Category Archives: Fire

CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Diluted bitumen (Dilbit), DOT-111, Evacuation, Explosion, Fire, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Tar sands crude

INSURANCE JOURNAL: Derailed Train in West Virginia Had Safer Tank Cars

Repost from Insurance Journal

Derailed Train in West Virginia Had Safer Tank Cars

By John Raby and Jonathan Mattise | February 26, 2015 

The fiery derailment of a train carrying crude oil in West Virginia earlier this month is one of three in the past year involving tank cars that already meet a higher safety standard than what federal law requires – leading some to suggest even tougher requirements that industry representatives say would be costly.

Hundreds of families were evacuated and nearby water treatment plants were temporarily shut down after cars derailed from a train carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude on Feb. 16, shooting fireballs into the sky, leaking oil into a Kanawha River tributary and burning down a house nearby. It was snowing at the time, but it is not yet clear if weather was a factor.

The train’s tanks were a newer model – the 1232 –designed during safety upgrades voluntarily adopted by the industry four years ago. The same model spilled oil and caught fire in Timmins, Ontario this month, and last year in Lynchburg, Virginia.

A series of ruptures and fires have prompted the administration of President Barack Obama to consider requiring upgrades such as thicker tanks, shields to prevent tankers from crumpling, rollover protections and electronic brakes that could make cars stop simultaneously, rather than slam into each other.

If approved, increased safety requirements now under White House review would phase out tens of thousands of older tank cars being used to carry highly flammable liquids.

“This accident is another reminder of the need to improve the safety of transporting hazardous materials by rail,” said Christopher Hart, acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board.

Oil industry officials had been opposed to further upgrading the 1232 cars because of costs. But late last year they changed their position and joined with the railway industry to support some upgrades, although they asked for time to make the improvements.

According to the Association of American Railroads, oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014, driven by a boom in the Bakken oil patch of North Dakota and Montana, where pipeline limitations force 70 percent of the crude to move by rail.

The downside: trains hauling Bakken-region oil have been involved in major accidents in Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Alabama and Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Reports of leaks and other oil releases from tank cars are up as well, from 12 in 2008 to 186 last year, according to Department of Transportation records reviewed by The Associated Press.

Just two days before the West Virginia wreck, 29 cars of a 100-car Canadian National Railway train carrying diluted bitumen crude derailed in a remote area 50 miles south of Timmins, Ontario, spilling oil and catching fire. That train was headed from Alberta to Eastern Canada.

The train that derailed in West Virginia was bound for an oil shipping depot in Yorktown, Virginia, along the same route where three tanker cars plunged into the James River in Lynchburg, Virginia, prompting an evacuation last year.

The train derailed near unincorporated Mount Carbon just after passing through Montgomery, a town of 1,946, on a stretch where the rails wind past businesses and homes crowded between the water and the steep, tree-covered hills. All but two of the train’s 109 cars were tank cars, and 26 of them left the tracks.

Fire crews had little choice but to let the tanks burn themselves out. Each carried up to 30,000 gallons of crude.

One person – the owner of the destroyed home – was treated for smoke inhalation, but no other injuries were reported, according to the train company, CSX. The two-person crew, an engineer and conductor, managed to decouple the train’s engines from the wreck behind it and walk away unharmed.

The NTSB said its investigators will compare this wreck to others including Lynchburg and one near Casselton, N.D., when a Bakken crude train created a huge fireball that forced the evacuation of the farming town.

No cause has been determined, said CSX regional vice president Randy Cheetham. He said the tracks had been inspected just three days before the wreck.

“They’ll look at train handling, look at the track, look at the cars. But until they get in there and do their investigation, it’s unwise to do any type of speculation,” he said.

State officials do have some say over rail safety.

Railroads are required by federal order to tell state emergency officials where trains carrying Bakken crude are traveling. CSX and other railroads called this information proprietary, but more than 20 states rejected the industry’s argument, informing the public as well as first-responders about the crude moving through their communities.

West Virginia is among those keeping it secret. State officials responded to an AP Freedom of Information request by releasing documents redacted to remove nearly every detail.

There are no plans to reconsider after this latest derailment, said Melissa Cross, a program manager for the West Virginia Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

___

Contributors include Joan Lowy in Washington, D.C.; Matthew Brown in Billings, Montana; and Pam Ramsey in Charleston, West Virginia. Mattise reported from Charleston.
CPC-1232, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Diluted bitumen (Dilbit), DOT-111, DOT-117, Fire, Flash point, Tar sands crude

RAILWAY AGE: Why tar sands train became a fireball – bitumen isn’t necessarily safer than Bakken

Repost from Railway Age
[Editor: Significant quote: “This blend of bitumen and petroleum-based diluents, known as “dilbit,” has a low flash point. Thus, the widespread belief that bitumen from Alberta’s northern oil sands is far safer to transport by rail than Bakken crude is, for all intents and purposes, dead wrong. This may be disruptive news for bitumen shippers, carriers, and regulators.”  – RS]

Why bitumen isn’t necessarily safer than Bakken

By  David Thomas, Contributing Editor, February 23, 2015 
Feb. 14, 2015 CN oil train derailment near Gogama, Ontario
Feb. 14, 2015 CN oil train derailment near Gogama, Ontario. CBC News/Dillon Daveikis

The chain reaction fireballs that attended the Feb. 16, 2015 derailment of a CSX unit oil train in populated West Virginia probably blinded observers to the significance of the concurrent derailment and explosions of a CN oil train in a remote and uninhabited area of northern Ontario. Most reports treated the two events as equals, given that both trains consisted of recently manufactured CPC-1232 tank cars loaded with crude oil.

