Union Pacific Railroad’s J.R. Davis Yard in Roseville is the the largest rail facility on the West Coast, and a major train staging area. The Roseville Yard would be the location for receiving and dispatching crude oil trains in Northern California if approved by Benicia’s City Council.
A few alert citizens from Roseville have written letters and attended hearings in Benicia to oppose Valero’s dangerous and dirty crude by rail proposal. Perhaps this training exercise (from 7AM to 1PM on May 18) will be another wake up call for the people of Roseville to the danger of transporting crude by rail to Benicia.
Mass casualty exercise planned for May 18 in Roseville
Low flying helicopters, scores of first responders, various emergency vehicles, sirens and other loud noises, and dozens of people made up to look like accident victims can be expected in Roseville May 18, as firefighters and law enforcement officers from throughout Placer County will team up to practice and ensure preparedness for a mass casualty incident.
Placer County’s Office of Emergency Services is holding the training exercise to give first responders from various agencies the opportunity to practice working together and test how well they can come together in a crisis. It is also a great chance to test the county’s recently finalized oil-by-rail response guide, which was developed to aid our first responder fire and law enforcement community and specialized response teams in the unlikely event an oil train disaster were to occur here.
“We want to get the word out now to as many people as possible about this exercise to avoid causing any panic on the day of the drill,” said John McEldowney, program manager for Placer County Office of Emergency Services. “The opportunity for all of these various groups to get hands-on experience in a safe but realistic-as-possible practice setting is crucial to making sure we are ready for whatever disasters come our way. But that does, unfortunately, come with some disturbance to the neighborhood.”
Anyone in the area of PFE Road and Hilltop Circle in Roseville between the hours of 7 a.m. and 1 p.m. can expect to see a significant amount of activity that could appear very realistic, including a simulated train accident, a simulated hazardous materials spill, many accident ‘victims’ made up to appear injured, and helicopters transporting people to hospitals. People are encouraged to avoid this area, if at all possible, due to the large volume of emergency vehicles responding to this area for the exercise.
“We also hope that anyone who lives, works or plays in Placer County will take this opportunity to register for our Placer Alert system,” McEldowney added. “Placer Alert will notify you by either a phone call, text or email – whatever your preference is – in the case of an actual emergency.”
Lac-Mégantic sends sympathy, donations to Fort McMurray
Ingrid Peritz, May 05, 2016 2:59PM EDT, Last updated May 05, 2016 7:48PM EDT
An ever-changing, volatile situation is fraying the nerves of residents and officials alike as a massive wildfire continues to bear down on Fort McMurray. (JASON FRANSON/THE CANADIAN PRESS)
In their time of need, the people of Lac-Mégantic got support from across Canada to help cope with the disastrous aftermath of a deadly train derailment. Now the Quebec town wants to give back, by helping the victims of the Fort McMurray wildfires.
The mayor of Lac-Mégantic says his town of 5,900 will make a donation to support residents whose lives have been upturned by the devastating blazes in Alberta.
“In 2013, all of Canada helped Lac-Mégantic. Now it’s what we want to do [for Fort McMurray],” Mayor Jean-Guy Cloutier said in an interview on Thursday. “After our catastrophe, a lot of citizens sent us messages of courage, determination and resilience. We want to send them the same thing. They will need it.”
Aid began to pour into Lac-Mégantic in the days and months after a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in the heart of Lac-Mégantic, killing 47 people and obliterating much of the town centre. Nearly three years later, the Red Cross has collected $14.8-million for the town and aid workers are still present in the struggling community.
To Mr. Cloutier, the “images of horror” in Fort McMurray are darkly reminiscent of the apocalyptic scenes in Lac-Mégantic in the early hours of July 6, 2013, when the tankers burst into flames.
“We can only feel solidarity,” the mayor said.
Mr. Cloutier and the region’s local MP, Conservative Luc Berthold, have joined together to call on people to support Fort McMurray through the Canadian Red Cross.
Mr. Berthold said “all of Canada mobilized for us,” and now, “it’s our turn.”
“These people need us and will need us,” Mr. Berthold, who represents Mégantic-L’Érable, said in a statement. “I want to put all efforts forward so that we respond rapidly to the needs of the citizens of Alberta.”
Residents of Lac-Mégantic are still suffering the economic and health-related after-effects of the disaster.
Through the Red Cross, more than 3,200 people in Lac-Mégantic have received support, including 256 people who lost their jobs, 113 families who have grieved loved ones, and 32 children who lost one or both parents.
