7 ethanol tankers derail in South Dakota, 1 catches fire
September 20, 2015, Associated Press
Smoke rises from a burning ethanol tanker car, Saturday Sept. 19, 2015, after the 98-car BNSF train carrying ethanol derailed in a rural part of Bon Homme County awash in corn fields between the towns of Scotland and Lesterville, S.D. (AP)
Seven ethanol tanker cars derailed and at least one caught fire Saturday in southeastern South Dakota, according to Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad. The company said no one was hurt.
The 98-car train carrying ethanol derailed about 6:15 a.m. in a rural part of Bon Homme County awash in corn fields between the towns of Scotland and Lesterville, BNSF spokesman Andy Williams said. There were no injuries and no nearby structures were threatened by the fire, he said.
Williams said three tankers were compromised and lost their contents, but crews haven’t yet determined which of those three actually caught fire. Officials aren’t yet sure what caused the derailment over a small bridge that spans a dry creek.
“It’s too early to tell,” Williams said. “It will be under investigation.”
The derailed tanker cars were near the front of the train, said Lee Rettig of the Bon Homme County Emergency Management Department.
Rettig said one rural road was shut down as firefighters who responded from Scotland, Lesterville, Menno, Tyndall and Tabor worked to extinguish the blaze. It was put out about 2:30 p.m., he said.
BNSF hazardous materials teams responded to help with the cleanup. There are no waterways near the accident scene.
“We’ll be assessing any environmental damage,” Williams said.
Asked for info on bridge conditions, railroad carrying Bakken crude tells cities no
By Lee Bergquist, Sept. 13, 2015
A flotilla of kayaks and boats and a small crowd onshore hold banners and beat drums Sunday to raise concerns about the transport by rail of oil through Milwaukee and across an aging railroad bridge at the confluence of the Menomonee and Milwaukee rivers near S. 1st Place. | Michael Sears
Despite urging from a federal agency that railroads hand over more information on safety conditions of bridges, a carrier moving Bakken crude oil through Milwaukee says it doesn’t plan to provide such details.
Trains carrying Bakken crude go through downtown Milwaukee, leaving some residents afraid of what will happen if there is a spill. This train passes by the apartment of Brian Chiu on W. Oregon St. | Brian Chiu
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) distributed a letter from Sarah Feinberg, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, in which the regulator urged railroad carriers to provide more information to municipalities on the safety status of bridges. Milwaukee officials have complained about the lack of information on the structural integrity of railroad bridges used by Canadian Pacific in the city.
“When a local leader or elected official asks a railroad about the safety status of a railroad bridge, they deserve a timely and transparent response,” Feinberg wrote.
“I urge you to engage more directly with local leaders and provide more timely information to assure the community that the bridges in their communities are safe and structurally sound.”
“CP’s position has not changed,” said Andy Cummings, a manager of media relations for the company.
“It is our policy to work directly with the Federal Railroad Administration, which is our regulator, on any concerns they have with our infrastructure.”
The exchange comes in the wake of growing concerns from communities along rail corridors used by railroads shipping a growing tide of oil from the Bakken region of North Dakota.
Those worries have been exacerbated by tanker accidents. The most notable is the July 2013 derailment of tankers that killed 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. The tankers had been routed through Milwaukee before the accident.
There have been no accidents involving crude in Wisconsin, but on March 5 a BNSF Railway train derailed and caught fire near Galena, Ill., after leaving Wisconsin. Twenty-one tankers derailed. Galena is about 10 miles south of the border.
In Milwaukee, one bridge in question is a 300-foot-long structure, known as a steel stringer bridge, at W. Oregon St. and S. 1st St. The bridge was constructed in 1919, according to Bridgehunter.com, which keeps a database of historic bridges.
Canadian Pacific said on Sept. 1 that it would encase 13 of the bridge’s steel columns with concrete to prevent further corrosion and to extend the life of the columns. The carrier said last week that a protective layer of concrete will be applied late this month.
Since last spring, neighbors have expressed worries about the integrity of the bridge, and since July city officials have sought details on the condition of the bridge.
In addition to the threat to human safety, environmental groups such as Milwaukee Riverkeeper say about three dozen bridges cross rivers and streams in the Milwaukee River basin.
On Sunday, a flotilla of kayaks and canoes paddled at the confluence of the Milwaukee and Menomonee rivers to underscore the connection between trains and the city’s waterways.
Bridges must be inspected annually by railroads. But railroads are not required to submit the information to the federal agency. Railroads also are not required to make the information available to the public.
Cummings said the bridge on S. 1st St. has been inspected by a railroad bridge inspector. “We are confident in its ability to safely handle freight and passenger train traffic,” Cummings said.
In her letter, Feinberg said the agency is “re-evaluating” its programs to determine whether it needs to take additional steps.
Common Council President Michael Murphy said he isn’t satisfied by Feinberg’s comments.
“I would liked to have seen a little more teeth in it,” he said.
Murphy said Canadian Pacific should be more transparent, adding that he expects the company to brief the council’s public safety panel soon on the bridge’s condition.
