Category Archives: Explosion

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Lac-Mégantic

$200 million settlement money announced for victims of Lac-Mégantic rail disaster

Repost from The Globe and Mail, Toronto
[Editor: Significant quote: “‘The main three bad actors, World Fuels, Canadian Pacific Railway and Irving Oil, aren’t contributing a penny to this settlement. We’re going to keep going after them very hard in American court,’ said Mr. Flowers.”  – RS]

Settlement money announced for victims of Lac-Mégantic rail disaster

Justin Giovannetti, Jan. 09 2015
Smoke rises from tanker cars in downtown Lac-Megantic, Que., on July 6, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson
Smoke rises from tanker cars in downtown Lac-Megantic, Que., on July 6, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

The families of those who died in the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster will have access to a $200-million (U.S.) fund, according to details released Friday from the bankruptcy case of the railroad responsible for the 2013 tragedy in eastern Quebec.

The fund still needs to be approved by Canadian and American courts before the first cheques are mailed to the families of the 47 people killed in the crash. A firefighter who died by suicide three months after the disaster was added to the list of victims. Money could flow as soon as this spring.

“The families of the victims need to live with this disaster every day. Those in town have gone into debt to try to get back on our feet and rebuild. If this could let us start over our lives on the right foot, that would be great, but we haven’t seen any money yet,” Yannick Gagné, the owner of the Musi-Café bar where the majority of the victims died, told The Globe on Friday.

Mr. Gagné has rebuilt the Musi-Café, but he’s still awaiting the help he says he was promised in the weeks after the disaster.

Just after 1 a.m. on July 6, 2013, a train carrying 72 cars of crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in New Brunswick careened while unmanned into the centre of town and derailed. A series of powerful explosions then levelled much of the city’s once picturesque downtown.

The settlement money announced Friday was drawn not only from the liquidation of the Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, the firm at the centre of the derailment, but also from a number of companies that extracted the oil, built the rail cars and leased them to shippers.

According to Peter Flowers, a Chicago-based lawyer involved in a wrongful death lawsuit, talks are continuing about how much of the $200-million will go to the families of victims.

“The money goes to the wrongful death victims – a class-action filed in Canada – those who suffered economic and emotional damages, and to the provincial and federal governments’ environmental claims,” Mr. Flowers said.

Crews are still demolishing buildings in downtown Lac-Mégantic and locals remain jittery about how much compensation they’ll receive. Property owners downtown have received $37-million from the government. But victims of the disaster have so far received nothing from the companies.

While bankruptcy trustee Robert Keach said he is seeking $500-million for the victims’ fund before Monday’s filing deadline, Mr. Flowers said the decision not to pay by three of the largest corporations linked to the disaster was responsible for the shortfall.

“The main three bad actors, World Fuels, Canadian Pacific Railway and Irving Oil, aren’t contributing a penny to this settlement. We’re going to keep going after them very hard in American court,” said Mr. Flowers.

The three companies have so far denied any responsibility for the 2013 disaster.

More Related to this Story

Bay Area Refineries, Benicia Industrial Park, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fracking, Oil spill, Valero Benicia Refinery

The Fight to Stop a Boom in California’s Crude by Rail

Repost from The Huffington Post
[Editor: Our friend here in Benicia, Ed Ruszel, has been featured in numerous online blogs and news outlets in this story by Tara Lohan.  This is an abbreviated version.  The article mistakenly gives a link to The Benicia Independent rather than Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community.  BSHC can be found at SafeBenicia.org.  – RS]

The Fight to Stop a Boom in California’s Crude by Rail

By Tara Lohan, 01/08/2015

Ed Ruszel’s workday is a soundtrack of whirling, banging, screeching — the percussion of wood being cut, sanded and finished. He’s the facility manager for the family business, Ruszel Woodworks. But one sound each day roars above the cacophony of the woodshop: the blast of the train horn as cars cough down the Union Pacific rail line that runs just a few feet from the front of his shop in an industrial park in Benicia, California.

Most days the train cargo is beer, cars, steel, propane or petroleum coke. But soon, two trains of 50 cars each may pass by every day carrying crude oil to a refinery owned by neighboring Valero Energy, which is hoping to build a new rail terminal at the refinery that would bring 70,000 barrels a day by train — or nearly 3 million gallons.

And it’s a sign of the times.