“We know that in one year, people in Fort McMurray will still have problems. These are major catastrophes,” Mr. Cloutier said.
On Thursday, the Quebec government also sent four water bombers to Alberta from the province’s forest-fire protection service. Premier Philippe Couillard called the fires in Alberta and forced evacuation of 80,000 people a “cataclysmic” situation.
“Firemen, airplanes, whatever is needed, we will provide. These are fellow Canadians and we want to be there with them,” the Premier said.
BOMB TRAINS – THE SCARIEST THREAT YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT
They’re explosive. Pervasive. And their movements are cloaked in secrecy. Their nickname? Bomb trains. And they roll through the heart of Chicago.
A train carrying hazardous material, potentially crude oil, heads south through Chinatown’s Ping Tom Memorial Park, photographed at dusk on March 15, 2016. PHOTO: JON LOWNENSTEIN
BY Ted C. Fishman, April 25, 2016 9:35 A.M.
They could not look more ominous. The long coal-black tubes announce themselves by their distinctive shape and color, their markings too small to read from the street. The 30,000-gallon tank cars roll, sometimes 100 at a time, in trains of up to one mile in length. Their cargo? Crude oil—as much as three million gallons per train. Nearly all of it is light sweet Bakken crude, a type that is particularly explosive. In whole, these trains constitute likely the biggest, heaviest, and longest combustibles to ever traverse America, and they do so routinely. More pass through Chicago than any other big metro area. Their blast potential has earned them a terrifying nickname: bomb trains.
Stand long enough at 18th and Wentworth, on the traffic bridge that separates the newer sections of Chinatown from the largely residential South Loop, and you will spot the tank cars wending their way across neighborhoods on the Near South and West Sides, past playgrounds, schoolyards, and row after row of houses. An estimated 40 of these trains cut through the metro area weekly. There’s no public information on exact routes or timetables; revealing their paths, the logic goes, might aid potential saboteurs, a real risk in an age of terrorism.
Until recently, crude on the rails was relatively rare. But since 2008, when Bakken oil began rolling out of newly active fields in the United States—North Dakota is the biggest producer—and toward Eastern refineries, the number of oil tank car shipments has grown 50-fold. That’s pushed the number of accidents up, too. According to U.S. government data, from 1975 to 2012, an average of 25 crude oil spills from tank cars occurred on the rails each year. In 2014, that number rose to 141. Most incidents are minor, such as small leaks. But in cases of a major derailment, the result can be catastrophic, even fatal (see “Terrifying Incidents,” below).
Chicago found that in the last three years there were 17 derailments of crude oil trains in North America significant enough to generate news coverage. In eight of them, the tank cars blew, sending fireballs hundreds of feet into the air, filling the sky with black mushroom clouds. In the most severe cases, the flames produced are so hot that firefighters almost inevitably choose to let them burn out, which can take days, rather than extinguish them. (The Wall Street Journal calculated that a single tank car of sweet crude carries the energy equivalent of two million sticks of dynamite.) Even when there are no explosions, the spills can wreak havoc on the environment: five of the 17 accidents resulted in the pollution of major waterways, affecting thousands of people across the continent.
Chicago is particularly vulnerable. As the Western Hemisphere’s busiest freight hub, the city has become a center for crude oil traffic, too. High volumes, combined with a densely populated urban setting, have watchdogs such as the Natural Resources Defense Council alarmed. Henry Henderson, the NRDC’s Midwest program director, sums up the threat this way: “Trains with highly explosive materials are traveling through the city on aging tracks in cars that are easily punctured, which can result in devastating explosions.”
Many of these trains cut through what were once industrial rail yards in the city and suburbs. Over the last 35 years, however, much of that property has turned into residential and commercial clusters. “You should assume that if you live in the Chicago area, near a railroad track, that there are trains carrying Bakken crude oil,” says Jim Healy, a member of the DuPage County Board.
Though Chicago has so far been spared a crude oil train crash, the potential of one presents a horrifying picture. One particular nightmare is emblazoned in the minds of first responders, and regulators. On July 6, 2013, a runaway crude oil train, which had been left unattended, sped through the center of the small Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic. Sixty-three cars derailed. Forty-seven people were killed, some literally incinerated while they drank at a bar.
The catastrophic 2013 derailment in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic PHOTO: PAUL CHIASSON/THE CANADIAN PRESS
Emergency responders in the Chicago area say they are confident any derailment here could be managed before it reached neighborhood-destroying levels. “Crude is not the threat that everyone says it is,” says Gene Ryan, chief of planning for Cook County’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. Ryan and a group of first responders looked closely at 29 major accidents across North America and found that “even though the crude is full of all kinds of volatile materials, the cars did not completely blow apart and hit homes,” he says.
