Repost from DeSmogBlog [Editor: As of Thursday evening 5/14, the death toll was increased to eight. – RS]
After Passenger Train Derailment in Philadelphia Kills At Least 7, Attention Turns to Oil-by-Rail Hazards
By Sharon Kelly, Thursday, May 14, 2015 – 10:23
This morning, investigators continue to search for missing Amtrak passengers, possibly thrown from a major train derailment and wreck in northeast Philadelphia Tuesday night. Already the casualty toll is one of the worst in recent memory, with at least seven people dead and over 200 injured after Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train No. 188, carrying 258 passengers, derailed.
“I’ve never seen anything so devastating,” Philadelphia Fire Department Deputy Commissioner Jesse Wilson told NBC News yesterday.
For some of those living nearby, the Amtrak collision was also a grim reminder of another – even more dangerous – hazard on the rails.
“I feel lucky that wasn’t an oil train last night,” Joseph Godfrey, a retiree who lives two blocks from the crash site, told CNBC.
Between 45 and 80 oil trains – each a chain of tankers that can stretch over a mile long – roll through Philadelphia’s densely populated neighborhoods every week, mostly heading to a South Philadelphia refinery that is the nation’s biggest single consumer of the notoriously explosive crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken shale. More than 400,000 Philadelphians, and an additional 300,000 in neighboring suburbs, live within a half-mile of tracks traveled by oil trains – and a half-mile represents the evacuation zone for an oil train derailment, according to federal regulators.
Alll told, over 25 million Americans nationwide live within a half-mile of oil train tracks, one 2014 analysis found.
Locals say that tanker cars carrying oil traverse the section of tracks where the Amtrak wreck occurred daily. The Amtrak train was travelling along the Northeast Corridor, where passenger trains often share the same rails as oil trains. At the site of the derailment, oil trains run on tracks parallel to Amtrak’s rails – and in fact, the Amtrak train may have come perilously close to striking oil tankers.
Photos from the time of the accident posted on Twitter appear to show the Amtrak train came within feet of tanker cars that were stopped on tracks parallel to the passenger rails.
“It missed that parked tanker by maybe 50 yards,” Scott Lauman, who lives near the wreck site, toldCBS. “An Amtrak guy came by and he was telling me it turns out those tankers are full, and if that engine would’ve hit that tanker, it would’ve set off an explosion like no other.”
Robert Sumwalt, an official representing the National Transportation Safety Board, told reporters at a Wednesday press conference the agency was told the tankers were not completely full, but did not say whether that meant they carried no crude oil or whether they were only partially full. He added that he had not verified independently how full the cars were.
The issue drew the attention of the state’s top executive, as he visited the derailment site yesterday. Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Wolf called the nearby tanker cars “a cause of additional concern.”
And oil train activists say that the Amtrak crash could potentially have been avoided if federal regulations requiring automated speed controls had gone into effect earlier – but instead, the federal government has allowed train companies to delay installing those controls.
Just one day after Tuesday’s wreck, the American Petroleum Institute filed a lawsuit challenging new federal safety standards for oil trains.
Although investigators are still combing through the wreckage looking for a full explanation of the cause of the wreck, speed seems to have been a major factor in the disaster. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, the Amtrak train that derailed was going 106 miles per hour, twice the speed limit, as it made its way around a curve that was the site of one of the deadliest railway accidents in U.S. history, a September 6, 1943 passenger train crash that killed 79 and injured 117.
The Amtrak train was equipped with Positive Train Control (PTC) equipment, that would use GPS data to automatically slow trains going over federal speed limits, but the section of track where the derailment occurred had not yet been upgraded to allow the PTC technology to work.
“A faster pace to implement federal rules requiring Positive Train Control systems on Class 1 tracks with commuter trains and high volumes of freight might have made the difference in this accident,” Matt Krogh, director of the Extreme Oil Campaign at ForestEthics, told DeSmog.
Already in Philadelphia, where a refinery surrounded by residential neighborhoods is the nation’s top destination for notoriously explosive Bakken crude, oil trains have derailed twice since January 2014. In one incident, cars filled with oil derailed on a bridge and dangled over the Schuylkill river and prompted the shutdown of a nearby expressway.
“The rapid rise of oil trains in Philadelphia and nationally parallels the rise in accidents and near misses,” Mr. Krogh told DeSmog.
“So far we’ve been lucky, but it’s just a matter of time until a major derailment happens in an urban center like Philadelphia.”
Flying Manhole Covers, Toxic Clouds
Suppose the Amtrak train that derailed had carried flammable material instead of passengers, and that flammable material ignited. An oil train explosion involves a series of escalating disasters, each posing unique dangers, particularly in urban environments.
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the potential impact zone of an oil train explosion includes a one mile radius around the blast site.
Around 47,000 people live within a one-mile radius of Amtrak 188’s derailment, according to five-year estimates from the 2013 American Communities Survey.
A few blocks to the northwest is Holy Innocents Area Catholic Elementary School, which reports an enrollment of 287. A few blocks further north and toward Frankford Ave. is St. Mark’s Episcopal Church.
Map Credit: Jack Grauer, Spirit News
“Let’s say there was [hazardous material] in those rail cars,” Jim Blaze, an economist and railroad consultant toldNPR. “If the cars cracked open, it could have been an explosive force and caused a chain reaction. What would the casualty rate have been as a result? Could you imagine evacuating 750,000 people? What’s that going to cost? What’s the lost business revenue?”
The recent string of oil train derailments and fires – the Feb. 17 derailment in West Virginia , the March 9 derailment in Gogama, Ontario, the May 6 derailment in the 20-person town of Heimdal North Dakota – have occurred in rural areas, away not only from dense population centers but also from the infrastructure that undergirds cities and towns.
Because of the labyrinth of sewer systems and underground utility tunnels – not to mention other industrial sites – oil train explosions in a major US city would pose unique hazards. First responders would likely contend with a broad array of surprising dangers.
