Repost from 5KPIX TV CBS SF Bay Area
[Editor: apologies for the video’s commercial ad. You can pass on choosing an ad – the video will begin if you just wait. – RS]
Category Archives: Emergency Readiness & Response
Lessons from a 2011 derailment: the 911 call, BNSF no-show, first responders, timelines
Repost from Sightline Daily
What Happened When a Hazardous Substance Train Derailed on a Puget Sound Beach
True story from 2011 raises questions about railroad’s ability to manage oil trains.
Eric de Place, November 21, 2014If you’ve ever wondered how an oil train derailment might go down on the shores of Puget Sound, it might look a bit like the winter night derailment in 2011 that spilled sodium hydroxide on a beach at Chambers Bay south of Tacoma. It was hardly the kind of disaster that has resulted from oil trains derailing, but it still makes for a rather instructive lesson in how these things happen.
Sodium hydroxide, more commonly known as lye, is used as a chemical base in the production of pulp and paper, textiles, drain cleaners, and other products. (It’s also the major ingredient that makes lutefisk unpalatable.) It’s caustic, corrosive to metal and glass, and it can cause fairly serious burns. You want to be careful handling it but—notably unlike the volatile shale oil traveling daily on the very same rail line—it does not erupt into 300-foot-tall fireballs.
If it had been an oil train, things could have been much, much worse.
What happened is this: around 8 pm on February 26, 2011, a north-bound freight train derailed, sideswiping a south-bound train that was carrying (among other things) four loaded tank cars of sodium hydroxide in a liquid solution. One of those cars was damaged in the collision and leaked a relatively modest 50 gallons onto the beach before response crews plugged the leak.
At the time, of course, no one knew how serious the incident was—and things did not go smoothly that night. The 911 call went out at 8:02 and firefighters were responding by 8:10. At 8:31 the Pierce County Sheriff alerted the National Response Center, the agency that in turn notifies all the relevant federal and state agencies. The Department of Ecology learned of the accident at 8:52.
By contrast, BNSF, owner of the railway and operator of the train—not to mention the nation’s leading carrier of volatile Bakken shale oil—did not contact emergency management authorities until 8:56. And then things got worse. As the government responders assembled—sheriff’s deputies, fire fighters, US Coast Guard officials, oil spill clean-up experts—they were unable to get the railway to respond to their requests for information, or even to show up at the fire department’s incident command post.
By 11:00, three hours after the accident, the responders held their incident briefing to plan how to enter the site yet they still were unable to get BNSF officials to appear. According to Ecology’s official account, “local, state, and federal responders did not know who was participating on BNSF’s response team, their level of training nor their plan of action.”
Finally, at 11:45, almost four hours after the derailment and still without a line of communication to BNSF, local fire fighters moved into the scene. Not until 11:50 did a railway representative show up and at that point responders were finally able to establish reliable communication with the railroad. But it was almost too late: just as the fire fighters were entering the scene, BNSF began moving rail cars on the site, putting them directly into harm’s way.
Local and state responders were eventually able to secure the site and clean up the material. Yet it took days to accomplish, during which time several high tides inundated the spill area. And the story wasn’t over: a few days later, on March 1, a contractor for the railway spilled another 100 gallons of sodium hydroxide when the equipment operators lost control of a damaged tank car they were removing from the shoreline.
For jeopardizing incident responders, and for failing to coordinate with state agencies as required under Washington law, Ecology fined BNSF $3,000. The state also sent the railway a bill for $6,370 to cover the response and clean up costs. (By way of comparison, BNSF regularly reports quarterly earnings in the billion-dollar range.)
The Chambers Bay derailment should be seen as a cautionary tale because it all could have been much worse if the train had been loaded with 3 million gallons of Bakken shale oil, a typical quantity for the several oil trains that pass over that very same rail line several times a day. Not only might the oil explode catastrophically — as it has on at least four occasions recently — but it would almost certainly contaminate the Sound and beaches that the tracks run alongside. It’s worth noting too that the incident occurred directly adjacent to the Chambers Bay Golf Course, which will be hosting the 2015 US Open and a projected 235,000 fans.
Oil trains and schools don’t mix
Repost from The Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY
[Editor: See also Danger 101: Oil trains pass near Rockland schools and Groups say oil tanker cars on trains put Mid-Hudson communities, schools, infrastructure at risk. – RS]
Oil and schools don’t mix, enviro groups say
Steve Orr, November 20, 2014
About 350 New York state schools, including at least 63 in Monroe County, lie within a mile of railroad tracks used by trains carrying volatile crude oil, a coalition of environmental and other advocacy groups said Thursday.
The groups urged state and federal official to bolster emergency planning at those educational facilities and to require crude-oil trains to travel more slowly near schools.
“We are deeply concerned about the growing number of crude oil rail cars passing through the Hudson Valley and across New York State every day,” said Claire Barnett, executive director of the Albany-based Health Schools Network. “A catastrophic event, should it happen near an occupied school, could devastate a community for a generation or more.”
The good news locally is that districts in Monroe County near CSX Transportation’s two freight-rail corridors say they have emergency plans in place and are prepared to shelter or evacuate in the event that became necessary.
“I’m impressed with what our county schools are doing – on paper. I really am. It sounds fantastic,” said Judy Braiman of Empire State Consumer Project, one of several groups that helped with the report released Thursday.