But in a city as dense as Chicago, it takes only one freak incident to have a titanic effect on the urban landscape. Just last year, on March 5, on a stretch of track near Galena, Illinois, 21 BNSF Railway train cars carrying 630,000 gallons of Bakken crude derailed and tumbled down an embankment. Five of them burned for three days. At the time, James Joseph, director of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency, told the Chicago Tribune: “We’re fortunate this occurred where it did, in a remote area, and there were no homes around it.”
Experts believe the train was likely headed for Chicago, 160 miles to the east.
Historically, oil in America moved from south (think Texas and Louisiana) to north mostly through pipelines, the safest conduits for it. When newly deployed technologies such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing—or fracking—opened access to sources of oil in North Dakota and elsewhere in the West, few pipelines were in place to move the crude to the refineries back east that could handle it. (A proposed pipeline for Bakken crude running from Stanley, North Dakota, to Patoka, Illinois, has faced political and jurisdictional challenges.) With limited alternatives, oil producers and refiners turned to railroads. In 2014, trains carried 11 percent of the nation’s crude oil.
So what paths do these tank cars take? The exact routes are state secrets. But assuming 40 trains, carrying three million gallons of crude oil each, pass through the Chicago area weekly, that means more than 17 million gallons roll through the city daily. It’s an inexact count, and the NRDC has continued to push to get accurate information. “A lot of people don’t know their residences are adjacent to hazardous cargo,” says Henderson. “The issue should be subject to public discussion, but the public has been cut off from it.”
Using freight maps and firsthand reporting, the West Coast environmental advocacy group Stand has assembled a national map of the most common crude oil train routes and created an interactive website that allows users to determine how far any U.S. location is from these routes. For example, according to the site, half of Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood, home to 32,000 people and U.S. Cellular Field, falls squarely within a half-mile “evacuation zone,” established by the U.S. Department of Transportation for areas vulnerable to crude oil train explosions. Stretch that to the one-mile “impact zone” and you include the Illinois Institute of Technology, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Cook County Juvenile Court.
It’s not just Chicago proper that sees traffic from crude oil trains. They cut through Joliet, Naperville, Barrington, Aurora, and dozens of other suburbs. “I can look outside my office and see them passing through downtown,” says Tom Weisner, Aurora’s mayor. “About 120,000 tanker cars a year now come through our city.”
Last April, the U.S. Department of Transportation ordered a maximum speed for crude oil trains of 40 miles an hour in populous areas. The majority of railroads run them 10 miles slower than that, an acknowledgment, in effect, that the trains aren’t invulnerable. Most often, it is a flawed track, wheel, or axle that leads to a derailment, which can then cause tank cars to rupture.
Bakken crude was first shipped using tank cars designed for nonhazardous materials and ill suited to its volatility. (Most tank cars are owned not by the railroads but by the oil producers and refiners, such as Valero Energy and Phillips 66, that ship crude.) Those first-generation tank cars, called DOT-111s, have almost all been subjected to new protections, including having their shells reinforced with steel a sixteenth of an inch thicker than used in earlier models. Federal regulations passed in 2015 mandate that by 2025 haulers must replace all cars with new models featuring even thicker steel shells and other safety measures.
Railroads know the dangers. In addition to the human and environmental costs, one terrible accident could put a railroad company out of business. Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, which ran the train that devastated Lac-Mégantic, could only cover a fraction of its hundreds of millions of dollars in liabilities and went bankrupt.
The big railroads hauling crude in the United States and Canada have spent heavily on new technology to make their lines safer, including an Association of American Rails app called AskRail, which identifies the contents and location of rail cars carrying hazardous materials. What railroad companies cannot yet do is reroute trains away from the populous areas whose growth their lines once spurred. There simply isn’t the infrastructure in place to do so.
And while the American Association of Railroads reports that rail companies have spent $600 billion since 1980 improving their current routes, even well-maintained tracks remain vulnerable. Department of Transportation accident data shows that broken rails were the main cause of freight derailments from 2001 to 2010. What’s more, the Federal Rail Administration, the agency charged with overseeing the integrity of America’s tracks, says it can only monitor less than 1 percent of the federally regulated rail system annually due to a shortage of manpower.
“There’s a lackadaisical attitude among people, including officials, about infrastructure that is not up to the threats against it, even as the threats are manifesting,” says Henderson. “You saw that in Flint, Michigan, and in other places with drinking water. And now with crude oil trains, which deal with very serious materials moving [on a system] not adequate to protect people from mistakes.”
