New oil train safety rules spell delay, leaving citizens at risk
By Jayni Hein, contributor, May 18, 2015, 10:00 am
Chicago, Philadelphia and Sacramento, Calif.: These are just a few of the cities within the “blast zones” of mile-long trains carrying flammable crude oil across the country. Twenty-five million Americans live in these vulnerable areas; yet it will be years until dangerous tank cars are retrofitted or retired from the rails, based on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new safety standards.
The standards, released on May 1, cover railcars that carry the nation’s growing supply of volatile crude oil produced in the Bakken region of the northern United States and the Canadian tar sands. While the new rules mark incremental progress, they give residents little reason to rest easy. And more implementation delays could be coming — the American Petroleum Institute filed a petition in federal court on Monday challenging the new rules, and other legal challenges may be on the horizon.
When it comes to oil train derailments, it’s no longer a question of “if,” but “when.” Driven by growth in the production of oil in the U.S. and Canada, there has been a staggering increase in rail transportation of crude oil over the past five years, with a corresponding spike in the number of accidents — many causing explosions, oil spills and fatalities. The latest incident happened earlier this month, when a train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed and caught fire in central North Dakota, forcing the evacuation of a small town.
In 2008, only 9,500 tank car loads of crude were transported by rail in the United States. By 2013, that number rose to 400,000. In 2013, more oil spilled from U.S. trains than in the previous four decades combined. In addition to putting citizens directly at risk, these trains pass over important sources of drinking water — such as the Sacramento River in drought-stricken California — and share track with commuter rail in many urban areas, including Philadelphia.
The Department of Transportation initiated a rule-making last year to update railcar design standards, speed limits and routing requirements for trains carrying 20 carloads or more of flammable crude oil. The agency’s final rule maintains some of the positive aspects of its proposed rule: new electronically controlled pneumatic brake requirements, lower speed limits for older tank cars moving through “high-threat urban areas,” and new routing analysis requirements.
But, in other ways, the final rule represents a step backwards from the Department of Transportation’s initial proposal. And more fundamentally, the rule puts a Band-Aid on a chronic condition caused by booming fossil fuel production, ongoing reliance on oil and aging transportation infrastructure.
First, the final rule exempts many trains that would have been made safer under the initial proposal. Originally, any train carrying 20 or more cars with flammable oil or ethanol was defined as a “high-hazard flammable train” subject to these standards. The final rule applies only to trains carrying at least 35 tank cars of flammable oil or ethanol, or 20 cars of flammable liquid in a continuous block. This final definition, then, encompasses fewer trains.
Second, the rule suffers from a lengthy, five- to eight-year retrofit or phaseout of DOT-111 and CPC-1232 railcars that have been known to puncture upon derailment for many years. These are the same cars that were involved in the Lac Mégantic, Quebec tragedy in July 2013 that killed 47 people and in the five major accidents in 2015 (thus far) in West Virginia, Illinois, North Dakota and two locations in Ontario. The protracted phaseout means many additional years of dangerous tank cars sharing track with commuter rail, traveling through dense population centers, and crossing water bodies and other sensitive environmental habitats. The delay is especially striking, as National Transportation Safety Board reports dating back to 1991 detail the high failure and puncture rates of DOT-111 tank cars. However, the agency determined that a quicker phaseout of DOT-111 cars would cause negative effects by temporarily shifting oil transportation from rail to trucks, increasing hazardous air pollution and traffic-related fatalities.
Finally, while the rule imposes 40-mph speed limits for non-retrofitted trains traveling through “high threat urban areas,” only a few dozen cities around the nation have been so designated, leaving many towns, cities and drinking-water sources highly vulnerable.
In the next year, the Department of Transportation should prioritize additional measures, like increasing railcar and track inspections, lowering speed limits in additional urban areas, sharing risk reduction “best practices” among the railroads and potentially tightening design standards for retrofitted cars to align with the standards for new cars.
The department should also coordinate closely with the states to modernize communication systems, improve spill prevention and response planning, ensure that states are empowered to train and fund additional rail inspectors, and collaborate to identify high-priority infrastructure needs, such as bridge and track improvements.
Ideally, these safety improvements should be made as part of an “all of the above” strategy to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels while ensuring that domestic production and transportation are as safe as possible in the near-term. The new rail safety rules are a necessary first step on what looks to be a long, uncertain journey.
Hein is the policy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity, focusing on climate change, energy and transportation issues.
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.
“This needs to be fixed:” FOX6 finds a new “risk on the rails,” could Milwaukee be the next Quebec?
By Brad Hicks, May 12, 2015, 10:00pm
MILWAUKEE (WITI) — Last year, the FOX6 Investigators were the first to expose a new risk on the rails — a steady stream of long oil trains trekking across the state from North Dakota. The crude oil they carry from what’s called “The Bakken” is highly explosive. Since then, there has been growing public concern about these so-called “bomb trains” in Wisconsin. Now, there’s a new concern, in a neighborhood in Milwaukee.
When the mile-long oil trains lumber by Milwaukee’s Fifth Ward lofts, the cars come roller-coaster close to a renovated building. A sliver of light between brick and steel.