Baldwin and Minnesota Sen. Al Franken, also a Democrat, said in an editorial in the La Crosse Tribune last week that oil trains have put “hundreds of communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin at risk for the explosive crashes that come when an oil train derails.”
Nationally, trains carrying crude oil in the United States have jumped from 10,840 carloads in 2009 to 233,698 in 2012 to 493,127 in 2014, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Canadian Pacific is shipping seven to 11 Bakken crude trains a week through Wisconsin, including Milwaukee, according to the latest data sent to the Wisconsin Division of Emergency Management. BNSF is shipping 20 to 30 trainloads along the Mississippi River.
In a federal transportation bill that has passed the Senate but not yet the House, Baldwin and Franken said they added language that would make oil train information available for first responders. It would also give state and local officials access to inspection records of bridges.
Cheryl Nenn of Riverkeeper said a rail accident that spilled crude could have long-lasting effects on the Milwaukee, Menomonee and Kinnickinnic rivers, and Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water.
Complicating a potential oil spill in downtown Milwaukee is wave action from Lake Michigan, known as a seiche effect, where surging water from the lake can push water upstream, she said.
“The Milwaukee River is cleaner today than it has been in decades, and now we face a threat from crude oil,” Nenn said.
Held up in court for a year, Maryland oil train reports outdated
By Curtis Tate, September 12, 2015
HIGHLIGHTS
• McClatchy received reports it asked for in 2014
• Documents contained data previously revealed
• Economics of crude by rail have shifted since
After more than a year, McClatchy finally got the oil train reports it had requested from Maryland.
And they were badly out of date.
Last year, McClatchy filed open-records requests in about 30 states for the documents, and was the first news organization to do so in Maryland, in June 2014.
Maryland was poised to release the records in July 2014, when two railroads, CSX and Norfolk Southern, sued the state Department of the Environment to block the disclosure.
Finally last month, a state judge ruled in the favor of the release, marking the first time a court had affirmed what many other states had already done without getting sued.
The documents McClatchy and other news organizations ultimately received were dated June 2014, not long after the U.S. Department of Transportation began requiring the railroads to notify state officials of shipments of 1 million gallons or more of Bakken crude oil.
After more than a year, however, the economics of shipping crude by rail had changed substantially.
Amid a slump in oil prices, refineries once receiving multiple trainloads of North American crude oil every day have switched, at least temporarily, to waterborne foreign imports.
The trend is reflected from the East Coast to the West Coast, where long strings of surplus tank cars have been parked on lightly used rail lines, generating rental income for small railroads but also the ire of nearby residents.
The documents released in Maryland show that in June 2014, Norfolk Southern was moving as many as 16 oil trains a week through Cecil County on its way to a refinery in Delaware.
But McClatchy has known that since August 2014, when it received a response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Amtrak.
The Delaware News Journal reported that the PBF Refinery in Delaware City, Del., now receives only about 40,000 barrels a day of crude by rail. That’s about 56 loaded tank cars, or half a unit train, nowhere close to the volume of mid-2014.
The June 2014 Maryland documents also show that CSX was moving as many as five oil trains a week on a route from western Maryland through downtown Baltimore toward refineries in Philadelphia.
But that had been clear since at least October 2014, when the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency released its oil train reports showing an identical number of CSX trains crossing from western Pennsylvania into Maryland, then back into southeast Pennsylvania.
CSX told the Baltimore Sun that it had not regularly moved a loaded oil train through Baltimore since the third quarter of 2014. The company had earlier told the newspaper that it moved empty oil trains through the city and state.
Federal regulators never required railroads to report empty oil train movements.
The vast majority of loaded CSX oil trains move to Philadelphia via Cleveland, Buffalo, Albany, N.Y., and northern New Jersey, according to records from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York.
Armed with proof of oil shipments, activists say they will press the issue
By Natalie Sherman, September 10, 2015
Signs indicate petroleum crude oil on train tank cars. While railroads have long carried hazardous materials through congested urban areas, cities are now scrambling to formulate emergency plans and to train firefighters amid the latest safety threat: a huge increase in crude shipments that critics say has put millions of people living or working near the tracks at heightened risk of derailment, fire and explosion. (Matt Rourke / Associated Press)
CSX Transportation said Thursday it still moves crude oil by train through Maryland via downtown Baltimore occasionally, but not as many as the five 1 million-gallon trains a week it estimated in documents released this week by the state.
Environmental groups and community activists said they hope the new disclosure about trains carrying the explosive crude though the city will spark public pressure and lead officials to act.
The state released documents on Wednesday in which CSX estimated it moves up to five trains a week, each carrying at least 1 million gallons of the volatile crude oil, through Baltimore City, as well as through eight Maryland counties.
The information, disclosed after CSX and Norfolk Southern lost a court battle to keep it private, is outdated, said Rob Doolittle, a spokesman for Jacksonville, Fla.-based CSX. The railroad has not moved trains carrying 1 million gallons of so-called Bakken crude — the volume that triggers federal reporting and disclosure requirements — through the Howard Street Tunnel since the third quarter of 2014, he said.
