Repost from DeSmogBlog [Editor: Apologies for the ad content. My retired volunteer budget won’t allow the $5 per DeSmog article for no ads. 🙁 – RS]
Are Oil Trains Just Too Heavy? No Regulations, No Weigh To Know
The cause of the most recent bomb train derailment and fire in Mosier, OR has been determined to be lag bolts that had sheared off resulting in the derailment. This once again raises concerns that the unit trains of oil are putting too much stress on the tracks due to their excessive weight and length. There… Continue reading Are Oil Trains Just Too Heavy? No Regulations, No Weigh To Know→
It is a safe bet that Jim Irving hasn’t been to Lac-Megantic, where almost three years ago a very profitable oil train derailed and exploded in the middle of downtown. The immediate damage was 47 lives lost, a massive oil spill, and the burning and contamination of the town center.
Nearly three years later, the downtown has yet to be rebuilt. And as we reported on DeSmog, there were many reasons the Lac-Megantic accident occurred. Averting any one of them could have prevented the accident. All were the result of corporate cost-cutting that put profits ahead of safety.
Also to blame were government regulators who allowed corporations to not invest in safety.
The locomotive engine fire that was the initial cause of the event? Faulty cost-saving repair.
The fact that regulators allowed full oil trains to be parked on a hill above a town, unmanned? Staffing cost savings for railroads.
The “19th century technology” air brakes that failed? More profits over safety.
Poor or non-existent employee training? More savings.
And how about those government regulators’ role in this? How could all of these moves to put profits over safety be allowed? The Globe and Mail looked at all the evidence and pointed the finger directly at the regulators.
There is one federal body that is ultimately responsible for the oversight of Canada’s railways: Transport Canada. The Lac-Mégantic disaster falls squarely at its feet.
It was recently revealed that the government of Canada contributed $75 million to the fund for the victims of Lac-Megantic to avoid further litigation. If they weren’t at fault, why would they pay up?
If you want to ask why allowing the pursuit of profits above all other concerns is a problem — Lac-Megantic is your answer.
Profits Over Safety: The Rule, Not the Exception
The old air braking system that was involved in Lac-Megantic is the standard for all oil trains. There are modern braking systems known as electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes that have been described as “a quantum improvement in rail safety” by Joseph Boardman, the former head of the Federal Railroad Administration. But this quantum improvement has not been implemented.
Cynthia Quarterman was in charge of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration for the majority of the multi-year process when the new oil-by-rail regulations were developed, and based on that process, she believes ECP brakes are a top priority.
“The more I think about it, the more I think that the ECP brakes may be more important than the tank car itself,” Quarterman told USA Today. “Because it would stop the pileup of the cars when there’s a derailment or when there’s a need to brake in a very quick fashion.”
So why aren’t ECP brakes required on oil trains? As DeSmog reported in March of 2015, the industry explained its opposition to ECP brakes in a presentation to regulators, and the opposition included the argument that safer brakes would be “too costly.”
And of course there is the issue of the tank cars used to move the dangerous oil. When the fracking boom happened in North Dakota and there weren’t pipelines to move the oil, the industry quickly built rail loading facilities.
Did the industry also build new safe tank cars to move the oil? No. They began filling the readily available DOT-111 tank cars with oil and started rolling them across North America through big cities and small towns — including Lac-Megantic.
The problem was that the DOT-111s were not designed to move flammable materials like Bakken crude oil, but were made to move things like molasses and corn oil.
But there was money to be made – so it was full-speed ahead with the DOT-111s for Bakken crude.
Shipping Bakken crude oil in DOT-111s has been called “an unacceptable public risk” by a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. But it continues anyway because it is profitable. Gee, what could go wrong with that?
The oil could be made safe to transport through a process known as stabilization. But that would require building stabilizing infrastructure in places like North Dakota. That would cut into profits. So it hasn’t been done.