From his fifth floor window, Brian Chiu has a front row seat.
“It’s so loud,” Chiu said.
But it’s not the noise that concerns him. The fear is five floors down.
Fracking technology has opened an oil spigot in North Dakota.
“It’s increased the amount of traffic on the railroads exponentially,” Wisconsin Railroad Commissioner Jeff Plale said.
The railroad traffic has increased by several thousand percent.
Bakken crude oil has a very high vapor pressure, meaning it can easily explode. And the tank cars carrying it?
“(They) were not designed to haul crude. A lot of them were designed to haul corn syrup,” Plale said.
When these trains have derailed, the cracker-thin tank cars have ruptured, with disastrous results. By far the worst incident occurred in Lac Megantic, Quebec. Forty-seven people were killed in the fireball.
Three times this year, trains carrying crude have derailed in the United States. Last week in North Dakota, the sky turned gray with smoke.
In March, a train derailed across the border in Galena, Illinois. The wreckage burned for four days.
A week before that, a train derailed in West Virginia. Hundreds had to evacuate.
The train that derailed in North Dakota was headed toward Wisconsin. Two trains before that had just been here.
“We’re kind of at the epicenter of where this stuff is coming,” Plale said.
That brings us back to Brian Chiu and his Fifth Ward home — and those oil trains just feet from the Fifth Ward lofts, going over the S. 1st Street bridge.
FOX6 first photographed the concern in February — but it wasn’t until the snow and ice melted that we saw the full extent. “I beams” that support the bridge have rusted away at the base to wafer-thin strips of steel. In some spots, entire sections are just gone.
Chris Raebel, an engineer at Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) agreed to take a look at what the FOX6 Investigators found.
“My focus is on steel design — just like the bridge,” Raebel said.
Unlike most railroad bridges, which have elevated foundations, the piers on this century-old span reach right to the road — where every winter, salt eats away at the steel.
“That’s hit the base of the bridge and that`s corroding the metal,” Raebel said.
In the past, some of the rusted piers supporting the bridge have been reinforced, but several columns have been corroded right through.
“At some point this needs to be fixed. This is not acceptable,” Raebel said.
FOX6 News received similar comments from other structural and civil engineers who saw the photos, but they didn’t want to be identified because they may do business with the railroads. They said things like:
“The level of rust and deterioration is a serious structural problem. They should be contacted immediately.”
And: “I would definitely report these conditions to the owner of this bridge without further delay.”
Canadian Pacific Railroad should already be aware. Canadian Pacific owns the bridge and is required to inspect it each year. In a written reply to a FOX6 request for those records, the company said it “meets or exceeds all federal requirements,” and that the bridge was last inspected in the winter. Canadian Pacific wouldn’t tell us exactly when that was — and whether there was snow on the ground. Canadian Pacific refused to show FOX6 News any of the inspection reports.
FOX6 asked them again earlier this months at a Common Council meeting in Milwaukee.
“We`ve given you a statement on that and we won`t have anything to add,” a Canadian Pacific representative said.
Canadian Pacific had been invited to Milwaukee to answer questions about the oil trains. Canadian Pacific’s brash brush off didn’t sit well with some Common Council members.
“You don`t give that image to the community that your facilities are safe. You don`t give us that confidence,” Milwaukee Alderman Terry Witkowski said.
Ken Wood knows what these inspections entail.
“I’m a structural engineer. My main focus is bridges. I`ve been working with bridges for 20 years — bridge design, bridge inspection, bridge rehabilitation,” Wood said. “You`re going to be looking for fatigue cracks, and the other thing you`d look for is corrosion, certainly, on a bridge — because corrosion is basically taking away the cross section.”
If you look at the base of the “I beams” on the bridge in the Fifth Ward, you’ll see layers and layers of flaking — in some places, more than an inch thick. That doesn’t happen quickly.
“It`s been some time, that`s for sure,” Wood said. “What happens during corrosion is the steel expands, sometimes seven to eight times what it is, so you can see that actually happening in the base here,” Wood said.
FOX6’s Brad Hicks: “How do you even inspect this with that much flaking on there without removing the flaking?”
“They would have to remove flaking to see what`s underneath and take some measurements with calipers to find out how much area they perceive is left,” Raebel said.
So that’s what the FOX6 Investigators did.
The beam is nine-tenths of an inch thick, but at the base, only four-tenths of an inch is left. The column is just over an inch thick. Corrosion has eaten it down to less than half that.
FOX6’s Brad Hicks: “The kind of thinning we`re seeing here, does that impact the load capacity of a bridge like this?”
“Yes,” Raebel said. “They have a certain amount of steel they need to resist the load from above.”
And that load is greater than ever.
Engines alone weigh three times what they did when the bridge was built in 1914. And a one-mile train weighs more than 25 million pounds.
“Now a two-mile long train is relatively common,” Plale said.
And with trains like that moving over the bridge daily — metal fatigue adds up.
“Is the bridge really built, with all that rust and all that corrosion, to support that kind of weight?” Chiu wonders.