Crude-by-rail has increased 4,000 percent across the country since 2008 and California is feeling the effects. By 2016 the amount of crude by rail entering the state is expected to increase by a factor of 25. That’s assuming the industry gets its way in creating more crude-by-rail stations at refineries and oil terminals. And that’s no longer looking like a sure thing.

Valero’s proposed project in Benicia is just one of many in the area underway or under consideration. All the projects are now facing public pushback–and not just from individuals in communities, but from a united front spanning hundreds of miles. Benicia sits on the Carquinez Strait in the northeastern reaches of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here, about 20 miles south of Napa’s wine country and 40 miles north of San Francisco, the oil industry may have found a considerable foe.

2015-01-08-16000050785_df993da9dc_z.jpg

Photo by Sarah Craig

A recent boom in “unconventional fuels” has triggered an increase in North American sources in the last few years. This has meant more fracked crude from North Dakota’s Bakken shale and diluted bitumen from Alberta’s tar sands.

Unit trains are becoming a favored way to help move this cargo. These are trains in which the entire cargo — every single car — is one product. And in this case that product happens to be highly flammable.

This is one of the things that has Ed Ruszel concerned. He doesn’t think the tank cars are safe enough to transport crude oil in the advent of a serious derailment. If a derailment occurs on a train and every single car (up to 100 cars long) is carrying volatile crude, the dangers increase exponentially. In 2013, more crude was spilled in train derailments than in the prior three decades combined, and there were four fiery explosions in North America in a year’s span, the worst being the derailment that killed 47 people and incinerated half the downtown in Lac Megantic, Quebec in July 2013.

Public Comments

In Benicia, a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) regarding the Valero project was released in June 2014 and promptly slammed by everyone from the state’s Attorney General Kamala Harris to the local group Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community because it left out crucial information and failed to address the full scope of the project.

One of the biggest omissions in Valero’s DEIR was Union Pacific not being named as an official partner in the project. With the trains arriving via its rail lines, all logistics will come down to the railroad. Not only that, but the federal power granted to railroad companies preempts local and regional authority.This preemption is one of the biggest hurdles for communities that don’t want to see crude-by-rail come through their neighborhoods or want better safeguards.

The DEIR also doesn’t identify exactly what kind of North American crude would be arriving and from where. Different kinds of crude have different health and safety risks. Diluted bitumen can be nearly impossible to clean up in the event of a spill and Bakken crude has proved more explosive than other crude because of its chemical composition. It’s likely that some of the crude coming to Valero’s refinery would be from either or both sources.

Public comments on the DEIR closed on Sept. 15, and now all eyes are on the planning department to see what happens next in Benicia.

But the Valero project is just the tip of the iceberg in California.

In nearby Pittsburgh, 20 miles east of Benicia, residents pushed back against plans from WestPac Energy. The company had planned to lease land from BNSF Railway and build a new terminal to bring in a 100-car unit train of crude each day. The project is currently stalled.

But Phillips 66 has plans for a new rail unloading facility at a refinery in Nipomo, 200 miles south of the Bay Area in San Luis Obispo County, that would bring in five unit trains of crude a week, with 50,000 barrels per train.

Further south in Kern County in the heart of oil country, Plains All American just opened a crude by rail terminal that is permitted for a 100-car unit train each day. Another nearby project, Alon USA, received permission from the county for twice as much but is being challenged by lawsuits from environmental groups.

Closer to home, unit trains of Bakken crude are already arriving to a rail terminal owned by Kinder Morgan in Richmond. Kinder Morgan had been transporting ethanol, but the Bay Area Air Quality Management District allowed Kinder Morgan to offload unit trains of Bakken crude into tanker trucks.

2015-01-08-15812706088_224545d0cb_z.jpg

Photo by Sarah Craig

With all this crude-by-rail activity, some big picture thinking would be helpful. As Attorney General Kamala Harris wrote about the Benicia project, “There’s no consideration of cumulative impacts that could affect public safety and the environment by the proliferation of crude-by-rail projects proposed in California.”