In testimony to the North Dakota Industrial Commission about the proposed regulations to requireoil stabilization,Tony Lucero of oil producer Enerplus explained the reality:
“The flammable characteristics of our product are actually a big piece of why this product is so valuable. That is why we can make these very valuable products like gasoline and jet fuel.”
And so there are no regulations to stabilize the oil because it would be less profitable.
What is wrong with profits? Dangerous oil in unsafe cars with 19th century technology brakes traveling though many North American cities is a good starting point to answer that question.
Profits Buy Plenty of Lobbyists
In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) released the report “Rigged Justice – How Weak Enforcement Lets Corporate Offenders Off Easy” detailing what is known as regulatory capture — essentially using corporate profits to buy influence over regulators responsible for improving safety. Like the ones who the Globe and Mail said failed the people of Lac-Megantic.
“When it comes to undue industry influence, our rulemaking process is broken from start to finish,” Warrenexplained in March while discussing the report. “At every stage – from the months before a rule is proposed to the final decision of a court hearing a challenge to that rule – the existing process is loaded with opportunities for powerful industry groups to tilt the scales in their favor.”
The math is simple. It is much cheaper to buy lobbyists and influence than it is to invest in safety. And that is what is wrong with an approach that puts the pursuit of profits above all else.
We Can’t Take A Chance That Things Will Be Alright
While the oil and rail industries’ pursuit of profits was championed in California on Monday, a similar discussion was happening on the East Coast in Albany, NY. Albany is the largest oil hub on the East Coast and all of that oil comes by rail.
Now there is a proposal to build a pipeline from Albany to the seaport in Linden, NJ. The pipeline would be fed by oil trains that would arrive in Albany. While it was mostly a symbolic vote — unlike the one in California — the Albany city council voted to oppose the Pilgrim Pipeline this week.
In the public comment period, local Pastor McKinley Johnson, whose church is across the highway from the oil train facility, explained his opposition to the pipeline and more oil trains.
“It is time for us to take a stand,” said Johnson “We can’t take a chance that things will be alright.”
And he is right that this is about taking chances. The oil and rail industries are gambling that an event like Lac-Megantic won’t happen in a big city like Chicago — knowing full well that the proper safety measures are not in place to prevent it.
So far they have been really lucky — and very profitable.
This past weekend, Albany was the site of one of the worldwide Break Free From Fossil Fuels events, and the issue of the oil “bomb trains” was front and center. City council member Vivian Kornegay, who represents the community that lives directly alongside the rail yards where the oil is offloaded, was one of the featured speakers.
She repeatedly made the point that her constituents were taking all of the risk with the trains and getting no reward, saying, “We assume 100% of the risk…and miniscule benefits.”
If you are an oil company in pursuit of profits, that is exactly how you want it.
Vivian Kornegay addresses Break Free rally in Albany, NY Photo credit: Justin Mikulka
Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
The Canadian Government is Blowing Up Bomb Trains for Practice
By Hilary Beaumont, March 18, 2016 | 9:51 am
Two and a half years after a train carrying crude oil ran off the tracks in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec and exploded, killing 47 people, the Canadian government set a tanker on fire and pretended to run a train off its tracks as practice in case it happens again.
On July 6, 2013, an unmanned train carrying ultra-flammable western crude plummeted into the downtown of 6,000-resident Lac-Mégantic, where it erupted in flames and flattened everything in its path. The Lac-Mégantic tragedy spurred a debate in Canada and the US about the safety of so-called “bomb trains”, and reinvigorated the discussion about shipping oil across Canada.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
The debate has become a heated one, and largely comes down to whether to build large pipeline projects amid an uptick in the amount of volatile crude oil moved by rail. Both pipeline and oil by rail proponents argue their methods of transport are safe. Meanwhile, environmental groups argue both methods inevitably lead to spills or explosions, and that the oil should stay in the ground, while Canada should beef up its focus on renewable energy.
According to Transport Canada’s own data, crude oil moved by rail has increased dramatically in Canada over the past decade, from only four carloads in 2005 to 174,000 carloads in 2014.
