Category Archives: Massive increase in crude-by-rail

Crude-by-rail: One federal inspector oversees all California’s railroad bridges, no state oversight

Repost from The Contra Costa Times
[Editor:  The issue of bridge safety is important here in Benicia for two reasons.  Locally, we understand that Valero’s proposed oil trains would roll PAST the refinery in order to back into the offloading racks, thus coming to a stop near enough to the Benicia-Martinez bridge that, in the event of an explosion, the bridge itself could be severely impacted if not destroyed.  Beyond Benicia, our little City’s decision would impact rail lines all the way from Alberta and North Dakota, including bridges of questionable security all along the way.  – RS]

Crude-by-rail: One federal inspector oversees all California’s railroad bridges, no state oversight

By Matthias Gafni, 09/12/2014
View of the underside of the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge in Benicia, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
View of the underside of the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge in Benicia, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

As concerns grow over aging rail infrastructure, earthquake readiness and a dramatic increase in crude oil shipments by train, state railroad regulators are scrambling to hire their first-ever railroad bridge inspectors — two of them.

Once they are hired, the California Public Utilities Commission plans to create a state railroad bridge inventory to determine which are most at risk. That’s right — neither the state nor federal government has a list of railroad bridges for California or the rest of the country. Until that happens, the safety of California’s thousands of railroad bridges — key conduits that carry people and hazardous materials over environmentally sensitive ecosystems and near urban areas — is left up to rail line owners and a single federal inspector who splits his time among 11 states.

An Amtrak train crosses the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge in Benicia, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)
An Amtrak train crosses the Benicia-Martinez Railroad Drawbridge in Benicia, Calif., on Friday, Aug. 15, 2014. (Jose Carlos Fajardo/Bay Area News Group)

“Two more inspectors is better than none, but it’s really a Band-Aid,” said Suma Peesapati, attorney with Earthjustice, an environmental group fighting the oil rail influx. “I think there should be no crude by rail over those bridges until there’s a comprehensive look at all of them.”

No California rail bridges have failed in recent memory, but the 6.0 earthquake that rattled the Napa area on Aug. 24 provided a reminder that California must monitor its aging rail infrastructure.

Following the quake, the Federal Railroad Administration worked with Caltrans to contact railroads within a 100-mile radius and ensure bridges and tracks were inspected for damage before resuming normal operations. The Napa Valley Wine Train, which was closed for two days after the quake, had its own private inspector go over the tracks and numerous bridges, including one traversing Highway 29. The inspector gave the green light to continue running Aug. 26.

Caltrans employs 120 inspectors and 80 specialty personnel to inspect the state’s public automobile highway bridges to ensure the integrity of the elevated structures, in comparison to the one federal inspector for all of California’s rail bridges, most of which are privately owned.

Those railroad bridges are inspected, maintained and regulated by company personnel, but watchdogs say that’s far from adequate.

In its annual Railroad Safety Activity Report to the state Legislature in November, the CPUC identified the state’s railroad bridges as a “potential significant rail safety risk.”

“There are many unknown questions regarding bridge integrity that need to be answered to ensure public safety,” the report found.

The Benicia-Martinez Rail Drawbridge, built in 1930 and tucked between the automobile spans, carries hazardous material shipments across the Carquinez Strait to East Bay refineries, along with 30 Amtrak Capitol Corridor passenger trains each weekday. The bridge is owned by Union Pacific and is safe, the company’s spokesman said.

“We regularly inspect all of our bridges in California,” said Union Pacific’s Aaron Hunt. “We perform necessary maintenance required to assure the safe use of our bridges. Bridges and culverts are a critical part of our 32,000-mile network.”

Union Pacific has spent more than $42 billion on infrastructure, Hunt said, not specifying what portion of that was devoted to bridges, including $4.1 billion scheduled for this year. “These are private investments, not taxpayer dollars,” he said.

However, the state report found many bridges are owned by smaller short-line railroads that “may not be willing or able to acquire the amount of capital needed to repair or replace degrading bridges.”

Crude by rail

Concern has grown about bridge safety and rail safety in general with the increase of crude oil shipments by rail. They’ve jumped 158 percent in California from just September to December 2013, according to the state energy commission.

This year, the CPUC created the Crude Oil Reconnaissance Team to monitor the oil-by-train boom to ensure federal and state safety laws are followed.

In June, federal rail chief Joseph Szabo spoke to an Indiana newspaper about the crude-by-rail boom: “The movement of this product is a game changer. We have to rethink everything we’ve done and known in the past about safety.”

In response to the increase and some deadly accidents, including a derailment last summer in Quebec, Canada, that killed 47 people, the U.S. Department of Transportation proposed tank car safety upgrades.

As of now, about 100 rail cars of crude roll through populated areas of the East Bay each week along the BNSF line from Stockton to Kinder Morgan’s rail depot in Richmond. The route traverses the 1,690-foot-long, 80-foot-high Muir Trestle, above Alhambra Avenue in Martinez. The trestle was constructed in 1899 and rebuilt 30 years later. Those rail cars rumble through Antioch, Pittsburg, Bay Point, Martinez, and Hercules, said Contra Costa Hazardous Materials chief Randy Sawyer.