Officials in the state of Wisconsin had the same question. In 2006, a study was commissioned on the impact heavier trains have on state-owned railroad bridges. That study concluded “many within the railroad industry are concerned that the aging bridge infrastructure will no longer be able to withstand the increased loadings.”
One bridge engineer who examined FOX6’s pictures said the problem may not be that bad, because in theory, you could cut a vertical pier in two horizontally, and it would still hold up the bridge. But that’s assuming you still have inch-thick “I beams” — not corroded columns.
The concern here isn’t that the bridge will completely collapse — but that if a column gives way and the load shifts and the train tips — with the Fifth Ward lofts just feet away, could Milwaukee become another Quebec?
“I would encourage the owner of the bridge to seriously look at this and consider repairs. And it seems like it should be done soon,” Raebel said.
To their credit, the railroads, including Canadian Pacific, have been at the forefront — pushing the federal government for stricter tank car standards. The railroads don’t actually own the tank cars — the oil companies and third-party leasers do.
Eleven days ago, the federal government announced new cars need to be thicker, and the old ones need to be retrofitted within five years.
The federal government is the only entity that can demand the railroad turn over its inspection reports on the bridge. For two months, FOX6 News repeatedly asked the Federal Railroad Administration if it has any of Canadian Pacific’s inspection audits for the S. 1st Street bridge. The agency hasn’t responded.
Local municipalities like Milwaukee are pretty powerless when it comes to regulating the railroads.
On Tuesday, May 12th, the Milwaukee Common Council approved a resolution urging federal regulators to immediately inspect all tracks, bridges and crossings on which Bakken crude oil is carried — but at the end of the day, that’s simply a request.
Health Professionals Call for Denial of Oil-By-Rail Terminal Permits in Oregon and Washington
By Regna Merritt, May 11, 2015
For Immediate Release
Contacts:
Laura Skelton, Executive Director WA Physicians for Social Responsibility, Laura@wpsr.org o: 206.547.2630
Regna Merritt, Campaign Director, OR Physicians for Social Responsibility, Regna@oregonpsr.org c: 971.235.7643
Mark Glyde, Resource Media, Mark@resource-media.org c: 206.227.4346
Bruce Amundson, MD, President, WA Physicians for Social Responsibility, jobrucebaa@frontier.com h: 206.542.5690
Seattle, WA – Nearly 300 doctors, nurses and other health professionals today called on Washington Governor Jay Inslee and Oregon Governor Kate Brown to deny permits for proposed new and expanded oil-by-rail facilities. The position statement based on peer-reviewed medical literature examines a broad range of public health and safety risks including air and water pollution, oil spills and clean-up, delayed emergency response, and storage tank fires and explosions. The statement to the Governors has been signed by 289 health professionals so far.
“There is simply no way that the health and safety of residents of these communities can be assured, given the number of dangerous oil trains heading our way and the scale of these massive storage and shipping facilities so close to residential areas,” said Bruce Amundson, a family physician and President of Washington Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR).
If all the proposed new and expanded oil terminals were built, the Northwest could see an increase in oil train traffic coming into the region from current levels of about 19 per week to more than 130 trains per week. Up to 1.5 miles long each, oil trains can block street crossings for 10 minutes or more.
“In trauma care, outcomes drastically worsen for seriously injured patients who need an emergency operation and don’t receive treatment within the ‘golden hour,’ said Pat O’Herron, MD, who practices acute care surgery in Salem, Oregon. “Ten minutes can cost lives or save lives.”
Oil trains are also a significant source of air pollution. Diesel pollution is linked to increased cancer rates particularly in the lung and breast, heart attack and stroke, and contributes 78% of the risk for cancer in airborne toxics in the Puget Sound area. In children, diesel pollution is linked to higher rates of neurodevelopmental disorders, impaired lung development, and increased frequency and severity of asthma.
“The expected surge in oil train traffic will add to already high levels of airborne toxin exposure experienced by many communities along rail lines,” said Mark Vossler, a cardiologist and Chairman of the Department of Medicine at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, WA.
The position statement also looks in-depth at the health impacts of water contamination from oil spills. Crude oil is a complex mixture of thousands of chemical compounds, many of them harmful to human health. Often overlooked is the toxicity of oil dispersants used to clean up spills.
“We have a history of oil spills in our Northwest waters and every day brings the risk of another one,” said Mary Margaret Thomas, a registered nurse who assisted with the clean-up of the BP Deepwater Horizon spill. “I saw first-hand the grave effects of oil dispersants including nausea and vomiting, seizures and memory loss, undiagnosed skin rashes and lesions, and hormonal changes.”
Many ingredients in oil dispersant products listed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are known or suspected toxins which can affect every organ system of the human body.
Findings of the 2014 Marine and Rail Oil Transportation Study from the WA State Dept. of Ecology reflect an overall lack of adequate training, resources, design and regulatory oversight to properly respond to an oil spill given current terminal proposals.
Chicago, Philadelphia and Sacramento, Calif.: These are just a few of the cities within the “blast zones” of mile-long trains carrying flammable crude oil across the country. Twenty-five million Americans live in these vulnerable areas; yet it will be years until dangerous tank cars are retrofitted or retired from the rails, based on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s new safety standards.
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