal. “Bakersfield has the country’s third most polluted air, according to the American Lung Association, and one in six children in the Valley will be diagnosed with asthma before age 18,” Forsyth told Courthouse News.
Kern County’s notoriously poor air quality causes approximately 1,500 premature deaths each year, and exposure to toxic air pollution racks up “$3 billion to $6 billion in health costs and lost productivity annually,” according to the complaint.
Several schools, residential neighborhoods and a hospital are only a few miles away from the Alon Bakersfield refinery. It is 1,000 feet from the Kern River Parkway, where people hike, walk, and ride bikes along trails and through parks, according to the complaint.
The refinery shut its doors in 2008 when its owner filed for bankruptcy. After sitting inactive for two years, it was bought by Alon in 2010 and “refashioned to convert intermediate vacuum gas oil into finished products,” but stopped all refining operations in December 2012 when the price of local feedstock rose, the complaint states.
In August 2012, Paramount submitted proposed modifications to the county that would let the refinery use the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail line to bring in 5.5 million gallons of oil per day.
“The five-fold expansion of the terminal’s unloading capacity, from 40 tank cars per day to over 200 tank cars per day, is the largest crude-by-rail project in California, twice the size of the next largest project,” the complaint states.
The Kern County Board of Supervisors approved the environmental impact report on Sept. 9 this year.
But the plaintiffs claim the environmental study “obfuscates and underestimates” the significant impacts posed by the project and ignores the effects that rail transport of Bakken crude will have on air pollution.
“The EIR severely underestimates the safety risks of this project through sloppy math and an incomplete analysis,” the complaint states. “Based on simple mathematical error, the EIR calculates the risk of a train accident involving an oil spill is unlikely to occur within the project’s 30-year lifetime. Correcting this error, however, results in a risk of accident involving an oil spill once every 30 years.”
California has a high risk for catastrophic accidents because many of its 5,000 to 7,000 railroad bridges are over 100 years old and are not routinely inspected by any state or federal agency, and the rail lines run through “hazard areas” such as earthquake faults and densely populated cities, the complaint states.
Kern County is especially vulnerable because “the freight rail track runs through the Tehachapi Mountain, an area identified by the California Interagency Rail Safety Working Group as a ‘high hazard area.’ The rail track includes steep grades, extreme track curvature, and a single track through the majority of the corridor. The elevation loss of this corridor is approximately 3,600 feet from Tehachapi to Bakersfield, and the grade is so steep that it includes the famous ‘Tehachapi loop’ where the railroad line must loop back under itself to make the grade,” the complaint adds.
The plaintiffs say the project also threatens to further pollute the air quality of a region “already plagued by the worst air quality in the nation.”
“Refining Bakken crude emits high levels of volatile organic compound emissions that lead to ozone pollution, which in turn causes respiratory illnesses such as asthma,” Forsyth told Courthouse News.
“The refining of tar sands crude, which is far dirtier than local crudes, will result in higher emissions of greenhouse gases, nitrogen, sulfur and toxic metals,” she added.
Moreover, restarting the refinery and processing 60 million barrels of fossil fuels a year will elevate greenhouse gas emissions in the region and interfere with California’s goal of reducing such emissions, the groups say.
They claim the EIR’s analysis of greenhouse gas emissions is “riddled with flaws” because instead of discussing mitigation measures to curb emissions, it assumed that the refinery’s emissions will be “reduced to zero” by participating in the state’s cap-and-trade program, and thus concluded that “these emissions are not significant.”
“The EIR also unlawfully underestimates greenhouse gas emissions, ignoring emissions from the combustion of end products produced from the imported crude,” the complaint states.
After Kern County released an initial study of the project in September 2013, the Air District commented that using 2007 as the baseline to analyze impacts to air quality was improper because the refinery had not refined crude since 2008, according to the complaint.
The groups say the draft environmental report released for public comment on May 22 this year did not correct this error.
“The draft EIR also omitted fundamental information necessary to evaluate the EIR’s conclusions, including underlying assumptions and calculations for the EIR’s emissions analysis, data concerning the properties of Bakken crude, and an objective description of the project’s crude slate,” the complaint states.
On June 13, the groups’ attorneys asked for the information not included in the draft report and an extension to the 45-day comment period, but the county denied both requests.
When the county issued its final EIR in August, the groups say, they objected to “new disclosures that the public had not had a chance to review,” including its flawed analysis of the probability of a train accident, and demanded that it be revised.
Several prominent environmental scientists submitted comments criticizing the report’s treatment of toxic air emissions and its failure to include “emergency flaring events” in emissions calculations, but the county ignored their input and approved the report 13 days after it was released, the complaint states.
Kern County Counsel Theresa Goldner defended the project.
“The Kern County Board of Supervisors carefully and thoughtfully considered the EIR and all public comments and approved the report after a full and complete public process,” Goldner told Courthouse News.
“We will vigorously oppose this action.”
Paramount did not immediately return requests for comment.
The environmentalists seek declaratory judgment that Kern County violated CEQA by authorizing the refinery expansion project without performing adequate environmental analysis.
They ask that the project approvals and the environmental impact report be vacated until the defendants prepare a new environmental study that complies with CEQA.
They also want an injunction preventing the defendants from carrying out any part of the project until they fulfill all of the CEQA requirements.
They are represented by Earthjustice attorneys Elizabeth Forsyth and co-counsel Wendy Park of San Francisco.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (CN) – Kern County illegally approved expansion of a local refinery that will let it transport and process 70,000 barrels of crude oil a day, environmentalists claim in court.
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