Aging

Based on total track miles and federal estimates of a bridge occurring every 1.25 miles of track, the CPUC estimates there are about 5,000 California railroad bridges.

Most are old steel and timber structures built more than 100 years ago, and “actual railroad bridge plans or records are either absent or unreliable,” the CPUC report found.

“It’s part of the infrastructure that’s dilapidated, not only in California, but across the country,” Peesapati said. “Bridges are really an example of the problem.”

American Society of Civil Engineers past President Andy Herrmann, a bridge consultant, said companies balk at releasing bridge data for competitive reasons, but he believes bridges are maintained safely.

“There’s a very strong profit motive to keep the bridges open,” Herrmann said. “Detours will cost them a fortune.”

However, the 2007 Government Accountability Office report also found that “Because bridge and tunnel work is costly, railroads typically make other investments to improve mobility first.”

Are they safe?

In 1991, a freight train traversing steep switchbacks in Dunsmuir, Siskiyou County, derailed, sending rail cars tumbling off a bridge and resulting in 19,000 gallons of metam sodium, a concentrated herbicide, leaking into the upper Sacramento River. The accident killed all vegetation, fish and other aquatic animals 45 miles downstream, rendering some invertebrate species extinct. Several hundred people exposed to the contaminated water required medical treatment in what’s still considered the worst inland ecological disaster in the state.

Although the accident was not caused by bridge failure, it led the railroad to build a derailment barrier on the Cantara Loop bridge to prevent it happening again. And the Federal Railroad Administration expressed concern about the condition of bridges generally in a wide-ranging review after the crash.

“The review was prompted by the agency’s perception that the bridge population was aging, traffic density and loads were increasing on many routes, and the consequences of a bridge failure could be catastrophic,” according to a report published in 1991, the same year as the crash.

From 1982 to 2008, records show there were 58 train accidents nationwide caused by the structural failure of a railroad bridge, causing nine injuries and about $26.5 million in damages.

State hires

As of July 2010, new federal rules require rail companies prepare bridge management programs — including annual inspections, maintenance inventories and more — that are made available to federal inspectors when asked. The Federal Railroad Administration can levy fines up to $100,000 for failure to comply.

Federal inspectors audit railroad bridge inspections done by the companies and personally perform observations of 225 to 250 bridges each year. Based on those CPUC calculations, it would take the California inspector 20 years to visit and observe all of the state’s estimated 5,000 bridges, if that was all he had to do. But in reality, it would take much longer because California’s inspector splits his time among 11 states, leaving the CPUC to conclude in its 2013 report that the feds “cannot provide adequate oversight.”

That shortfall prompted state regulators to hire their own bridge inspectors, and they have already designed a bridge evaluation form and experimented with performing inspections.

“Railroad bridges carry thousands of cars of hazardous materials and thousands of passengers daily,” said CPUC spokesman Christopher Chow. “The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has new, general bridge regulations … but employs only five inspectors for the entire U.S. The CPUC’s bridge inspectors will be able to augment the FRA’s efforts.”

Lake Champlain activists host oil train forum, feds in attendance

Repost from VTDigger.org

Oil train forum attendees want state, federal regulators to ban leaky tankers and assess new risks

News Release — Lake Champlain Committee, Sep. 2, 2014

 PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. – More than 120 concerned residents attended a public forum to discuss the risks of crude oil train traffic through the Adirondack Park and Champlain Valley here Thursday night, with many saying they would urge state officials to fully assess the risks to communities and the environment, and urge federal regulators to ban the older, leak-prone rail tanker cars involved in recent spills, fires and explosions.

Currently, more than three million gallons per day of Bakken crude oil is transported through the region on rail lines that had rarely carried crude oil or hazardous materials before.

“We were very pleased with the number of people who came out to discuss the risks of oil train traffic through the Adirondack Park and Champlain Valley,” said Diane Fish, Deputy Director of the Adirondack Council. “But even if you couldn’t attend, we urge anyone who is concerned about oil train traffic to contact state and federal officials and let them know. If you aren’t sure how to do that, contact one of the sponsor organizations and we will help you.”

The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (NYS DEC) will be accepting comments through September 30 on its environmental assessment of the plan by Global Partners to expand its oil-transfer facilities at the Port of Albany. Federal officials are currently updating their risk assessments for the rail tanker car traffic.

“If the Global Partners’ expansion is approved, it could lead to a major increase in oil train traffic through the Champlain Valley,” said Lori Fisher, Executive Director of the Lake Champlain Committee. “The new traffic would be carrying tar sands oil from Canada, in addition to the Bakken crude oil already coming from North Dakota, and put our communities and waterways at even greater risk.”

“Tar sands oil is not as explosive as Bakken crude, but it is very heavy and sinks in water so it is very difficult to clean up once it is spilled,” said Adirondack Mountain Club Executive Director Neil Woodworth. “If it gets into Lake Champlain, it is likely we will never get it out again.”

