CSX Provides Update on W.Va. Oil Train Derailment Cleanup
By JOHN RABY Associated Press, Jul 21, 2015, 7:51 PM ET
GLEN FERRIS, W.Va. – CSX is continuing to closely monitor the environmental impact of a fiery oil-train derailment in southern West Virginia, a spokeswoman said Tuesday.The company held a public informational meeting that drew a sparse turnout Tuesday evening at the Glen Ferris Inn.
On Feb. 16, 27 cars of a CSX train’s 109 cars derailed during a snowstorm in Mount Carbon. Twenty of the cars leaked oil, some of which burned or was released into the ground.
Under a March consent order with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the railroad agreed to a long-term plan for cleaning up and restoring the area around the derailment.
“It’s important for the community to know that we said we would be here,” CSX spokeswoman Melanie Cost said. “This is part of that process. We want to keep the open dialogue for them.”
Donna Shabdue lives near the derailment site and was forced to evacuate her home for more than a day. She showed up to the meeting to voice her concerns about local emergency response and pleaded for quickly informing the public about future incidents.
“They need to have a plan,” she said. “We didn’t know what to do. There needs to be a siren somewhere go off to evacuate. We didn’t know what to do. I just want out of there safely.”
The train was carrying 3 million gallons of Bakken crude and headed to Yorktown, Virginia. In recent years, trains hauling crude from the Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana have been involved in fiery derailments in six states.
The Federal Railroad Administration is investigating the West Virginia accident, which shot fireballs into the sky, burned down a nearby house and caused fires on the ground that smoldered for days.
The cause of the derailment hasn’t been released. Speed had previously been ruled out as a factor. The FRA has said the train was going 33 mph at the time of the crash. The speed limit was 50 mph.
CSX said more than 181,000 gallons of crude oil was recovered after the accident. About 10,000 tons of soil has been removed and shipped for disposal. Additional soil removal is planned next to the Kanawha River and a tributary at the derailment site.
Air, water and soil sampling continues. The water monitoring is at five locations along the river, including a drinking water intake, because of the occasional presence of oil sheens. CSX said the local drinking water supply has been unaffected by the spill.
Oil-absorbing booms were attached to a metal wall more than 410 feet long in the river as an additional containment measure. The wall will eventually be taken down once the sheens are no longer detected, Cost said.
Cost declined to disclose how much the company has spent on the cleanup.
Repost from The Tribune, San Luis Obispo, California
Put politics aside and think safety first when it comes to oil trains
Risks associated with increased oil train activity are too great; supervisors must act to protect our communities from disaster
VIEWPOINT, By Jan Marx, July 17, 2015
Jan Marx | Photo by Joe Johnston
Like other residents of the city of San Luis Obispo, I am proud of our beautiful 165-year-old city, dubbed the “Happiest City in North America.” Residents may be happy about our city, but we are not happy about the risks proposed by the Phillips 66 rail spur expansion project.
Why? As we’ve all seen on the news, when trains carrying this oil derail, they don’t just spill — they explode, and burn for days. Those derailments and resulting hazardous air and soil contamination have increased as oil-by-rail transport has increased. The Phillips 66 project would result in five or more additional trains a week bearing highly volatile crude from far away oil fields, traveling through our communities to Nipomo, each train approximately a mile in length. Residents, to put it mildly, do not want these oil trains traveling through our city.
In response to concerned city residents , the San Luis Obispo City Council voted unanimously to write a letter to the county Board of Supervisors opposing this project and asking them to protect the safety, health and economic well-being of our city. The city of San Luis Obispo is honored to lead the way in our county and stand alongside a growing number of cities, counties and public agencies throughout the state, allied in opposition to this project.
The increased risk posed by this project is a major statewide issue and is a threat to every community with a railroad running through it. However, this project poses a uniquely extreme risk to the city of San Luis Obispo, made even more extreme by our unique topography.
Just to our north, in the open space immediately behind Cal Poly, is the mountainous Cuesta Grade area, which Union Pacific Railroad has rated as one of the state’s highest risk areas for derailments.
This unspoiled and beautiful part of our greenbelt, full of sensitive species and habitat, with the railroad tracks and Highway 101 snaking through it, is also rated by Cal Fire as being at extreme risk for wildfire. The current extreme drought has created a tinder-dry situation, and when under Santa Ana-downdraft conditions, our city is often downwind from Cuesta Grade.