For example, in the 2013 oil train explosion in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic, population 2,000, hazards were not limited to the fireball. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of Bakken crude oil – described not like the tar balls that washed onshore following the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, but as slightly less watery than vegetable oil – spilled through the streets and down into sewers.
Explosions from the fumes that built up in those tunnels blew manholes over 30 feet into the air, investigators found. Burning oil melted streetlamps, flowed into rivers and lakes, and soaked deep into the ground after it poured from the train.
Toxic clouds from the fumes also kept first responders at bay, limiting their ability to approach the wreck initially and then also keeping them from areas close to the crash site for days.
And then there’s the train car explosion itself – not only involving the burning of the 30,000 gallons of oil carried in each DOT-111 tanker car, but also what fire engineers call a BLEVE, standing for a Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion. As liquids in a metal tank boil, gasses build up, pressurizing the tank even despite relief valves designed to vent fumes. Tanks finally explode, throwing shrapnel great distances, and spitting out burning liquids that can start secondary blazes.
In the Lac Megantic disaster, 30 buildings were leveled by the blast, and officials said they believed some of the missing could have been vaporized in the explosions and fires. Hospital officials reported that emergency rooms were eerily empty following the blast. “You have to understand: there are no wounded,” one Red Cross volunteer told the local press at the time. “They’re all dead.”
In light of these hazards and many others – the risk of a domino-like series of subsequent disasters and spills if an explosion occurred in an industrial area – emergency planners often focus on evacuation.
Philadelphia’s emergency response plans in the event of a derailment and explosion have not been made public, local activist groups complain, prompting fears that the plans may not be sufficiently detailed.
‘No Traffic Cops’
Meanwhile, an increasing amount of oil is moving by train through one of America’s largest cities, as Philadelphia Energy Solutions purchased an old Sunoco refinery – first established in 1866, long before regulations made it nearly impossible to build new refineries in urban centers – and added the East Coast’s largest railcar unloading facility.
“We’re now the single largest buyer of crude from the Bakken in North Dakota,” Philip Rinaldi, the refinery’s chief executive, told a Drexel University conference last December. “We bring in nearly six miles of train a day for unloading at our facility.”
Unlike passenger trains, heavy axel trains like oil trains can cause rails to flex ever so slightly – prompting concerns that rails used by both oil trains and passenger trails could be at greater risk of broken welds or rails.
And damaged welds and rails are the number one cause of train derailments nationwide, Federal Railroad Administration data shows, responsible for rought 40 percent of overall derailments. This means that the sharp increase in oil train traffic could make it more likely that passenger trains using the same rails could crash.
Oil trains travel on parallel rails on the section of track where Amtrak 188 crashed – but over Amtrak’s entire Northeast Corridor, the nation’s most heavily traveled passenger railways, oil trains at times travel on the same rails as passenger trains.
With risks like these in mind, Philadelphia’s railroad unions called for tougher rules in April.
“The industry arrogantly claims they cannot afford to maintain the tracks to a higher safety standard,” Freddie N. Simpson, president of the Maintenance of Way Brotherhood, which represents workers who inspect and maintain railroads, told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “My question to the nation is, Can we afford for them not to?”
Trains are generally required to run at slower speeds on tracks that are less frequently inspected.
But oil train activists point out that speed limit enforcement is left up to railroad companies themselves, meaning that there is no available data on how often trains exceed speed limits.
“There’s no tracking or recording,” Mr. Krogh told DeSmog, “there are no traffic cops on the rails.”
Public officials say that efforts to regulate oil trains locally to prevent explosions are hamstrung by the fact that train regulation up to the federal government. Philadelphia City Council passed a resolution in March urging the federal government to enact new rules – but can do little otherwise, local politicians say.
“It is very frustrating, because on a local level we have very limited powers to regulate the railways,”City Councilman Kenyatta Johnson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in February. “The federal government needs to step up. The Department of Transportation needs to do more to hold these railroads more accountable.”
Repost from National Parks Traveler [Editor: Excellent, thorough report. Incredible interactive map of oil trains in and near our national parks. (Video portions of the map seem to be best viewed in Google Chrome.) Remember, it’s not only human life at risk, but the earth itself. – RS]
A Traveler Special Report: “Oil Trains” Pose A Significant Threat To National Parks
By Kurt Repanshek, May 13, 2015 – 1:15am
Oil trains that pass through John Stevens Canyon on the south border of Glacier National Park also pass through West Glacier, an entrance to the park./NPCA, Michael Jamison.
For more than a century, freight trains have rumbled up and over Montana’s Marias Pass, skirting the heavily forested south boundary of Glacier National Park, casting rolling shadows on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River below. Until recently the major threat was a grain car derailment, which on occasion left bears woozy from eating fermented grain and led to their deaths by train.
Today’s prospect of a derailment involving a 100-car train hauling millions of gallons of highly combustible Bakken crude oil risks an environmental catastrophe unprecedented in National Park Service history.
Every week an estimated 30-35 million gallons of Bakken crude oil passes along the park’s southern border as 10-12 BNSF Railway trains — with each tanker car holding about 30,000 gallons of crude — head from North Dakota to West Coast refineries and terminals. During the winter months, each mile-long train is exposed to a snowy Russian Roulette as they pass 11 avalanche chutes that could break loose without warning from mountains called Running Rabbit, Snowslip, and Shields on Glacier’s flanks.
Any day of the year, equipment failure, poor track conditions, or over-worked crews could lead to a derailment that could dump tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude into the Middle Fork, a wild and scenic river, while an enormous fireball could ignite the park’s forests.
But Glacier National Park isn’t the only National Park System unit that faces this threat from “oil trains.” Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, in the state of Washington, could have four oil trains, each upwards of a mile-and-a-half long, hauling crude daily to a proposed but as yet unbuilt oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver.
