A train carrying 35 tanks through Horodyshche in Cherkasy Oblast derailed triggering a major oil spill, with 11 tanks catching on fire.
The spill was discovered at 6:35 a.m., reports the State Emergencies Service. Crews cleaned up over 1,250 square meters of the territory and extinguished the fire by 11 a.m. with the help of 230 local emergency personnel and members of Ukraine’s State Emergencies Service.
Horodysche, home to 14,480 residents, was on high alert in the morning as the fire spread to neighboring houses near the railway station. Around five fire units were sent to Horodyshche, located some 142 km from Kyiv, from the neighboring Kirovohrad Oblast to extinguish it. Electricity and gas supply were cut in the morning of Aug. 22.
No casualties were reported from the site, according to local officials. “Around 25 houses were burnt. No injuries are reported,” Mykola Dudnyk, the head of local city council administration told 112 Channel.
While the investigation is underway, it’s unlikely the catastrophe would cause significant penalties for responsible companies or make it to the top ecological inspections.
Several similar accidents in the past did not lead to any major court cases, despite the ecological harm. For instance, British Petroleum oil giant paid as much as $40 billion in fines for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, when more than 200 million gallons of crude oil pumped into water.
The sum included cleanup costs, and settlements as well as an additional $16 billion due to the Clean Water Act. The company also owed around $4.5 billion in penalties to the U.S. government.
‘Weak safety culture’ faulted in fatal Quebec train derailment, fire
By Curtis Tate, McClatchy Washington Bureau, August 19, 2014
Aerial view of charred freight train in Lac-Megantic in Quebec, Canada. | TRANSPORTATION SAFETY BOARD OF CANADA
CHICAGO — Canadian safety investigators on Tuesday blamed a “weak safety culture” and inadequate government oversight for a crude oil train derailment last year in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, that killed 47 people.
In its nearly 200-page report, issued more than 13 months after the deadly crash, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board identified 18 contributing factors.
“Take any one of them out of the equation,” said Wendy Tadros, the board’s chairman, “and the accident may not have happened.”
Among other factors, the investigation found that the train’s sole engineer failed to apply a sufficient number of handbrakes after parking the train on a descending grade several miles from Lac-Megantic, and leaving it unattended for the night.
The engineer applied handbrakes to the train’s five locomotives and two other cars, but investigators concluded that he did not set handbrakes on any of the train’s 72 tank cars loaded with 2 million gallons of Bakken crude oil.
Investigators said the engineer should have set at least 17 handbrakes. Instead, he relied on another braking system in the lead locomotive to hold the train in place. But after local residents reported a fire on the locomotive later that night, firefighters shut the locomotive off, following instructions given by another railroad employee.
Not long after, the train began its runaway descent, reaching a top speed of 65 mph. The train derailed in the center of Lac-Megantic at a point where the maximum allowable speed was 15 mph.
Investigators said that the derailment caused 59 of the 63 tank cars that derailed to puncture, releasing 1.6 million gallons of flammable crude oil into the town, much of which burned. In addition to the 47 fatalities, 2,000 people were evacuated, and 40 buildings and 53 vehicles were destroyed.
The train’s engineer and two other railroad employees are set to go on trial next month. But Tadros noted that the investigation revealed “more than handbrakes, or what the engineer did or didn’t do.”
“Experience has taught us that even the most well-trained and motivated employees make mistakes,” she said.
The Quebec derailment set in motion regulatory changes on both sides of the border to improve the safety of trains carrying crude oil. Sixteen major derailments involving either crude oil or ethanol have occurred since 2006, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
Tadros said the railroad relied on its employees to follow the rules and that regulators relied on the railroads to enforce their own rules. But she said that a complex system requires more attention to safety.
“It’s not enough for a company to have a safety management system on paper,” she said. “It has to work.”
CN derailment near Plaster Rock has left family living in tents
Caleb Levesque and family say CN is to blame for the ongoing issues with their home
CBC News, Aug 08, 2014
Investigators at the scene of the CN derailment in Wapske, near Plaster Rock. (Transportation Safety Board/Twitter)
Family members in Wapske, N.B., say they have been living in tents on their front lawn for more than a month after their house was ruined following a freight train derailment near Plaster Rock in January.
They say CN Rail is to blame.
Caleb Levesque, the son of the property owner, and his family, say their house remains unlivable due to damage from a train derailment back in January.
Jeff Levesque and his son Caleb, whose home was damaged in the CN derailment near Plaster Rock in January, say a carpenter hired by CN has done a botched job of repairs. (CBC)
Levesque says a carpenter hired by CN Rail to fix their house following the derailment left the house worse than before due to poor craftsmanship.
The initial heat of the train derailment melted much of the siding on the house. The carpenter replaced the siding but Levesque says the carpenter CN Rail hired didn’t do it right.
“So all the siding is falling off, buckling. So we’ve been getting a lot of water when it rains,” he said.
Levesque said when post-tropical storm Arthur arrived, the water came right through the new siding, leaving puddles on the floor.
“Completely soaked it, just big puddles on the floor. The inside of the house is soaked, damaged. It’s ridiculous,” he said. “It smells so bad you don’t even want to go in the house.”