Were there to be an oil car derailment in the Cuesta Grade or Cal Poly area, the campus — with its 20,000 students and 10,000 staff members — as well as the densely populated downtown and northern part of our city would be extremely difficult to defend from the ensuing oil fire.
However, that is not the only area of our city that would be threatened, because the railroad tracks go right through the heart of our city, putting most of our residents, visitors, businesses and structures at risk.
Our emergency responders are simply not funded, trained or equipped to deal with a disaster of the magnitude threatened by this project. If there were an oil disaster in our community, we taxpayers would be stuck with the bill for firefighting, hazardous material cleanup and repair of infrastructure. The damage to our lives, our environment and our economy would be devastating.
Like all businesses, Union Pacific and Phillips 66 desire to increase profits for their shareholders. But the problem is that these businesses wish to do so by vastly increasing our community’s risk of exposure to an oil-train disaster. Are we going to be forced to bear that risk? Is there no way to protect ourselves?
The answer to that question is up to the Board of Supervisors. As the permitting agency, the county Board of Supervisors is in a uniquely crucial position. It is the only entity in the county with the land use authority to deny the permits, which are needed for the project to proceed.
County residents have the opportunity to urge the Board of Supervisors to reject this project. They should do so for the sake of the health, safety and welfare of everyone who lives or works within the “oil car blast zone,” approximately a half-mile on each side of the railroad tracks.
The supervisors have the opportunity to put political differences aside and make the safety and wellbeing of their constituents their first priority by rejecting this project. Hopefully, they will rise to the challenge.
By Lynne Nittler, July 08, 2015
Protesters in Portland carry placards bearing the names of 47 people who died two years ago when an oil train derailed in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, Canada. Courtesy photo
There is no safe way to transport extreme tar sands and Bakken crude oil. Two years after Lac-Mégantic, oil trains keep exploding and carbon pollution keeps rising. Oil trains are a disaster for our health, our safety and our climate.
On Saturday, July 11, Davis residents will remember the 2013 oil derailment that took 47 lives in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, Canada. Davis faces the threat of a similar accident. Currently, at least one oil train per week passes through Davis headed to the Bay Area.
Two more 100-car trains per day are planned for the near future for the Valero Refinery in Benicia and the Phillips 66 refinery in San Luis Obispo … unless citizens stop them.
The ForestEthics map at www.Blast-Zone.org shows endangered homes and businesses along Second Street in Davis, including the police station, Carlton Plaza senior community and Rancho Yolo. The entire Davis downtown is vulnerable, along with parts of UC Davis campus and apartments complexes along Olive Drive.
Saturday’s vigil and rally highlight public opposition to oil trains passing through Davis. Too many residents live in the oil train blast zone, the 1-mile evacuation zone recommended by safety officials in the case of an oil train derailment and fire. ForestEthics calculates that nationwide, 25 million Americans live in the blast zone.
“My home is in the oil train blast zone,” says Frances Burke, a downtown resident and oil train activist. “I have to breathe the extra particulates in the air from each additional daily train. Meanwhile, the new federal regulations do little to protect me.
“In the event of an accident, first responders can only evacuate people from fireballs that happen despite trains moving at slower speeds in the supposedly safer tank cars. Oil trains are too dangerous for communities.”
Wearing fiery red, yellow and orange shirts, Davisites are invited to meet at the train station and walk through the Davis blast zone downtown to the Rotary Stage in Central Park.
“Five times in the first five months of 2015 we’ve watched oil trains derail and explode into toxic fireballs,” said Elizabeth Lasensky of Yolo MoveOn, as she made her sign for Saturday’s event. “The Department of Transportation reported in July 2014 that we can expect 10 to 12 derailments a year! It’s only a matter of time before an oil train derails in a major urban area, and the railroads don’t carry sufficient liability for such a disaster!”
At the state level, Sen. Lois Wolk will share the legislative response to the sudden surge of crude-by-rail transport into California, which is aimed at protecting the public as well as sensitive habitat and waterways.
“With well over 100 pledges signed on and 500 visitors online, this fracking pledge of resistance is starting to take off,” Luzzo says of his plan to make California fracking-free. “My article explaining the origins of the pledge has attracted over 1,000 people. The word is definitely getting out there.”