Park Service officials in Washington, D.C., were keeping an eye on the issue, and relying on their field staff to apprise them of any developments.
“We rely on National Park Service employees, like (Superintendent) Jeff Mow at Glacier who is engaged with communities near the park, to keep us informed on health and safety issues. Our concern is focused on visitor and employee safety, preservation of the cultural, historic and natural resources in our care and the health, safety and well being of our friends and neighbors who live near national parks,” said NPS spokesman Jeffrey Olson.
At individual parks across the National Park System, officials expressed great concern about the potential for a derailment in or near their parks.
At Fort Vancouver, Superintendent Tracy Fortmann said a derailment would “be catastrophic.”
“The threats are what you might expect,” Fort Laramie Superintendent Tom Baker said from his park in Wyoming. “If there were an oil spill, which most likely would be right at the crossing there just off of U.S 26 and Wyoming 160, that would be calamitous, to say the least.”
Bakken crude is extremely volatile and prone to explosive derailments, such as this one at Casselton, ND, back in 2013/NTSB
How extensive is the potential problem? When you look at a map of rail lines, it leaps out.
“We put together a map that shows the rail system that Bakken (crude oil) runs on nationwide, and we overlaid it with National Park System units. And we suddenly realized, holy mackerel, this is 48 states’ worth of a problem,” said Michael Jamison, who oversees the National Parks Conservation Association’s Crown of the Continent program. “The spills that are happening in (Lac-Mégantic) Quebec, on the James (River in Virginia), out in Casselton (North Dakota), they’re happening all over the nation. These are rails that run either adjacent to or sometimes literally through the center of a park.”
From Passengers To Oil
Railway history in the United States is richly intertwined with national park history. A century ago the Union Pacific Railroad, the Great Northern Railway, the Northern Pacific Railway, and the Santa Fe Railway and numerous short-lines filled their passenger cars with riders anxious to see America’s grandest natural attractions: Glacier, the Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone national parks, among others.
Gleaming locomotives — first steam-powered, and then by diesel electric — pulled coaches, replete with linen-topped tables and white-jacketed stewards in dining cars. Travelers bunked in Pullman sleeping cars, which provided a comfortable trip out West.
Scenic national parks gave the railroads strong promotional opportunities to sell tickets. The Union Pacific hauled passengers to Cedar City, Utah, where they boarded buses operated by the Utah Parks Co. (a Union Pacific subsidiary), to explore Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Grand Canyon national parks. The railroad was even hired by the Interior Department to build lodges within these parks.
But rail passengers eventually turned to automobiles, and the railroads’ focus turned to freight.
“In 1952, for example, only 22 percent of the occupants at Zion, 20 percent at Bryce, and 27 percent at Grand Canyon came by rail,” Maury Klein wrote in the second of his two-volume history of the Union Pacific. “In effect, the railroad was subsidizing the vacations of automobile travelers as part of its contribution to the Utah economy.”
Today, a growing portion of the railroads’ freight is crude oil, most from North Dakota. Day into night and into day mile-long trains rumble out of the state’s energy-rich northwestern corner, carrying millions of gallons of crude oil from the Bakken formation, which is fueling resurgence in U.S. energy independence.
But it’s at times a costly path. Oil train derailments have led to spills, and in some cases fiery explosions, in North Dakota, West Virginia, Illinois, and Virginia. On May 6, just five days after the U.S. Transportation Department announced more stringent regulations for oil train tank cars, a fiery derailment near Heimdal, North Dakota, sent billowing clouds of black smoke and billowing orange flames soaring into the morning sky.
BNSF’s tracks run along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park/NPCA graphic
While individual railroads, railroad associations, and other stakeholders work to prevent such accidents, the growing domestic oil production demands transportation of crude, either by rail, pipeline, or truck. And with increasing rail transport, there are more rail derailments.
“… the accident frequency trend is against rail. Oil trains are getting bigger and towing more and more tanker cars,” James Conca wrote in a piece for forbes.com on May 5. “From 1975 to 2012, trains were short and spills were rare and small, with about half of those years having no spills above a few gallons. Then came 2013, in which more crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents than was spilled in the previous thirty-seven years.”
But do, or should, the railroads shoulder all the blame? As common carriers the railroads, which in most cases don’t own the oil tank cars they haul, are required to move a shipper’s hazardous materials, according to BNSF officials. For the railway, that means that their network of rails along the northern edge of the country has turned their trains into “rolling pipelines” from the Bakken boom to market.
“Other modes of transportation are able to turn down hazardous materials,” said Roxanne Butler, a BNSF spokeswoman. “Crude oil is a hazardous material and therefore, when a shipper asks us to move it, we are required to do so.”
“In 2007, we ran about 6,000 tankers on the rail nationwide. A year later we had increased that by 50 percent, we were running 9,000 tankers,” says NPCA’s Jamison, who was drawn to studying the matter after Jeff Mow became superintendent of Glacier in August 2013 and asked about the tankers rolling over Marias Pass and down through John F. Stevens Canyon.
“Five years later, by 2013, we were up to 435,000 tankers. And we have gone from one ‘incident,’ as they call it, in 2007, to about 150-plus in 2013, nationwide. And so the numbers were pretty clear of what was going on,” he continued. “At the same time, of course, we had gone from approximately zero wells in the Bakken, to approximately 7,000. And my concern was that the whole build-out on the Bakken has been estimated not at 7,000 wells, where we’re at currently, but it’s 70,000-100,000 wells. And so you just do the math. From zero wells to 7,000 wells we went from 6,000 tankers to 435,000 tankers. So what happens when you add a zero, when you go from 7,000 wells to 70,000 wells?”