10 Terrifying incidents
With crude oil rail shipments growing 50-fold in the last eight years, the number of accidents has risen too. Below, 10 of the most damaging. —Katie Campbell
JULY 6, 2013
Lac-Mégantic, Quebec
In the worst recent accident, 63 cars on a runaway train derailed in the heart of this Canadian town. The resulting blast and flames killed 47 residents and destroyed 30 buildings in the small downtown.
NOVEMBER 8, 2013
Aliceville, Alabama
Outside this tiny Southern town, 25 cars spilled nearly 750,000 gallons of oil into surrounding wetlands, creating an environmental nightmare.
DECEMBER 30, 2013
Casselton, North Dakota
After two trains collided, 18 cars on the one carrying crude oil spilled nearly 400,000 gallons.
FEBRUARY 13, 2014
Vandergrift, Pennsylvania
Enroute from Chicago, a train went off the track and crashed into a downtown industrail building.
Lynchburg PHOTO: STEVE HELBER/AP
APRIL 30, 2014
Lynchburg, Virginia
A train from Chicago derailed near a pedestrian waterfront area, sending three cars—and 30,000 gallons of oil—into the James River.
FEBRUARY 16, 2015
Mount Carbon, West Virginia
After 27 cars went off the track during a snowstorm and exploded, the fire burned for four days.
Galena PHOTO: MIKE BURLEY/AP/TELEGRAPH HERALD
MARCH 5, 2015
Galena, Illinois
A train likely headed to Chicago derailed on a remote stretch of track, sending cars down an embankment. Even though the cars had been reinforced with half an inch of steel, the fire burned for three days.
MARCH 7, 2015
Gogama, Ontario
Just one month after a derailment in the same area, five cars fell into the Makami River, leaking oil into waterways used by locals for drinking and fishing.
MAY 6, 2015
Heimdal, North Dakota
Five cars exploded and spilled nearly 60,000 gallons of oil. Fire crews from three nearby towns were called to help fight the blaze.
JULY 16, 2015
Culbertson, Montana
Twenty cars toppled from the track, with three spilling a total of 35,000 gallons of oil, forcing 30 people to evacuate.
Benicia Oil-by-Rail Battle Hinges on Legal Controversy
Opponents of oil-by-rail shipments want the city to block a proposed Valero facility, but Valero says the city lacks this power.
By Jean Tepperman
Andres Soto said Benicia shouldn’t wait on federal regulators to reject Valero’s oil-by-rail project. BROOKE ANDERSON
An oil-by-rail facility that Valero wants to build at its Benicia refinery has been stalled by opponents concerned about environmental impacts and safety issues for over three years now. But Valero and an attorney working on contract for the City of Benicia claim that the city cannot stop the project because federal railroad law preempts the city’s powers. Project opponents say this is a flawed interpretation of federal law, however, and that Valero’s new oil facility should be cancelled.
Valero’s original proposal was presented in 2013 as a simple plan to build a couple of rail spurs from the main railroad line to the company’s refinery, and the city announced its intention to approve the plan without doing an environmental impact review. A torrent of opposition greeted this announcement, however. As a result, the city was forced to conduct three environmental impact reviews and hold public hearings. Then, last February, Benicia’s planning commission unanimously reversed approval for the project. Now the oil facility is pending a final decision by the city council.
Supporters say the crude-by-rail project is necessary to preserve Valero’s — and Benicia’s — economic viability and the nation’s energy independence. Opponents say it will cause increased air pollution and environmental destruction, and that expanding oil-by-rail transportation increases the risk of catastrophic accidents like explosions and fires due to derailment.
But according to Bradley Hogin, a contract attorney advising the city, the federal government’s authority over railroads means that local governments are not allowed to make regulations that affect rail traffic — even indirectly. And when they’re deciding on a local project, cities are not allowed to consider the impact of anything that happens on a rail line, claims Hogin. The legal doctrine Hogin is referring to is called federal preemption.
But other attorneys call Hogin’s interpretation of federal laws “extreme” and say that the city has every right to block the project if it so chooses. Environmentalists have also pointed out that Hogin has represented oil companies against environmental and community groups in the past. Project opponents say Hogin is biased in favor of Valero, and is not giving the city accurate legal advice. When asked if Hogin’s previous work suggests that he could be biased, Benicia City Attorney Heather McLaughlin said no. “I think he has had great experience in the refinery industry and I think that’s been helpful for us,” she said.