Trains carrying less than 1 million gallons continue to travel that route “on occasion,” he confirmed. He declined to be more specific about the amounts or frequency. It takes roughly 35 tank cars to carry a million gallons of crude.
“We consider information about the shipment of hazardous material to be security sensitive,” he said, adding that the firm does disclose the information to first responders and emergency officials.
“Safety is CSX’s highest priority,” he said. “We’re sensitive to this. Zero accidents is our goal and we believe we’re acting appropriately.”
The amount of crude oil traveling around the country in rail tankers increased exponentially in recent years with a boom in domestic and Canadian production. While rail shipment is one of the safest modes of transportation, accidents involving the volatile crude oil can be explosive, which has stoked fears about the traffic. A fiery 2013 derailment in a small Quebec town killed 47 and forced 2,000 to evacuate.
“We’ve seen these trains explode and we know that they pose a serious threat to Baltimore residents and business and other people who are just trying to go about their life in Baltimore,” said Anne Havemann, general counsel with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network.
Advocates have estimated that about 165,000 Baltimore residents live within a 1 mile radius of train routes, making them vulnerable to explosions caused in potential derailments.
“This one affects everybody,” said Amy Sens, 38, who lives in Morrell Park and is a pastor at Six:Eight, a church in Hampden. “My hope is that a lot of people will become aware of this and realize that they’re affected personally and takes steps to make this situation safer than it currently is.”
The CSX route through Maryland described in the 2014 documents enters the state from Pennsylvania in Allegany County and travels into Washington County, dipping into West Virginia, through Harpers Ferry and back into Maryland, crossing Frederick County. It catches parts of Carroll and Howard counties, passing through Ellicott City along the same line where a rail defect caused a coal train to derail in 2012, killing two young women trespassing on a rail trestle.
After crossing into Baltimore County in the Patapsco Valley State Park, the line enters Southwest Baltimore, traveling up into the heart of the city, passing two blocks from the Horseshoe Casino Baltimore and right by M&T Bank Stadium before entering the Howard Street Tunnel just south of Camden Yards.
The 120-year-old tunnel, which follows Howard Street under downtown, was the scene of a six-day chemical fire after a train derailment in 2001. The line emerges at Mount Royal Station, crosses over the Jones Falls and skirts Remington before turning east in a below-grade cut along 26th Street, where a retaining wall collapsed onto the tracks after heavy rains in 2014.
The line bends through East Baltimore, passing neighborhoods, schools, cemeteries and industrial zones before turning northeast back into Baltimore County and through Harford and Cecil counties roughly parallel to U.S. 40.
CSX stopped shipping through Baltimore because it found a more efficient route to deliver the oil to its client, Doolittle said.
A CSX website shows that its principal crude oil route serving refineries in Philadelphia and New Jersey passes through Ohio, a bit of northern Pennsylvania and mostly New York before turning south.
While the railroad only occasionally moves crude through Maryland now, Doolittle said a new plan submitted to the state estimates it moves between zero and five weekly million-gallon crude trains along the route so it can comply with its requirements as a common carrier.
The Chesapeake Climate Action Network and other groups said even smaller amounts are cause for concern.
They have been trying to build support for a city ordinance that would impose a temporary ban on expansion of crude oil terminals. The City Council hosted a hearing on the issue this summer.
Brent Bolin, Chesapeake regional director at Clean Water Action, said the newly released documents give new urgency to the issue.
“Now that this information is out, it’s time to go back to the Baltimore City Council and say, ‘OK, great hearing. What do you think about this information?’ That’s our immediate next step,” he said.
City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke said she supports the idea of a moratorium, but it’s not clear what the city can do because crude oil shipments cross state lines and are federally regulated.
“I definitely support a moratorium on the expansion of the facilities so that while we’re trying to cope with this problem, we’re not expanding the potential, but I have a lot to learn about this before I have any opinions about how to proceed except that it’s not a safe situation and we have to protect our citizens,” she said.
City Councilman Ed Reisinger, who hosted the hearing, said the city doesn’t want to impose rules against rail shipment that might lead to oil’s being sent through the city on trucks. He has asked CSX for more specific information, he said.
“If it’s one [rail] car I’m concerned, but … the reality is do we want to see one car on the tracks or do we want to see how many trucks driving through the city of Baltimore?” he said. “I just want some accurate information for what we’re really dealing with.”
Howard Libit, a spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said it would be premature to take a position without a real ordinance on the table.
“Our understanding is that we’re very limited in what we can regulate,” he said. “What we can do is make sure our fire and emergency management folks work well with the railroads and are prepared for any contingency.”
Connor Scott, a spokesman for the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said the city has had a close relationship with CSX since the 2001 tunnel fire.
Staff at CSX have Fire Department radios, and the city, through state police, has access to a CSX system that shows the contents of rail shipments 24-7, he said.
The Fire Department and CSX have conducted training sessions on responding to a crude oil explosion.