The Concern At Glacier
Glacier National Park rises in the “Crown of the Continent,” a rugged, mountainous landscape hugging the U.S.-Canadian border that is considered by some conservationists to be the United States’ largest intact ecosytem, a 10-million acre chunk of wild where, The Trust of Public Land says, “the list of plant and animal species living … has remained unchanged since the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition.” Rivers run swift, cold, and pristine, brimming with trout and cherished by river runners. Forests hold bears and wolves, elk and deer, wolverine and fox, while eagles and falcons wheel in the skies. Mountains here, the Great Northern reminded us, were, and still are, home to mountain goats.
Glacier National Park Superintendent Mow knows oil spills and their aftermath very well. He was on the NPS tort investigation team following the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Alaska in 1989, and 20 years later was superintendent at Kenai Fjords National Park while it was still dealing with some of the spill’s aftermath. More recently, Mow was an incident commander for the Interior Department during the Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
Since taking the helm at Glacier, he’s met with BNSF officials to discuss their tracks that descend roughly 2,000 feet in elevation from Marias Pass down to West Glacier, a distance of about 46.5 miles.
The track corridor dates back to 1890. John Frank Stevens, then principal engineer of the Great Northern Railway, had crossed Marias Pass the year before with an Indian guide and determined it the best location for rail traffic. Today, two sets of tracks run along the southern boundary of Glacier, cross over the Middle Fork of the Flathead River before coursing along the boundary of the Flathead National Forest. The steepest grade, between the top of the pass and Essex on the western side, is 1.8 percent, according to BNSF.
Amtrak’s Empire Builder (Seattle/Portland-Chicago), here portrayed at the Izaak Walton Inn at Essex, daily crosses the park with both an eastbound and westbound train. In summer, passenger counts reach 300 per train./J. Craig Thorpe painting, used with permission.
Winter’s heavy snows can bring avalanches cascading down 11 known pathways that stream down Glacier’s flanks onto the tracks below. These torrents of white fury led to the construction of snowsheds over key segments of rails as long ago as 1910. Today there are 11 sheds protecting the tracks, which also carry Amtrak’s Empire Builder passenger train as it shuttles between Chicago and Seattle, with stops at East Glacier and West Glacier and, if a flag is displayed, the Issack Walton Lodge at Essex.
BNSF recently conducted some maintenance work on Snowshed 5, but there are no plans to add sheds along the route, according to Ms. Butler.
Superintendent Mow is familiar with BNSF’s proactive efforts, which include sensors to monitor track conditions, to keep their trains on the tracks over Marias Pass and through the canyon. But, he adds, “We don’t operate trains and so quite honestly we don’t have the capacity to monitor their operations remotely.”
Since the tracks are outside the park’s boundaries, the Park Service has no official role in overseeing the train traffic and potential risks, the superintendent said.
“The only activity that we have issued permits for is avalanche mitigation during winter months,” said Superintendent Mow.
While an avalanche-caused derailment near the pass in January 2004 knocked 15 grain cars off the rails and closed the rail corridor for 29 hours, there have been no serious accidents in recent years. Yet the threat remains, and it’s a significant one when you consider the pristine river flowing below the tracks, the park’s forests above, and the explosiveness of Bakken crude.
“As we look at a response to a spill, there are just so many moving pieces that come into it,” the Glacier superintendent said. “From just whether it’s a winter vs. a summer spill, how you respond differently to that. It’s fascinating if you read about the (63,000-gallon oil) spill that occurred in the Yellowstone River this winter. There was that initial incident where the spill occurred, and how it impacted communities, then as the winter went on that calmed down, and as spring’s come along it’s remobilized a lot of the oil that was trapped in the snow and ice. It’s kind of a two-stage event, really.”
An NPS map shows the avalanche chutes that tower above the BNSF Railway track corridor.
In what could be described as a worst-case scenario, an explosive oil train derailment in John F. Stevens Canyon in the middle of a long, hot, dry summer could dump oil into the river and rain flames 100 feet or higher onto the park’s forests of aspen, lodgepole pine, spruce and fir. Depending where a derailment occurred, tank cars could jackknife end over end, spraying their combustible cargo over mountainside and into the river. Such a derailment also could take out a train, freight or passenger, running on the second set of tracks.
How such a derailment would impact U.S. 2, a winding two-lane highway that also parallels the Middle Fork, depends on the size of the derailment. The Casselton derailment, which occurred out on the prairie, led to the town’s 2,500 residents being asked to evacuate due to hazardous contaminants in the billowing smoke plumes. A similar derailment in narrow John F. Stevens Canyon could pose a much greater risk to human life.
Recovering oil from rivers is not easy, cheap, or quickly done. Cleanup after a 2011 pipeline break at the Yellowstone River near Laurel, Montana, recovered only about 5 percent, according to NPCA’s Jamison. A major derailment in John Stevens Canyon could dump many tens or hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil into the Middle Fork of the Flathead.
“I think the chances of actually responding in a meaningful way, relative to the larger watershed and the aquatic ecology, are fairly slim,” he said.
John F. Stevens Canyon is narrow, often filled with wind, and in a remote, rugged location.
“Even out in Casselton, where you have room to operate, the answer in all these cases has been let it burn out. It takes three or four or five days, you let it burn out. Because it’s so hot they can’t get close to it,” the NPCA staffer said. “You add the complications of a very narrow, very windy, very rugged canyon, and there’s no way they’re going to fight that fire. It’s going to burn itself out.”
If such a fiery derailment occurred in August, during a hot, dry, windy “red flag” day with high fire danger, the problems magnify quickly, he said.
”We have people in the backcountry that we need to evacuate, and we have oil in the river and we have a couple thousand tourists, because that’s a white-water raft river…,” Jamison continued. “The first step (to preventing a disastrous spill) is you do everything you can to keep the oil in the trains, and I don’t think we’re doing that right now. We’re not even close to that right now.”
For their part, BNSF officials declined to say how prepared they were to handle a derailment in the canyon.