Information on oil trains and the proposed ban on fracking in Yolo County will be available at the Cool Davis booth at the Farmers Market in Central Park.
“The truth is, we don’t need any of the extreme oil,” says Reeda Palmer of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Davis. “The explosive Bakken and the toxic tar sands crude that moves by rail is a small percent of total U.S. oil consumption.
“As we move our economy to clean energy, we can’t allow oil companies to bring Bakken, tar sands and other fracked oil — the dirtiest, most dangerous sources of oil — onto the market to pollute the atmosphere when we have clean alternatives.”
Given the unresolved dangers of crude oil transport by rail and the overload of carbon emissions already in the atmosphere, a more prudent path is to leave all extreme crude in the ground, transition to clean, renewable energy and practice energy conservation in an effort to live sustainably on a finite planet.
— Lynne Nittler is a Davis resident, the founder of Yolano Climate Action Central and an active member of Cool Davis.
Repost from The Ecologist [Editor: An excellent cheeky overview. I’d like to see this documented: “This phenomenon [catastrophic oil train explosions] has become so common that the train engineers who run them actually call them “bomb trains.” – RS]
#StopOilTrains – How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb train
Stephyn Quirke, 9th July 2015
Two things are new in the Pacific Northwest, writes Stephyn Quirke: abnormally hot, dry weather that has even killed Chinook salmon on their run upriver to spawn; and ‘bomb trains’ a mile or more long carrying thousands of tonnes of oil, with just a single sleep-deprived driver on board. What could possibly go wrong?
More than a hundred people converged in Ticonderoga, NY on 7th July for a flotilla and symbolic blockade to #StopOilTrains. Photo: Rising Tide Vermont.
Is our weather getting funny?
Some bushes and flowers started to bloom near the end of January this year, and in the spring cherry blossoms were blooming weeks early. This capped a winter with extremely low snowfall in the Cascade Mountains.
The abnormal heat, combined with the drought now covering 80% of Oregon, has actually raised temperatures in the Willamette River above 70 degrees, recently killing Chinook salmon as they made their way up-stream to spawn.
In March, tribal leaders from the Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians converged in Portland to discuss this ongoing phenomenon of strange weather, which they cannily dubbed ‘climate change’. These changes, they said, were related to a pattern of global warming, and were creating unique hardship on Northwest tribes.
In 2013, the ATNI also passed a resolution opposing all new fossil fuel proposals in the Northwest, citing harm to their treat rights, cultural resources, and land they hold sacred. Now the Affiliated Tribes are discussing plans for adaptation and mitigation, and asking how to undermine the root causes of climate change.
And that’s not all. Now there’s mile-long oil trains
In addition to the sudden onset of strange weather, Portland has also seen the abrupt arrival of strange, mile-long trains loaded with crude oil – a very unusual sight in the Northwest until just two years ago.
In the event of a derailment or crash, these trains are known to increase the temperature of surrounding areas by several hundred degrees – a strange weather event by any standard. This phenomenon has become so common that the train engineers who run them actually call them “bomb trains”.
While the danger of unplanned explosions is universally recognized, the risks of strange weather, and the planned explosions that take place in our internal combustion engines, are typically less appreciated. But the connections are becoming more obvious as the figure of the oil train valiantly pulls them together.
The sudden appearance of oil trains in the Northwest is one effect of the unprecedented crusade for oil extraction in North America – one that has produced a massive wave of opposition from residents and elected officials.
In Washington state alone, nine cities representing 40% of the state’s population have passed resolutions that oppose oil trains. In Alberta resistance to oil politics recently replaced a 44-year ruling party with socialists. And in Portland, anger against oil trains just smashed a city proposal to bring propane trains into the port.
In recent months rail workers have become increasingly vocal about the industry-wide safety problems that lead to fiery train accidents. They are also critical of the latest safety rules that allegedly protect the public from accidents.
Rail Workers United, a coalition of rail workers and their unions, says that the best way to make trains safer is to increase worker control and self-management; they propose a host of reforms that profit-obsessed rail companies are not interested in hearing.
For many rail-side communities there is a parallel interest in community control over the railroads: no fossil fuel trains are safe for them as long as trains derail and the climate unravels.
Together, the two movements are calling for a better future for our railroads and our environment, and demanding more public influence to safeguard both.