School officials told Braiman they had fully developed emergency-evacuation plans, and staff in the affected schools were tutored in those plans. Braiman said, though, she could not be sure if that was true of every school. “My only question is, did it get down to the level of the teachers, the parents and the children?” she said.
Rail shipment of crude oil has become a hot-button topic around the country since a surge in shipments from shale-oil fields in the northern Plains. CSX has said 20 to 35 oil trains traverse upstate New York each week, headed for Albany and from there to East Coast refineries.
The shipments raise concern because this particular crude oil is highly volatile. Several oil trains have derailed and caught fire; most tragically, a train rolled downhill out of control and derailed in Lac-Megantic in July 2013, exploding into a huge conflagration that killed 47 people and destroyed several blocks of the small Canadian city’s downtown.
Federal officials say locations within a half-mile of a derailment site should be prepared to evacuate in event of a serious accident, and everyone within a mile could be in danger.
Twenty-six of the 63 Monroe County schools noted by the environment groups are within a half-mile of the tracks, according to data the groups released. Included were schools in the Churchville-Chili, Gates-Chili, Rochester, Penfield, Pittsford, East Rochester and Fairport districts. Several religious-affiliated and charter schools were included as well.
All 63 Monroe schools noted by the groups are near the CSX mainline tracks that run through the city of Rochester and adjoining suburbs. As the Democrat and Chronicle has reported, however, there is evidence that CSX prefers to route oil trains on a separate track that runs through Monroe County’s southern suburbs.
At least four schools located near those tracks are omitted from group’s list and maps, though Braiman said she did contact districts in which those schools are located.
Sacramento Area leaders call for strong safety controls on oil trains headed west and south
Repost from The Sacramento Bee
Sacramento leaders call for more crude-oil train safety
By Tony Bizjak, 11/14/2014
Concerned about potential oil spills and fires, Sacramento leaders are calling for stronger safety controls on a Phillips 66 proposal to transport crude oil via trains through Sacramento neighborhoods to the oil company’s refinery in San Luis Obispo County.
In a letter approved Thursday by board members of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, regional officials are asking San Luis Obispo County to require the oil company to notify local fire officials before any crude oil train comes through the area, limit the parking of crude-oil-laden trains in the urban area, provide funding for training on fighting oil fires, and require trains and tracks to have modern safety features.
SACOG officials said they are not taking a stance against rail shipments of crude oil in general.
“Our intent is not to prohibit any types of shipments, our intent is to ensure that where they are shipped that we impose the most reasonably feasible safety measures for our communities,” the agency’s attorney Kirk Trost said during a board briefing this week.
A boom in domestic oil production in North Dakota, Colorado, Texas and other Western states in recent years has prompted safety concerns after several high-profile oil-train explosions, including one in Canada that killed 47 people last year. The federal government is formulating new safety regulations, including a requirement for sturdier tank cars.
SACOG’s letter comes in response to a Phillips 66 proposal to ship oil via train five days a week to its Santa Maria Refinery in San Luis Obispo County. Many of those trains are likely to come through Northern California, via Roseville, and run through downtown Sacramento, West Sacramento, downtown Davis and East Bay cities. Some could take a route through Sacramento to Stockton, then west into the Bay Area. The route east of Roseville is unknown.
The Sacramento group, in its letter, also joined a growing national chorus of cities and states demanding that particularly flammable crude oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota be stripped of its more volatile elements before being loaded on trains.
In an email to The Sacramento Bee, Phillips 66 spokesman Dennis Nuss said Phillips does not plan to ship Bakken oil to its Santa Maria Refinery. He did not specify which types of crude oil the refinery will receive.
“Phillips 66 is working to ensure the long-term viability of the Santa Maria Refinery and the many jobs it provides,” he wrote. “Our plans for this project reflect our company’s commitment to operational excellence and safety while enhancing the competitiveness of the facility.”
SACOG, a transportation planning agency formed by the region’s six counties and 22 cities, previously called for similar safety measures on another oil company plan to transport oil, likely Bakken, through Sacramento to a Benicia refinery. Valero Refining Co. officials say they hope to start next year shipping two 50-car oil trains a day through Sacramento to that plant.
Railroads have long successfully argued that federal railroad regulations pre-empt states, counties and cities from imposing any rules on their operations. In their letter, Sacramento officials contend that San Luis Obispo County and Benicia can require the oil refineries to write safety measures into their contracts with the rail carrier companies. A rail law expert, Mike Conneran of the Hanson Bridgett law firm in San Francisco, said Sacramento’s argument might have legal merit, but likely will have to be tested in court.
Crude-oil trains have proliferated in recent years around the country as producers use newer fracking technologies to unearth previously trapped oil deposits in the West. California Energy Commission analysts say very little of that oil is being transported on rail into California currently, but they say as much as 22 percent of the state’s oil will arrive by train by 2016.
One such shipment comes through Sacramento, traveling on the rail line that cuts through North Sacramento, midtown, Land Park and Meadowview en route to Richmond in the Bay Area. The BNSF Railway company recently filed papers with state emergency officials indicating they are running up to two trains a week on that route, an increase from one train a week earlier this year.
Another major crude-by-rail facility, outside of Bakersfield, is expected to open before the end of this year and may take shipments of crude oil on rail that will come through Sacramento. A spokesman for Plains All American, owner of the facility, declined comment on the routes the trains will take, saying that will be a decision the railroad companies will make.
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