A longer version of this story appeared on Faces of Fracking.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Government regulation, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Oil Industry, Rail industry

Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself – a record of denial and deceit, in photos

Repost from Sightline Daily
[Editor: These images would be great for posters  (see below) – and the author speaks for me when he writes, “Government regulators have been slow to act, their responses painfully milquetoast. As a result, much of what I do involves research into the often-complex details of federal rulemaking procedures, rail car design standards, insurance policies, and the like—all the issues that Sightline is shining a light on….Yet on some level it’s not about any of that. It’s about a reckless and unaccountable oil industry that—in the most literal and obvious way—profits by putting our lives at risk. Every time I hear one of their accountability-shirking lines, I can’t help recalling images from those tragedies and near-tragedies.”  – RS]

Oil Trains: The Industry Speaks for Itself – a record of denial and deceit, in photos

By Eric de Place and Keiko Budech, December 30, 2014

A year and a half after an oil train inferno ended 47 lives in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, the crude-by-rail industry rolls on, virtually unimpeded. It’s hard not to feel horrified when, one after another, we register the place names of oil train explosions—Aliceville, Alabama; Casselton, View PostNorth Dakota; Lynchburg, Virginia—as grim warnings of what could happen in so many other North American communities.

Government regulators have been slow to act, their responses painfully milquetoast. As a result, much of what I do involves research into the often-complex details of federal rulemaking procedures, rail car design standards, insurance policies, and the like—all the issues that Sightline is shining a light on.

Yet on some level it’s not about any of that. It’s about a reckless and unaccountable oil industry that—in the most literal and obvious way—profits by putting our lives at risk. Every time I hear one of their accountability-shirking lines, I can’t help recalling images from those tragedies and near-tragedies. The juxtaposition is startling that we decided to undertake a small photo project to capture it. We hope that you’ll find the following useful in your own work, and if so, that you’ll share the images with your own networks.

It’s a practically a given that we’ll hear more empty reassurances and lies from oil and rail executives in the new year, and as growing numbers of oil trains crisscross the continent, there’s every likelihood we’ll have another catastrophe to catalog. To grasp the magnitude of the oil industry’s cynicism, it’s best to hear them in their own words.

Lynchburg, VA, Derailment by LuAnn Hunt
Lynchburg, VA, Derailment by LuAnn Hunt
Aliceville, AL, Derailment, by John Wathen
Aliceville, AL, Derailment, by John Wathen
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by David Charron
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by David Charron
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lac-Mégantic Derailment by TSB Canada
Lynchburg, VA, Derailment by Michael Cover
Lynchburg, VA, Derailment by Michael Cover
Explosion, Fire, Rail tank cars

Fire and explosion with injuries at Atchison, Kansas rail yard

Repost from NewsPressNOW.com, St. Joseph, MO
[Editor: original news reports said that the tank car exploded.  Now officials are calling it a fire and “over-pressure” in the building.  Raw news video footage shows fire emerging at the top of a tank car, so it is clear that the tank car was involved.  KSHB Kansas City reported that the building is used to prepare railcar services for painting.  As of today, no one is reporting whether the tank car was a DOT-111, and no one has disclosed the nature of the burning fuel.   – RS]

Explosion near Atchison deemed accident

Two injured employees upgraded to fair condition
By Jeremy Lyons FOX 26 KNPN, December 12, 2014

An explosion at a railroad contracting company just south of Atchison, Kan., has been deemed an accident.

“The fire marshal’s office did do a complete investigation of the building and they have determined there is nothing criminal in the building,” Atchison County Sheriff Jack Laurie said. “So they have released the building back to GBW, and whether or not any other investigators will be coming in or not, we do not know that at this point.”

The explosion Thursday afternoon at GBW Rail Services, which sent nine employees to the hospital, proved not to be in a rail car, as previously reported by authorities.

The accident occurred inside of the building. However, the contents inside the rail car have not been ruled out as a contributing factor.

“The actual rail car itself did not explode. There was an explosion inside the building and I was corrected on ‘explosion’ as well, as it was an over-pressure is what they called it,” Mr. Laurie said. “The over-pressure meaning that the building expanded to some type.”

The sheriff couldn’t comment on exactly what over-pressurization was and the fire investigators could not be reached for comment.

Two men who were admitted to the University of Kansas Hospital in critical condition were upgraded to fair condition Friday, but their names have not been released.

“There’s a lot of debris, insulation, just a lot of materials inside there,” he said. “When walking out of that scene, it’s hard to believe that everybody actually did walk out of that area.”

All other employees inside the building at the time were accounted for. Most were treated and released.