Getting Crude To Port
Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state was established in 1948 to preserve the setting for the western headquarters of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the Columbia River that dates to the early 1800s. In 1972 the city of Vancouver gave the park the Pearson Army Air Corps airfield, which dates back to the 1920s. Today the historic site blends story-telling of those two aspects within an urban park covering a bit more than 200 acres.
It also happens to have a BNSF rail line running along the southern edge of the park, sandwiched between Highway 14 and Columbia Way. The tracks already carry tanker cars, but the number could increase substantially if a proposal to build an oil terminal at the Port of Vancouver moves ahead.
BNSF oil trains already pass through Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Washington state, but a lot more could be on the way/NPS map
“The proposal as I understand it is that the (Vancouver Oil Terminal) will have the capacity to handle 360,000 to 380,000 barrels of Bakken crude per day, which is equal to 15 million gallons,” Fort Vancouver Superintendent Tracy Fortmann said.
“Stretching a mile or more in length, these 100-car trains pose a significant threat,” she said when discussing the potential of a derailment in her park, “It would be a horrific thing, it would be catastrophic.”
In its official comments on the terminal project, dubbed Tesoro-Savage, the National Park Service said that those proposing to build the facility and BNSF “should be required to develop robust mitigation and emergency response plans for the entire length of the supply and distribution lines.”
The NPS has called for extensive oversight, planning, and mitigation for the tracks that wind hundreds of miles back to the oilfields.
“These plans should consider both winter and summer conditions and should provide a rapid response in the event of a train derailment or marine oil spill,” the agency said in its official comments. “In areas of high snowfall, including at Glacier National Park, project proponents should investigate construction of snow sheds to prevent derailments and consider alternatives to using explosive devices to control avalanche events along the tracks.”
A decade ago, before oil trains were rolling, BNSF sought NPS permission to use explosives along the southern boundary of Glacier on a regular basis to control avalanches. The Park Service denied permission, and instead suggested that the railroad build more snow sheds. However, during the snowy winter of 2014 BNSF was given temporary permission to use aerial explosions, produced from a mix of hydrogen and oxygen, which creates a loud boom to trigger avalanches.
Now, with the daily traffic of oil trains coming through John F. Stevens Canyon, NPCA would like to see the railroad be more proactive in protecting its trains from avalanches.
“They need less than a mile of new shed. Not all in one place,” said Jamison. “In many places they’re just expanding the length of the shed that they have.”
BNSF’s Butler says multiple options are needed to keep trains running safely.
“Even with a robust avalanche risk minimization program that includes forecasting, snow sheds and operations restrictions, in times of high risk additional strategies may be needed,” she says.
Western parks don’t face all the dangers of oil trains. As the NPCA map shows and explains, rail lines wend their way, “along the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers and converge in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. A derailment here could affect one of America’s most important historic sites and affect water quality for miles downstream.”
CSX tracks also travel through the gorge that cradles New River Gorge National River in West Virginia, and have been used to funnel oil trains to Virginia ports. However, the railroad has agreed to reroute oil trains around the New River Gorge National River.
Derailments are highly destructive, as the remains of a grain train derailment in 2011 in New River Gorge illustrates/NPS
“After the derailment and subsequent fire just north of the park in February, CSX contracted with Norfolk Southern to reroute most of the trains carrying oil out of the gorge,” said Jeffrey West, the National River’s deputy superintendent. “I will say they have been excellent to work with when a derailment does occur – quick environmental response, excellent compliance with our mitigation and recovery requirements. We have had diesel spills (punctured fuel tanks), and hydraulic leaks within the gorge – they have always been good about the clean-ups (three cases in the last five years).”
CSX officials also have a mitigation plan in place that has led to quick response whenever there’s been a derailment in the gorge, the Park Service official said.
“Anything that goes into the river (soybeans, coal, corn, or oil) gets immediate reaction from their hazmat team, and their hazmat contractors,” Deputy Superintendent West said. “In my five years here, they have notified us within an hour of a derailment with a spill. We send rangers and resource management personnel to monitor the site – they work with us to solve the environmental concerns.”
The Danger Of Bakken Crude
This is the charred locomotive involved in the Casselton derailment. For the engineer’s account of the crash, click here/NTSB
Oil pulled from North Dakota’s Bakken Formation is particularly troublesome for shippers. Hal Cooper, a chemical engineer who has long studied the nation’s oil reserves and associated transportation systems, describes the crude “as being potentially hazardous in terms of flammability and volatility…”
One possible way to reduce that combustibility, he said, would be to remove the “volatile organic hydrocarbon vapors” from the Bakken crude before loading it into tankers.
When the ramp-up in production is considered, the problem becomes alarming.
“The state of North Dakota has undergone nothing less than an enormous increase in its crude oil production of less than 100,000 (42-gallon) barrels per day in 2006 to 300,000 barrels per day in 2010 and to 1,050,000 barrels per day at the beginning of 2014,” Dr. Cooper wrote in a report for the Puget Sound Regional Council.
Most of that oil, he points out, is carried by BNSF. In October 2013 it was estimated that the railroad hauled 620,000 barrels a day of the total 732,518 barrels a day produced in North Dakota.
The issue grows greater when you consider, as Dr. Cooper points out, that “there is a massive amount of crude oil lying underneath North Dakota in as many as 11 individual layers in at least five major formations. The total estimated oil resource in the Bakken Formation is between 300 and 500 billion barrels, of which between 4 and 6 billion barrels at a minimum to as much as 25 to 50 billion barrels at a maximum is considered as being presently recoverable.
“The total resource is as much as one trillion barrels of oil from all of the oilfields, in North Dakota, making it more than Saudi Arabia.”
Back at Glacier, Superintendent Mow says the volatility of Bakken crude “is a blessing and a curse, because being so volatile it’s been shown that fires are common with spills associated with the Bakken. But on the other hand, if it’s not burning it will evaporate on its own pretty quickly.”