Who’s in control? A retrospective.
A little over two years ago on 6th July 2013, an oil train derailed and exploded in Lac Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. After the accident the CEO of Rail World, Edward Burkhardt, told the media that he blamed the single employee his company had charged with moving 2 million gallons of crude oil.
Armed with his very best talking points, Burkhardt told the media: “I think he did something wrong. It’s hard to explain why someone didn’t do something.”
According to reports, the lead locomotive’s engine had problems in the past, but had been rushed back into circulation to save the company money on a standard repair. That engine caught fire the night before the disaster, and a local fire chief shut off the engine to stop fuel from flowing into the fire, inadvertently cutting the power to the train’s air brakes in the process.
The company told the lone crew member not to come back to the site, and instead sent two workers who did not have experience with the braking system to confirm that the train was safe. Later that night, while the engineer was asleep in a nearby hotel, the train rolled down-hill from where it was parked, hurtling toward the city.
The impact of the explosion incinerated half the city’s downtown, and contaminated most of the remaining buildings with 1.5 million gallons of crude oil.
‘One man crews are safer – less distraction’
For CEO Burkhardt, the explanation was simple – the engineer should have set more brakes that did not rely on the engine. When asked if the crew was adequate for the cargo the following week, Burkhardt told a press conference that “one-man crews are safer than two-man crews because there’s less exposure for employee injury and less distraction.”
Under financial pressure, the company had made the switch to one-person crews three years before, replacing on-board conductors with remote control systems, and saving about $4.5 million every year. One month after the tragedy in Lac Megantic, the company filed for bankruptcy. Later that month Burkhardt expressed bewilderment when the police raided his corporate offices in Quebec.
In March, a coalition of rail workers held a conference on rail safety in Olympia, Washington, where they taught audience members (including myself) that the average train operator today suffers from chronic exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
Many workers in attendance attributed this to inaccurate train-lineups that do not allow for proper rest. Due to the uncertainty of when they are called to work, a train crew can be assigned to move a train full of hazardous materials without the chance to achieve needed rest from their last assignment. And with full knowledge they will be penalized for refusing a train, workers can go over 24 hours with no sleep by the time a shift ends.
This exhaustion is a chronic background problem for rail workers, and when combined with the near-constant dismissal of safety hazards from their managers, workers are left with waning confidence in their own safety – a development that should raise red flags for rail-side communities.
One man crews on long and heavy trains – a recipe for disaster
According to Ron Kaminkow, General Secretary of Rail Workers United, “There’s no such thing as a safe one-person train.” Looking back over some recent derailments, the facts appear to back him up.
On 14th May an Amtrak train derailed in Philadelphia, killing 8 passengers and sending over 200 people to the hospital. It was staffed by one person, and accelerated to over 100 miles per hour shortly before hitting a curve whose speed limit was 50.
On October 28th last year, a sleep-deprived engineer in the Bronx fell asleep at his controls, causing his one-crew train to hit a curve at 82 miles per hour when the speed limit was 30. The derailment killed four people and injured more than 70.
On July 24th, 2013 a single crew-member train derailed in Santiago, Spain, killing 79 people and injuring 139. The train was traveling at 100 miles per hour when it headed into a curve where the speed limit was 50.
Public officials commenting on these incidents have often focused on the technology that could have stopped the trains remotely if installed – something US railroads are already required to utilize under federal law, despite constant extensions on their legal deadlines.
According to rail workers, this is just part of the problem. Rapid attempts at cost-cutting, they say, have created both technological and human shortages, and when it comes to safety there is no question which one matters most.
“There is no technology available today that can ever safely replace a second crew member in the cab of the locomotive”, says a statement from the BLET and SMART-TD rail unions after the Philadelphia derailment.
Obama administration sitting on proposed two-man rule
Prior to 1967, Washington state actually required 6 crew members on all trains. That law was repealed in 1967 after the rail corporations ran an initiative campaign that wiped it out. In the 1980s, the standard train crew was still five or six people across the country.
But this was widdled down to two people by the 1990s – with just one conductor and one engineer. This has been the standard ever since. Now, through the use of new technology, the rail corporations have attempted to break down that number to one or even zero.