CN’s Ontario conflagration is the more disturbing of the two mishaps: The railroad reported that its train was not carrying the extra-light Bakken crude that, in a series of high-energy derailments since 2013, has proved to be explosive. To the contrary, the CN train was laden with bitumen, the extra-heavy tarry substance extracted from Alberta’s oil sands. Bitumen, in its natural highly viscous form, is considered to be essentially inflammable by petrochemical experts and is rarely considered in safety evaluations of crude by rail.

So why did the bitumen ignite and explode in Ontario’s -40ºC (-40ºF) weather? The reason, based on research consulted by Railway Age, is that the diluent added to make bitumen flow into and out of tank cars makes the blended lading quite volatile.

This blend of bitumen and petroleum-based diluents, known as “dilbit,” has a low flash point. Thus, the widespread belief that bitumen from Alberta’s northern oil sands is far safer to transport by rail than Bakken crude is, for all intents and purposes, dead wrong. This may be disruptive news for bitumen shippers, carriers, and regulators.

The hope for Bakken crude is that it can be treated to remove benzene and other “light end” substances before loading, rendering it mildly flammable instead of highly explosive. The same is not true for dilbit, because the highly volatile diluents are added to the crude to make it less viscous. A safer procedure is to heat bitumen at origin before loading into a tank car and again at destination, prior to unloading. Some tank cars are equipped with internal steam coils for this purpose and are used in crude oil service, but a requirement for such heating elements is not included in the specifications proposed for a future DOT-117 tank car to replace both the DOT-111 and CPC-1232 cars now in CBR service.

According to “Properties of Dilbit and Conventional Crude Oils,” a February 2014 report by the Alberta Innovates consortium of industry, government, and university researchers, “[T]he flash point of fresh dilbit is initially lower than other oil types and is comparable to a diluent.” It says that dilbit will ignite upon exposure to an ignition source at -35ºC, compared to -9ºC for conventional light oil. The flash point of raw diluent is -35ºC or less. The flash point of undiluted bitumen is +151ºC, well above the +60ºC flammability threshold specified in current hazardous materials classification regulations.

The reason for the low flash point of dilbit is that ignitability is determined by a blend’s most volatile components, in this case, the diluent itself: “[T]he flash point is determined by the lowest-boil-point components (volatiles). Consequently, the flash point of the dilbit is governed by the 20%-30% volume diluent component . . . .”

The study defines flash point as “the temperature to which the fuel must be heated in order to produce an adequate fuel/air concentration to be ignited when exposed to an open flame. The flash point of the crude oil is used as an index of fire hazard in North America.”

Thus, flash point is the critical factor in determining whether a tank car breach will lead to its contents burning or exploding upon exposure to the pyrotechnics of a high-energy derailment.

Canada’s Transportation Safety Board can be expected to analyze the dilbit lading of CN’s Ontario accident, as it did the Bakken crude that exploded at Lac-Mégantic in 2013. TSB reported then that Bakken crude is more volatile than other varieties. Should TSB conclude that dilbit has a volatility similar to Bakken crude, as the Alberta research suggests, the hazmat classification of crude oil could be in question.

Bakken Crude, Benicia CA, BNSF Railway, CPC-1232, Derailment, DOT-111, Earthjustice, Explosion, Fire, Tank car design, Tank car retrofit, Union Pacific Railroad, Valero Benicia Refinery, Valero Crude By Rail, Valero Energy Corporation, Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA)

KQED covers rail and oil industry “show and tell” in Sacramento

Repost from KQED Science, NPR

Railroads, Big Oil Move to Ease Fears Over Crude Shipments

By Daniel Potter, KQED Science | February 24, 2015
This CPC-1232 tank car represents an upgrade over an older models criticized for being easily punctured, but critics say there's still much to be desired. (Daniel Potter/KQED)
This CPC-1232 tank car represents an upgrade over an older models criticized for being easily punctured, but critics say there’s still much to be desired. (Daniel Potter/KQED)

Facing growing apprehension among Californians, railroads and oil companies are trying to allay fears over the dangers of hauling crude oil into the state.

Tensions have been heightened by a spate of derailments, as well as a recently unearthed government report with some sobering projections for the potential cost to life and property from such incidents in coming years. Federal regulators are weighing stricter rules governing everything from modernized braking systems to new speed limits.

In a rare move Tuesday in Sacramento, officials with California’s two major railroads, Union Pacific and BNSF, held a media briefing explaining safety measures ranging from computerized stability controls to special foam for choking out fires.