Railroads try to be ready for the worst. BNSF and other railroads jointly run a first-responder training center in Pueblo, Colorado, to instruct them on how to attack tanker car fires. For its part, BNSF has a force of 160 trained emergency response personnel located across its rail network, and uses a system to “determine the most safe and secure routes for crude trains of 20 or more loaded cars.”
But BNSF officials would not say how close the nearest emergency response teams were to Glacier, Fort Vancouver, and Fort Laramie. They also declined to say whether the railroad has studied John F. Stevens Canyon to determine whether there’s a safer route for its oil trains; in July 2014 the railway had adopted Rail Risk-Based Traffic Routing Technology to “determine the most safe and secure routes for crude trains of 20 or more loaded cars.
While BNSF spent $5.4 billion on its rail operations in 2014, railway officials would not say how much was spent on track maintenance around those parks.
“Given the amount of work that it would require me to invest in your request, we are not inclined to participate in the story,” Ms. Butler said.
While the dangers of oil trains have been well-known for years, incidents seem to be increasing. On May 1, the U.S Department of Transportation along with its Canadian counterpart announced oil train regulations that would require stronger tanker cars, new braking standards, maximum speed limits between 40 mph and 50 mph, and routing analyses by railroads hat would review “27 safety and security factors.”
Freight trains, some hauling tanker cars, pass through Mojave National Preserve/NPCA photo.
The regulations will not be fully effective before 2023. U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Washington, who has been leading the effort to make the trains safer, was unimpressed. “The new DOT rule is just like saying let the oil trains roll. It does nothing to address explosive volatility, very little to reduce the threat of rail car punctures, and is too slow on the removal of the most dangerous cars,” she said in a statement. “It’s more of a status quo rule than the real safety changes needed to protect the public and first responders.”
BNSF officials had a mixed reaction to the rules.
“BNSF has advocated for a safer tank car in the movement of crude oil and finally setting a new federal standard will get the next generation tank car into service and substantially reduce the risk of a release in the event of an incident,” the railway said in a statement.
“We have also said that any regulatory changes that automatically take away capacity will have a devastating impact on our shippers and the economy. Most importantly, capacity is not abundant. The supply chain’s experiences with the recent disruptions at the West Coast ports is clear evidence of the negative impacts substantially reduced capacity will have on the economy.”
“DOT has handed down an unprecedented railroad operating requirement that is 100 percent dependent on the actions of rail customers or tank cars owners,” Hamberger said. “This decision not only threatens the operational management of the U.S. rail system, but trains moving 30 mph will compromise network capacity by at least 30 percent. The far-reaching effects of this decision will be felt by freight and passenger customers alike. Slow-moving trains will back up the entire rail system.”
While the rules include a requirement that train speeds not exceed 40 mph in “high-threat urban areas,” Glacier and many other national park settings are not urban.
“The value of what’s at stake is so high — with regard to the wild and scenic river, the Flathead (Lake downstream), Glacier Park,” Jamison said.
In general, the resources that national parks preserve and protect demand the utmost safety precautions, he said.
“At Fort Vancouver, the human communities that are around it, the historic and cultural resources. What’s at stake is so high that we absolutely need to insure to the best that we can in case something bad should happen,” he said. “And that insurance means an investment in some site-specific infrastructure changes, and some site-specific rule changes in these places of high value.”
NPCA, said Jamison, believes speed limits also should be set for trains traveling through areas “of national significance with regard to natural and cultural values,” such as Glacier.
While speed can be a factor in derailments, so can faulty equipment. In the Casselton derailment — which dumped an estimated 400,000 gallons of oil when 21 of the oil train’s 106 tankers and two locomotives went off track — National Transportation Safety Board investigators focused on a broken axle on a grain car that derailed onto the tracks in front of the approaching oil train.
Despite new rules and precautions, with increasing oil train traffic, the odds of a serious derailment impacting a national park are more than likely only going to go up. Whether the response infrastructure is in place to prevent a major catastrophe is more difficult to answer.
“We don’t operate the railroad, but we just really want to emphasize what’s at stake in the event of an incident,” Glacier Superintendent Mow said. “So anything that we can do to influence safe operations and a spill never occurring, that’s one area for us to put some attention to. At the same time, we also have to be prepared for a spill, and to that extent our response capability, how would we interface with those first responders, the county and the state and the EPA as they ultimately become engaged.
“In this area, you call 911, and while 911 may direct you to Flathead County, Flathead County is often quick to call us because we’re the ones closest to being on the scene,” he added. “It becomes pretty integrated. We’ve had some early discussions, still need to do more tabletop exercises on some various scenarios to ensure that if there is an emergency we can have a smooth response, we don’t have to stand there and figure out who’s going to do what.”
How to improve safety, while not impeding commerce, is a question with few answers.
“We’re not out to stop transportation by any particular means. But the fact remains that these are literally bombs that run through our cities and next to our national parks,” said NIck Lund, NPCA’s landscape conservation program manager. “All it will take will be one more Lac-Mégantic. If a Lac-Mégantic accident happened in Philadelphia, where trains run constantly, or any of the cities that are involved here, that would sort of just completely change the nature of how this is thought of, I think.
“It’s a very difficult question I think a lot of people are struggling with what the answer is. Even if trains are the safest mode at this point, it only takes one incident for something really terrible to happen,” he said.
This map, prepared by NPCA, shows the convergence of railroad tracks (in purple), national parks (in green) and oil facilities (in blue)/NPCA.
Repost from State Impact Pennsylvania, NPR.org [Editor: Quote: “Conrail knows what’s in the cars on their tracks but considers it proprietary information, not to be revealed unless there’s an emergency.” – RS]
What’s in those tank cars near the Amtrak derailment?