According to Herb Krohn, the Washington State Legislative Director for Smart UTU, the Puget Sound and Pacific Railroad is already using one-person crews to run trains loaded with hazardous materials – like the one that blew in Lac Megantic – including trains full of explosive gas. This line operates in Washington State between Centralia, Grays Harbor and Shelton.
In the aftermath of Lac Megantic, the Canadian Minister of Transport mandated two-person crews for trains carrying dangerous goods. In January the US Federal Rail Administration proposed a rule on two-person crews, but the Obama administration has so far declined to consider the proposal.
Train lengths doubled in eight years
In addition to cutting crew sizes, the biggest rail companies have doubled train lengths since 2007, routinely moving trains a mile long or even greater. This decreases labor costs, but also weakens tracks and causes exceptional wear on rail infrastructure. Factoring in this extra length and tonnage, a two person crew today represents one-sixth the number of workers that was standard in the 1980s.
Despite running trains that have never been longer or heavier, with quantities of hazardous material that are totally unprecedented on our rail lines, the railroads insist that an individual worker’s behavior, and not the hazards they have built in to the system, are the main reason that accidents occur.
“The BNSF is not genuinely concerned about safety”, says Geoff Mirelowitz, a former BNSF employee. “It is concerned about legal and financial liability. Every oil train that derails, every rail worker who is hurt on the job is a potential liability to the company.
“They are on a massive public relations campaign to ‘prove’ that if anything does go wrong it is not the BNSF’s responsibility. They frequently claim the primary safety problem is ’employee behavior’ in order to distract attention from the unsafe conditions and hazards that the BNSF itself is responsible for correcting.”
Geoff was fired from BNSF three years ago, after working as a switchman for almost 18 years in Seattle. His entire three-person crew was fired shortly after they pressed safety complaints about switch maintenance with BNSF management. The crew has filed a Whistleblower complaint with OSHA, charging the company with a violation of the Federal Rail Safety Act.
Although OSHA has agreed that their firing deserves an investigation, the crew is still waiting for it to begin.
Pipelines on wheels, protests on stilts
By any metric, the volume of oil by rail has skyrocketed in recent years, with 1,000 of these trains now coming through the Columbia Gorge every year. According to Karmen Fore, Senior Transportation Policy Advisor for Governor Kate Brown, there were around 3,000 oil shipments by train in 2006, but 493,126 in 2014.
In 2013 alone the railroads shipped over 11 billion gallons of crude oil, which has led to a commensurate rise in oil spills. Over a million gallons spilled in 2013 – more than the previous four decades combined, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. In 2014 there were 141 spills reported – setting yet another record.
The US Department of Transportation completed an analysis earlier this year predicting an average of 10 oil train derailments every year for the next 20 years.
According to an analysis of industry data by OPB, hazardous material trains spill 0.01% of the time, so if the 1,000 oil trains coming through the Gorge are any representation of the larger problem, we could expect 10 of these to derail and spill each year.
The public database at the FRA’s Office of Safety Analysis shows that 15 trains actually did derail and released hazardous materials in Multnomah County between 2011 and 2014.
Cut oil trains not conductors!
Abby Brockway learned about these statistics first-hand after an incident in her own neighborhood. On July 24th last year a train loaded with 100 oil cars derailed in downtown Seattle.
“The derailment under the Magnolia bridge was just a little too close to home – just a mile away from my daughter’s school,” Abby said in a phone interview. “I’ve spent years worrying about climate change, wondering why our leaders were doing nothing about it. After that day I realized that I couldn’t wait any longer – I needed to take action.”
On September 2nd, Abby and a group of activists with Rising Tide Seattle entered the Delta rail yard, not far from the derailment. There, Abby scaled an 18-foot tripod directly on top of the train tracks, and stayed there all day to talk to the media about the danger of oil trains, and to invite others to stand up for their communities. She waved two bright flags – one in each hand – while sporting a giant sign that read “Cut oil trains not conductors!”
After eight hours on the tripod, Abby and four other people were arrested. They now have a trial set for October 19th. Jen Wallis, a conductor with over 10 years of experience with the BNSF railroad, was fired from BNSF after reporting an injury, but re-instated in 2014 after six years of litigation. She would later write:
“When my co-workers saw that tripod up in Everett with the sign that said ‘Cut Oil Trains, Not Conductors’, they were blown away.” She added: “We understand completely now that we are fighting an industry that cares as much about us as they do the environment, which is not at all … “
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