In the case of Lac Megantic, an investigation showed a complex series of errors allowed the disaster to happen.
The goal of the recent train simulation, which used flammable liquid common in firefighter training rather than actual crude, was to improve emergency preparedness and public trust around the movement of crude and other dangerous goods by rail.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
Firefighters arrived on the scene of 11 smoking tanks that had derailed. They were taught to identify the contents of the tanks and decide when it was better not to intervene, as that could make the situation worse. If tackling the fire directly, the firefighters were told to apply foam and water spray to extinguish the flames.
It’s taken two-and-a-half years to start upgrading the procedures around emergency response to train derailments involving crude, and they’re not done yet. Exercise Vulcan, as the simulation was dubbed, was a test run of those new procedures, and Transport Canada hopes to use the training in other parts of the country in the future.
“Better late than never,” one industry expert told VICE News in reaction to Transport Canada running the train derailment simulation last weekend.
It’s too soon to tell whether Lac-Mégantic has sparked real safety upgrades in the rail industry, transportation industry consultant Ian Naish said. “They’re replacing tank cars, [but] they’re doing it slowly.
“Speed of the oil trains is a big issue to me,” he continued. “I’d recommend they take another look at the maximum speed at which a train should operate because the two that went off the rails in Gogama last year were operating at around 40 miles per hour, which is 60 or 70 kilometres an hour, and since all the tank cars failed, that obviously was too fast.”
A photo of the aftermath of the Gogama derailment. Photo via the Transportation Safety Board of Canada.
Just over a year ago, a crude oil train exploded in a fireball and derailed near the town of Gogama in northern Ontario. No injuries or deaths were reported in the March 7, 2015 explosion. It took three days to extinguish the flames.
At the time, it was the second CN train to derail near Gogama in a three-week period. Both incidents resulted in spilled crude oil.
The tankers that derailed in both Gogama accidents were the same type of Class 111 tanks that ruptured in Lac Megantic. The Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency tasked with investigating transportation disasters in Canada, has warned for years that Class 111 tanks are unsafe because they aren’t reinforced and tend to break open when they crash.
“It will be very silly for everybody, not only Quebec — any province, and any state in the United States — not to learn from what happened in Lac-Mégantic. What happened showed so many voids in the system, and so much lack of important information.”
But it won’t be until after May 1, 2017 that the notorious Class 111 tank cars — which are most susceptible to damage when they crash — will no longer be able to carry crude. Phasing in more crash-resistant tank cars will mean the Class 111s will be off the rails “as soon as practically possible,” Transport Canada spokesperson Natasha Gauthier told VICE News.
After the disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Transport Canada says it introduced strict new rules, including a two-person minimum for crews on trains carrying dangerous goods, a requirement for railway companies on federally-regulated tracks to hold valid certificates, new speed limits for trains carrying dangerous goods.
In the US, though, there’s been pushback from the railroad industry, with one representative saying there is “simply no safety case” for two-person crews.
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
Transport Canada also introduced more frequent audits, better sharing of information with municipalities, and increased track inspections. Plus, the agency amended the Railway Safety Act, researched crude for a better understanding of the volatile oil, and made it mandatory for some railways to submit training plans to the agency.
Since Lac-Mégantic, one improvement is that local first responders are now more aware of what dangerous goods, including crude, are travelling through their communities, Naish added.
And according to an engineering professor who witnessed first-hand the scene after the Lac-Mégantic explosion, while the railway industry is ramping up safety measures, the risk of increased shipments of oil by rail could balance those out, meaning it may not actually be any safer since Lac-Mégantic.
“Is it enough?” Rosa Galvez-Cloutier told VICE News when asked about the improved safety measures. “That’s hard to say. Zero risk doesn’t exist.”
Another major concern for Galvez-Cloutier is that when government and industry look at risk and safety, they tend do so project by project.
“Who is evaluating the big picture? Who is evaluating the whole thing?” She asked. “Government needs to put more interest and focus on the cumulative impacts of transporting dangerous goods.”