Residents wary of mould
Levesque says the most concerning thing now is the mould throughout the house.
He says so far CN Rail has refused to fix the ongoing problem.
Levesque is staying in a tent with his girlfriend, their dog and cat. His father is in another tent, all on their front lawn.
Trains are rolling again through the section that had been closed due to the derailment. (Matt Bingley/CBC)
To shower and launder, they’ve been driving to the house of a family friend. For cooking, they’ve made due with just a barbecue, without the use of a stove or fridge.
“It sucks. It’s not so bad when you’re just camping, but when you have to do it for over a month … it’s hard,” said Levesque.
He says CN Rail officials should acknowledge the unacceptable conditions their hired carpenter left the home in, and pay to make it right.
“They took the responsibility on when the train went by our house and derailed, they took the responsibility to fix everything that they had damaged,” said Levesque.
The Levesques got an initial quote on the damage from restoration specialist Nicholas Mann, of ServiceMaster Restore.
Mann estimated it would cost about $160,000 to fix the home properly. Levesque said CN Rail offered him $2,500 after receiving the report.
“Right now all we want is to get our house fixed and everything that was in the house replaced,” said Levesque. “We just want our house fixed so we can go home.”
Levesque says his lawyer hopes to meet with CN Rail in September to sort out a solution.
Train jumped the tracks
A 122-car train derailed on Jan. 7 with 19 cars and a locomotive jumping the tracks.
Five derailed tanker cars were carrying crude oil from Western Canada to an Irving Oil refinery in Saint John, N.B., while four other tankers carried liquefied petroleum gas.
About 150 people living within a two-kilometre radius of the crash site were forced to leave their homes for several days.
A Transportation Safety Board investigation found one of the wheels on the 13th car broke from “fatigue.”
Executive Dow Constantine says a training exercise helps but the region needs a reduction or elimination of the dangerous trains.
August 7, 2014
Tank cars hours after they derailed under the Magnolia Bridge in Interbay. Bill Lucia
Five rail cars carrying petroleum crude oil derail and catch fire near Boeing Field, about five miles south of downtown Seattle. That was the scenario during a tabletop exercise King County held Tuesday.
The planning exercise took place less than two weeks after three tank cars carrying highly flammable crude oil from North Dakota derailed in Seattle’s Interbay neighborhood. That incident was relatively benign. None of the cars leaked or caught fire. The mock scenario discussed on Tuesday was designed to be far more precarious.
“This is an emerging public safety threat,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine at a press conference on Wednesday. “And we need to have our emergency preparedness folks really up to speed on it and well-coordinated. And that’s what yesterday’s exercise was all about.”
The exercise highlighted some of the complications responders might face when dealing with burning tank cars of crude oil, such as monitoring toxic smoke, transporting evacuated people and delivering information to the public.
Between eight and 13 trains operated by BNSF Railway Co. pass through King County each week carrying crude oil, according to information the railroad released in June to the Washington Military Department.
A local fire chief involved in the exercise acknowledged on Wednesday that responders would most likely have to let some of the fuel burn off if one of those trains crashed and five tank cars were ablaze.
The cars commonly used to transport petroleum crude oil have a capacity of about 30,000 gallons apiece. In past wrecks, un-breached cars, heated by surrounding flames, have ruptured in dramatic explosions.
“We’ll want to probably suppress the fire enough to assess the integrity and exposure to the other tank cars. We’d certainly want to minimize life risks,” said Mark Chubb, Fire Chief of King County Fire District 20.
“It’s unusual for all five tank cars to breach,” he also said.
Battling flames would not be the only problem that burning tank cars of crude oil would present for responders.
“We have to be mindful of the impact of the smoke column on aviation,” Chubb said. He also noted that a large oil train fire could create problems on Interstate 5, even if the smoke and flames do not reach the highway. “The distraction of an event of this scale,” he said, “is going to be highly disruptive.”
Chubb added: “After you grapple with the fact that it’s a fire and it’s going to go on a while, it’s all about logistics.”
Walt Hubbard, director the King County Office of Emergency Management, viewed Tuesday’s exercise as helpful, because it got people from different agencies together in the same place, talking about how they would coordinate and communicate if there were a serious crude oil train accident.
In addition to emergency responders, staff from local transportation and public health departments attended, as did officials from federal agencies, such as the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Representatives from BNSF were also on hand. The company operated the train that derailed in Interbay.
For Hubbard, having the railroad representatives at the exercise was important.
“We want to keep them engaged,” he said. Hubbard specifically pointed to dialogue that took place between BNSF representatives and fire officials about what kinds of equipment and people the railroad could deploy after an accident.
“That was a very good exchange,” he said.
Another topic that came up during the exercise was evacuations. If a rail car of crude oil is on fire, U.S. Department of Transportation guidelines recommend that responders consider evacuating people within a half-mile of the accident scene.
The risk of an explosion would be one immediate reason to evacuate the area around the fire. But Chubb, the King County fire chief, also noted that toxic smoke is a hazard, and said that responders would consult with officials from public health agencies and the EPA when considering whether to tell people to leave the area.