Hogin’s legal argument that cities are preempted from influencing oil-by-rail projects has major national implications. As the shipment of crude oil via railroad has grown in recent years, so have the number of derailments, oil spills, fires, and explosions, including the 2013 explosion that killed forty-seven people in Lac Megantic, Quebec. As a result, communities across North America have demanded that local authorities stop rail shipments of crude oil through their towns. In addition to Benicia, San Luis Obispo County is currently in the midst of a battle over crude by rail.
“Hogin is making a case that would affect cities across the nation dealing with crude by rail,” said Marilyn Bardet, a founder of Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community. “They [are trying] to create a legal precedent here.”
Many lawyers, including California Attorney General Kamala Harris, say the exact extent of federal preemption of local authority is still being worked out in the courts. In her legal opinion on the Valero project’s environmental review, Harris cited several cases in which local governments were allowed to implement health and safety regulations involving railroads.
Several lawyers submitted opinions and testified in Benicia City Council hearings held on April 4 and 5 challenging Hogin’s interpretation. And in one of the hearings, Berkeley City Council member Linda Maio told her Benicia counterparts that the city council has the right to make its own land-use decisions. “This is in your town and you’ve been elected to see to the health and safety of your citizens,” said Maio.
Valero and its critics have been arguing about the extent to which Benicia’s authority is preempted by federal law since last summer. After the planning commission rejected Valero’s project in February, the company showed up at the March city council meeting with a surprise request: that the council delay voting on the project until Valero has a chance to make an appeal to the federal Surface Transportation Board (STB), which regulates railroads.
That didn’t sound right to Benicia resident Andres Soto, who works for Communities for a Better Environment, an environmental group opposed to the project, so Soto called the STB and talked to staff attorney Gabriel Mayer. In a report Soto submitted to the city council, he wrote that Mayer told him that the STB is not the final authority on federal preemption, and that the state and federal courts serve that purpose.
Soto also said that the STB deals with disputes among railroads, and since Valero is not a railroad, it’s unlikely the agency would take its case. Many speakers at last week’s hearings urged the city council to deny Valero’s bid for a delay and reject the project immediately.
But project supporters emphasized the economic benefits of bringing crude oil by rail to Benicia. Berman Olbadia of the Western States Petroleum Association, an oil industry lobbying group, said that Valero creates jobs and generates tax revenue. Michael Wolf, of Ageion Energy Services, said that oil by rail reduces California’s dependence on foreign oil.
Later, however, Greg Karras, senior scientist at Communities for a Better Environment, said North American crude would create serious new problems that the environmental reviews for the Valero project did not address. Canadian tar sands produce very heavy oil with an extra load of toxic chemicals, said Karras. In addition, refining tar sands oil would dramatically increase the refinery’s emissions of carbon dioxide, the main pollutant causing global warming. The other major type of North American crude from North Dakota’s Bakken fields produces highly explosive oil. Trains carrying Bakken crude have been involved in a number of fires and explosions.
People from “uprail” communities have also turned out at Benicia hearings to oppose the Valero project. “The oil trains will pass through our downtown and pass my house,” said Frances Burke, a resident of Davis. “We will have the fumes and particulate matter from increased daily trains. I’m also a potential victim of a deadly accident, explosion, or derailment.”
Benicia resident Bardet said the project site is especially dangerous because the crude-oil-offloading tracks would be “adjacent to crude oil storage tanks and Sulphur Springs Creek, in a flood-plain zone and active fault zone, and also directly across from the industrial park along East Channel Road.” According to Bardet, derailment or fire involving flammable crude oil could have catastrophic results.
College student Jaime Gonzalez said the project would further proliferate fossil fuels, which accelerate climate change, and that future generations will bear more of the burden. “The consequences would fall on the shoulders of my generation,” he said.
Hearings will continue April 18 and 19 in Benicia, and the city council will then decide whether to wait for Valero’s federal appeal, or vote to approve or deny the project.
Placer County is planning a mass casualty training exercise related to oil train explosions on May 18th in Roseville, California. The exercise will take place at PFE Road and Hilltop Circle in Roseville.
So what paths do these tank cars take? The exact routes are state secrets. But assuming 40 trains, carrying three million gallons of crude oil each, pass through the Chicago area weekly, that means more than 17 million gallons roll through the city daily. It’s an inexact count, and the NRDC has continued to push to get accurate information. “A lot of people don’t know their residences are adjacent to hazardous cargo,” says Henderson. “The issue should be subject to public discussion, but the public has been cut off from it.”
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