By Susan Phillips, May 13, 2015 | 6:12 PM
Emergency personnel work at the scene of a deadly train derailment, Wednesday, May 13, 2015, in Philadelphia. The Amtrak train, headed to New York City, derailed and crashed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, killing at least six people and injuring dozens of others. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
News footage of the Amtrak derailment in Philadelphia Tuesday night shows nearby tank cars that look similar to the rail cars carrying crude oil or other hazardous material across the country each day. In aerial photos, it looks as if the Amtrak train, traveling at 100 miles an hour, nearly missed creating an even greater catastrophe, if it had struck an oil train, say, or a train carrying chlorine gas. Residents quickly took to twitter, wondering what about the content of those tank cars, and whether it was hazardous.
“This could be just one more in a litany of near misses,” said David Masur, director of PennEnvironment, an activist group working to ban oil trains.
It wouldn’t be far-fetched for a passenger rail car to collide with an oil train, dozens of oil trains run through the state on their way to Philadelphia and South Jersey refineries each week. In fact, Norfolk Southern runs oil trains on a track that runs above Amtrak lines, close to the derailment. Bakken crude oil from North Dakota crosses those lines daily, traveling across the Delaware river, and down to refineries in South Jersey. WHYY reporter Tom MacDonald says he saw the black tankers about 50 yards from the derailed Amtrak train.
But it’s still unclear what is in those tank cars.
“It could be corn oil, it could be very benign stuff,” said Conrail spokesman John Enright.
The accident occurred on Amtrak’s rail lines, but the scene is very close to a Conrail yard, which Enright says is used for local transport.
“I know the sensitivity to the whole crude oil situation,” said Enright. “One shouldn’t presume anything.”
Enright says Conrail knows what’s in the cars on their tracks but considers it proprietary information, not to be revealed unless there’s an emergency.
“If there was an incident then that information would be readily available to [first responders],” he said.
In this case, the Amtrak train did not hit any nearby freight cars, so the contents of the blank tankers remains a mystery.
Norfolk Southern, which operates the oil trains that cross the Amtrak line, did not respond to requests for comment. And the American Association of Railroads would also not comment on the freight rail traffic in the area. Philadelphia’s Office of Emergency Management would not comment on the contents, saying they were focusing on the accident itself.
But rail safety experts say the accident could have been much worse if the Amtrak train did hit those black tank cars, and if those cars were carrying explosive or flammable material.
A passenger is carried following an Amtrak train crash Tuesday, May 12, 2015, in Philadelphia. Train 188 was traveling from Washington to New York City. (AP Photo/Paul Cheung)
Fred Millar is an independent rail safety expert.
“Having the oil train sitting there is not necessarily an undangerous situation,” said Millar.
Millar says, although it’s rare, trains have been known to run into each other. Federal investigators recently released a report about an oil train explosion in North Dakota in 2013, where the train hit a derailed freight train.
“One kind of industrial accident can set off another,” he said.
Not only would the death toll be higher, but the neighborhood would need to be evacuated.
Jim Blaze is an economist and railroad consultant who worked in the railroad industry for 30 years.
“Let’s say there was [hazardous material] in those rail cars,” said Blaze. “If the cars cracked open, it could have been an explosive force and caused a chain reaction. What would the casualty rate have been as a result? Could you imagine evacuating 750,000 people? What’s that going to cost? What’s the lost business revenue?”
Not only is it unclear what’s in those nearby tank cars. It’s unclear if Philadelphia’s first responders would be ready. The city’s Office of Emergency Management says it’s done exercises to prepare. But it’s not clear if the exercise has included passenger rail cars.
Pennsylvania’s Emergency Management Agency spokesman Cory Angell says that’s not a scenario he’s heard discussed.
Delaware County’s Office of Emergency Management says the risk of an Amtrak or regional rail line hitting an oil train is low because the passenger rail cars don’t run in close proximity to the oil trains as they do in Philadelphia. Ed Truitt runs Delco’s OEM.
“We’ve looked at a lot of different scenarios and that was never conceived as being a threat in Delaware County,” said Truitt.
Truitt says the rail cars only travel between midnight and 5 AM through the county.
Repost from CNN[Editor: The reporter interviews Scott Lauman, a nearby resident: “‘It missed that parked tanker by maybe 50 yards,’ he told KYW. ‘An Amtrak guy came by and he was telling me it turns out those tankers are full, and if that engine would’ve hit that tanker, it would’ve set off an explosion like no other.’” NOTE: The videos only work on CNN’s website – see tweets, photos and video at CNN.com. – RS]
Witness to Amtrak 188 crash: Train missed ‘tanker by maybe 50 yards’
By Eliott C. McLaughlin, Holly Yan and Don Melvin, CNN, May 13, 2015, 4:41 PM ET
(CNN) Rebecca Bibb awoke alongside the mangled Amtrak commuter train with no recollection of the carnage and chaos that had just unfolded.” The shoes, my shoes — are not my shoes. I lost my shoes. A lady gave me my shoes,” a distraught Bibb told CNN affiliate KYW. She recalls being on the train, in the third car from the back — and then, nothing. “I don’t remember anything. I did not hear any noise, did not see anything. When I started hearing people, I was on the side (of the crash scene), and someone told me I’d been delirious and that they had carried me off,” she told the station. When Amtrak Northeast Regional Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, it tore apart passenger cars, sending seven of them careening off the tracks. At least four toppled over, and some cars were smashed like aluminum cans. The rails were uprooted, and the badly damaged engine was left standing upright. At least seven people were killed and 200 more were sent to six area hospitals — some with critical injuries, authorities said. About 76 passengers were treated and released. Journalist Beth Davidz of Brooklyn was one of those fortunate enough to be released. To hear her Twitter feed tell it, she was on the phone when she boarded the train and thus chose not to sit in the “quiet car,” which was one of the most damaged in the wreck. Around 3 a.m., she tweeted she had been released from the hospital — “no wallet, one shoe, so grateful” — and later thanked CNN affiliate WPIX for helping her find a ride home. (CNN)Rebecca Bibb awoke alongside the mangled Amtrak commuter train with no recollection of the carnage and chaos that had just unfolded.”The shoes, my shoes — are not my shoes. I lost my shoes. A lady gave me my shoes,” a distraught Bibb told CNN affiliate KYW. She recalls being on the train, in the third car from the back — and then, nothing. “I don’t remember anything. I did not hear any noise, did not see anything. When I started hearing people, I was on the side (of the crash scene), and someone told me I’d been delirious and that they had carried me off,” she told the station. When Amtrak Northeast Regional Train 188 derailed in Philadelphia on Tuesday night, it tore apart passenger cars, sending seven of them careening off the tracks. At least four toppled over, and some cars were smashed like aluminum cans. The rails were uprooted, and the badly damaged engine was left standing upright. At least seven people were killed and 200 more were sent to six area hospitals — some with critical injuries, authorities said. About 76 passengers were treated and released. Journalist Beth Davidz of Brooklyn was one of those fortunate enough to be released. To hear her Twitter feed tell it, she was on the phone when she boarded the train and thus chose not to sit in the “quiet car,” which was one of the most damaged in the wreck. Around 3 a.m., she tweeted she had been released from the hospital — “no wallet, one shoe, so grateful” — and later thanked CNN affiliate WPIX for helping her find a ride home.