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
That debate is especially hot in Quebec, where the Lac-Mégantic explosion occurred. A recent poll of Quebec residents found they aren’t as likely as the rest of Canada to trust either pipelines or oil by rail.
According to a study by the Fraser Institute published last August, pipelines are 4.5 times safer than rail for moving oil — the rate of incidents for pipelines is 0.049 incidents per million barrels of oil moved, while that rate is 0.227 per million barrels of oil for trains.
“It will be very silly for everybody, not only Quebec — any province, and any state in the United States — not to learn from what happened in Lac-Mégantic. What happened showed so many voids in the system, and so much lack of important information,” Galvez-Cloutier said.
When asked if he would rather have a pipeline or a train carrying crude through his backyard, Naish laughed and said “Well I’d rather not live in the neighborhood, personally.”
“In the ideal world, the rail lines and the pipelines would avoid all populated areas all the time.”
Exercise Vulcan. Photo via the Defence Research and Development Canada – Centre for Security Science
Big Oil’s scorched-earth legal approach to climate change
By Keith Stewart, March 14, 2016
A highway loops around the southeast end of Mildred Lake at a Syncrude facility as seen from a helicopter tour of the oilsands near Fort McMurray, Alta., on July 10, 2012. Jeff McIntosh, The Canadian Press
I want to believe the oil company CEOs who say they’ve seen the light and now support action on climate change. I really do.
But it’s hard to take them at their word when their lawyers are simultaneously engaged in what one legal scholar has called “the first case in which a party has challenged the constitutional validity of any federal greenhouse gas regulations.”
A consortium of seven oil companies is challenging the right of the federal government to adopt a regulation designed to substitute renewable energy for fossil fuels — in part on the grounds that “that the production and consumption of petroleum fuels is not dangerous and does not pose a risk to human health or safety”, and so, “there is no evil to be suppressed”.
Those words are taken from a 2014 legal ruling against the companies. The judge in that case went on to refute their argument at length: “The evil of global climate change and the apprehension of harm resulting from the enabling of climate change through the combustion of fossil fuels has been widely discussed and debated by leaders on the international stage. Contrary to Syncrude’s submission, this is a real, measured evil, and the harm has been well documented.”
Case closed.
Or maybe not. Syncrude was back in court last November to appeal that ruling.
Few Canadians have heard of Syncrude because it’s a consortium of oil companies that jointly operate three massive tar sands mines. Suncor became Syncrude’s largest shareholder when it bought Canadian Oil Sands earlier this year, but the mines’ day-to-day operations are managed by Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil.
It’s no surprise to see Exxon involved in this case; the company has a long history of opposing action on climate change. Exxon is now under investigation in New York and California for publicly claiming that the science of global warming was too murky to warrant policy action by governments — even as the company redesigned its drill rigs and pipelines destined for the Canadian Arctic based on company scientists’ predictions of a warming world. Exxon also was the only major oil player not on stage with Alberta Premier Rachel Notley as she announced the province’s ambitious new climate policy.
Yet it’s surprising to see companies like Suncor — which are trying to rebrand themselves as climate leaders — involved in such legal shenanigans. In his assessment of the original case, University of Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes wrote that this litigation “suggests that at least the sector of big oil represented by the Syncrude interests will fight federal greenhouse gas regulations in all of its forms and that it will fight them hard.
“There was no stone left unturned in this litigation. Counsel for Syncrude pursued every possible avenue, no matter how small the chance of success or creative the argument. Big carbon may be just like big tobacco in protecting its turf.” — University of Calgary law professor Nigel Bankes
That doesn’t sound like something climate leaders ought to do.
As the largest shareholder, Suncor should tell their colleagues to withdraw this appeal. They should then take the money they were spending on lawyers and use it to map out how their businesses can thrive in a world that has moved beyond fossil fuels.
Keith Stewart is the head of the climate and energy campaign at Greenpeace Canada, and teaches a course on energy policy at the University of Toronto
You must be logged in to post a comment.