At the California State Railroad Museum, Pat Brady, a hazardous materials manager for BNSF, showed off a newer model tank car with half-inch thick “head shields” – metal plates extending halfway up on either end.  The car was also equipped with “skid protection,” Brady said, pointing to a nozzle underneath that’s designed to break away in a derailment, leaving the valve itself intact, to avert spills.

This tank car, the CPC-1232, is supposed to be safer and harder to puncture than the older DOT-111 version, but it’s facing skepticism after several exploded last week when a train hauling North Dakota crude through West Virginia derailed.

Using a simulator, Union Pacific's William Boyd demonstrates technology making sure train operators don't go too fast or end up on the wrong track. (Daniel Potter/KQED)

Industry officials at the Sacramento briefing were reluctant to comment about that incident, saying not all the facts are in yet, but several emphasized the importance of keeping trains from derailing to begin with, and claiming that more than 99.99 percent of such shipments arrive safely.

Both BNSF and Union Pacific said tracks used to haul crude through California undergo daily visual inspections, said Union Pacific spokesman Aaron Hunt, as well as a battery of high-tech tests.

“We’re using lasers to measure track gauge and track profile to keep trains on tracks,” he said, and also “pushing ultrasonic waves into our rail to detect potential cracks early.”

Hunt says in a typical month, Union Pacific brings in 1,000 to 1,200 cars loaded with oil, a tiny fraction of the company’s in-state freight. BNSF said its oil haul is even less: about two trains a month. But some predict such shipments could soar in the near future.

Also represented at the briefing was Valero Energy, which is hoping to start bringing two fifty-car oil trains a day to its refinery in Benicia.

“Valero as a company has acquired over five thousand rail cars,” said Chris Howe, a health and safety manager at Valero’s Benicia facility. “We’re able to get a number of them committed to our project, so we will likely be using Valero cars of these newer designs.”

The industry’s shift away from the DOT-111 model is “a useful step,” says Patti Goldman, managing attorney with Earthjustice, who adds that the newer cars are still “not nearly safe enough.”

“What you need to do to prevent catastrophes when trains do leave the tracks is have far better tank cars to be able to prevent the leaks and explosions in the first place,” says Goldman.

Earthjustice is in a legal fight pushing for stronger oversight and regulation. Goldman charges that it’s taking a long time to fully phase out older models because the industry is more focused on growing fleets rapidly.

“That’s just inexcusable,” she says. “We don’t think they’re allowed to do that. We think they need to get these hazardous tank cars off the rails before they start increasing the amount of crude oil that’s going to be shipped on the rails.”

 

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fire

Cleanup, investigation continue at W.Va. derailment site

Repost from The San Francisco Chronicle

Cleanup, investigation continue at W.Va. derailment site

By Pam Ramsey, Associated Press, February 22, 2015 2:19pm

BOOMER, W.Va. (AP) — A full-scale federal investigation of an oil train derailment in southern West Virginia has begun as work continues to remove the overturned tank cars from the site, federal officials said Sunday.

A fire sparked by the Feb. 16 derailment in Mount Carbon prevented investigators from gaining full access to the crash scene until this weekend. Foul winter weather also has hampered the investigation. As of Sunday, some cars had been removed from the site but many remained.

“The folks at the site of the derailment are making a lot of progress. It has absolutely been difficult. It is a great testament to them that we have no one injured up there despite the ice and snow, the cold and dampness,” Sarah Feinberg, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration Administrator, said Sunday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Investigators have not determined what caused 27 cars of the 109-car CSX train to go off the tracks during a snowstorm. Feinberg said the investigation is in an early stage and the railroad agency will examine all elements, including weather, the track and the operation of the train.

“Some of the things we want to look are still under the cars in the pileup,” Robert Lauby, the railroad agency’s chief safety officer, told The AP.

Investigators have reviewed video from cameras on the locomotives’ front and rear, along with video from another train that passed the CSX train minutes before the derailment. The train’s data recorder also has been recovered.

“Now we can begin work on the forensic investigation,” Feinberg said.

The investigation will include inspecting the damaged tank cars, recovering damaged rail and reviewing maintenance and inspection records, the U.S. Department of Transportation said Sunday in a news release.

The oil involved in the derailment is being tested by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration to determine its gas content, volatility and tank car performance. Investigators also want to determine whether the oil’s classification complied with federal hazardous material regulations, the DOT said.

Derailment investigations can take several days to a couple of weeks, Feinberg said.

The train was carrying 3 million gallons of North Dakota crude when it derailed. As of Sunday afternoon, response teams had recovered 152,000 gallons from tank cars, multiple agencies responding to the derailment said in a news release.

“Some cars still have to be righted,” Skip Elliott, CSX vice president of public safety, health and environment said Sunday at a multiagency media briefing in Boomer, across the Kanawha River from the derailment site.

The derailment shot fireballs into the sky, leaked oil into a Kanawha River tributary, burned down a house nearby and forced nearby water treatment plants to temporarily shut down. Containment booms have been deployed to lessen the environmental impact.

A small amount of oil was detected in the river. Water and air monitoring in the area is continuing, Dennis Matlock, on-scene coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, said at the briefing.