Speed a factor?
Scott Lauman, who lives in the Port Richmond neighborhood where the train crashed, told KYW that the tracks curve around a warehouse, and when the train reached the bend, “it looks like the engine just kept going straight, right off the curve, right down the hill and all of the cars just followed with it. And the engine was all the way over into the train yard.”
‘Violent scene’ near Amtrak train crash site 02:56. Click will take you to CNN for video.
The train hit power lines and wiped out a support for a pedestrian bridge, leaving it hanging, Lauman told the station.
“They were pulling people, just lifeless,” he said of the rescue efforts.
But it could have been far worse in Lauman’s estimation.
“It missed that parked tanker by maybe 50 yards,” he told KYW. “An Amtrak guy came by and he was telling me it turns out those tankers are full, and if that engine would’ve hit that tanker, it would’ve set off an explosion like no other.”
Khaled Kayed, a volunteer with the Muslim-American Society, lives near the crash site and was on the scene before police began taping off the area. He saw many passengers with head injuries amid the chaos, he told CNN in an email.
“When we first got on to the scene we could see people laying on the ground covered in blood,” he wrote. “The scene was very disturbing! It looked like something straight out of a movie. When we got on the tracks you could see the carnage. The train could only be described as a tin can that was crushed & ripped apart. Anywhere you look you could see pieces of the train all around you. You could see some people trying to crawl out due to the train cars upside down & on their sides.”
It has not yet been established whether speed was a factor in the crash, which happened around 9:30 p.m. But passenger Janna D’Ambrisi said she thought the train was going “a little too fast around a curve.” “Then there was a jolt. And immediately you could tell the train derailed,” she said. “I was thrown into the girl next to me, sitting in the window seat. The train started to tip that way, to the right. And people on the other side of the train started to fall on us.” Moments later, she heard a banging from the bathroom. A man inside was screaming. “He was trying to unlock the door, but it was stuck,” D’Ambrisi said. The metal must have been bent.”
‘Everything flying’
Jeremy Wladis was on the last car of the train. He had been in Washington for work, and he was returning home to New York. Then he felt the jolt. The train was leaving the tracks. Wladis, 51, saw “phones, laptops, everything flying,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. “There were women launched up in the luggage rack,” he said. “I don’t even know how they got there.” Once the train came to a rest, he and others helped the women down and they made their escape. Another passenger, Daniel Wetrin, 37 of New York, told the paper that the initial shock was gentle “compared to what came next.” “Within two seconds, it was chaos,” he said. Andrew Cheng, visiting from Singapore, was traveling with 14 relatives when he was thrown to the ground like a rag doll, along with other passengers, he told KYW. “Some were piling on top of the others,” he said, adding that he and his family members were able to walk away from the incident. “We know that we counted all the members. They’re all there. I can’t ask for more. That’s good enough.” Joan Helfman thought her ribs were probably broken, but, as a nurse, her mind was on the others who were hurt. “I saw so many head injuries and bloody faces,” she told KYW. “There were a lot of fractures — arms, shoulders, all kinds of fractures.” Helfman couldn’t believe the destruction. “This is a nightmare,” she recalled thinking, “and it can’t be happening.” People caught in luggage rack Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor is 363 miles of track connecting Washington to Boston. It is the busiest railroad in North America, as three times more people take the train between Washington and New York City than fly the route. Train 188 was on its way from Washington to New York, carrying 238 commuters and five crew members at the end of another workday. The trip was routine until the train passed through the Port Richmond neighborhood in Philadelphia. That’s when Wetrin saw passengers catapulted from their seats. “There were two people above our head in the luggage rack asking to be helped down,” he told CNN. “It was just unbelievable.” A video posted on Instagram showed people trying to help passengers out. “Keep crawling, OK?” one man tells a passenger. “Where am I crawling to?” the passenger asks. “Crawl forward, sir,” another man says.
Power cables add extra danger
Many passengers walked away, some with bloodied shirts or head wounds wrapped in bandages. But the journey from the crash site was also treacherous. “All the power cables that run parallel to the track caved in,” Wetrin said. “There were cut cables hanging around.” Many passengers, including former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy of Florida, praised the firefighters and police, who arrived within minutes. “Thank you so much to all the first responders-there w/in minutes,” Murphy tweeted. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” Not all the rescuers wore uniforms. “My son went back and got everybody off our one car,” Helfman, the nurse, said. “There was a very small opening in the door, and we were able to get out.” Her son, Max, told KYW that his first priority was getting his mother off the train. Then he went to help the strangers. “Luckily I’m still here, I’m still walking,” Max Helfman said. “So I figured I would do my best to help because I saw everyone — I could see the blood on people’s faces. They can’t move. … So I just tried to do my best to help people get out of that car.”
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