“We know the Adirondack Park is home to some of New York’s rarest and most sensitive wildlife, fish and plant life; and, we know trains derail,” said Mollie Matteson, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Immediate action is needed to protect this fragile, irreplaceable environment.”

The organizations said NYS DEC should take into consideration potential for damage to Lake Champlain, the Adirondack Park, the communities through which the tracks pass and local farms when assessing the environmental risks of expanded oil traffic.

The groups also urged those who care about the Adirondack Park and Lake Champlain to tell their Congressional representatives to seek a ban on the model DOT-111 rail cars that have been blamed for most of the recent spills and fires.

The risks of Bakken crude oil rail shipments have been highlighted by a series of recent derailments in the U.S. and Canada resulting in water and soil contamination, deadly explosions and raging fires. A 2013 derailment involving nearly 80 tankers in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killed 47 people and devastated the town. A derailment in May in Lynchburg, Va., set the James River on fire.

Federal officials have said they would require the replacement of the leak-prone rail tanker cars (model DOT-111) involved in recent spills, fires and explosions. However, it will take years to carry out the current plan.

Appearing at the event were U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Emergency & Remedial Response division representatives Carl Pellegrino and Doug Kodama; Essex County Emergency Management Director Don Jaquish; Clinton County Emergency Management Director Eric Day; Claire Barnett of the Healthy Schools Network; and, Mark Malchoff of Lake Champlain Sea Grant.

The event was hosted by the Lake Champlain Committee, Adirondack Council, Adirondack Mountain Club, and the Center for Biological Diversity.

On average, 3.4 million gallons of explosive crude oil per day are shipped through the Champlain Valley on trains coming from the oil fields of North Dakota, through Canada, to Albany. Between five and nine trains per week use the Canadian Pacific Railroad line between Montreal and the Port of Albany on the Hudson River. Each train can haul up to 100 oil tankers. Each tank car carries about 34,000 gallons of oil.

Bakken crude is light and contains large amounts of volatile chemicals, making it highly flammable. Tar sands oil is less explosive, but much heavier. It sinks rather than floating on water, making it impossible to remove via conventional boom-and-suction methods.

Every crude oil spill causes lasting environmental damage, the organizations noted, pointing to continuing problems in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico from the Exxon Valdez and British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon disasters. Closer to home, attempts to clean up oil spills on the St. Lawrence River (1976) and at a long-closed steel mill in southern St. Lawrence County continue to cost taxpayers millions of dollars, decades after they occurred.

The Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks run alongside Lake Champlain for more than 130 miles, including 100 miles inside the Adirondack Park. The tracks also cross the Saranac, Ausable and Bouquet rivers. For many miles, the tracks are just a few feet from the water’s edge.

Lake Champlain is ecologically rich, the drinking water source for nearly 200,000 Champlain Valley residents, and a key driver for the regional economy. The tracks also run through the center of more than a dozen small communities and the City of Plattsburgh, within a short distance of schools, homes, businesses, farmlands, tourist accommodations, campgrounds, beaches and municipal offices.

For more information:
Lori Fisher, Lake Champlain Committee, 802-658-1421
John Sheehan, Adirondack Council, 518-441-1340

Bill Moyers & Company: America’s Exploding Oil Train Problem

Repost from Bill Moyers & Company

America’s Exploding Oil Train Problem

by John Light, September 2, 2014
FILE - In this July 16, 2013, file photo, railroad oil tankers are lined up at the Port of Albany, in Albany, N.Y. While the federal government has ordered railroads to give states details about shipments of volatile crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale region, New York officials haven't decided whether to share that information with the public. (AP Photo/Mike Groll, File)
In this July 16, 2013, photo, railroad oil tankers are lined up at the Port of Albany, in Albany, NY. (AP Photo/Mike Groll, File)

If you reside in the US, there’s around an eight percent chance that you live in an oil train’s blast zone. And there’s a fight going on at the state and federal levels, between monied interests and regulatory agencies, over efforts to ensure that these trains — which have shown a tendency to burst into flames — will be relatively safe.

The increased use of hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has made oil that was previously inaccessible available to drillers. The crude then has to make its way to refineries, and while the boom in pipeline projects has received quite a bit of attention, roughly 60 percent of it travels by rail.

On Friday, California legislators passed a bill that would require railroads to tell emergency officials when oil trains filled with explosive Bakken crude — oil from a particularly productive region in western North Dakota — would pass through the state. The law reflects growing concern, across America, about the dangers of these trains moving through dense communities, including Sacramento, California’s capital.

Oil tanker cars move along a web of routes that crisscross the United States. In 2013, about 400,000 cars made the journey, a 4,000 percent increase over the previous five years. The boost in oil cars has been so great that less lucrative industries are having trouble finding rail transport for their products. In March, General Mills announced that it had lost 62 days of production on such favorites as Cheerios because the trains that had shipped agricultural products were being leased by the fossil fuel industry.

Most oil reaches its destination without any problems, but as production has skyrocketed, the railroads have become increasingly taxed. Those who live near railways have noticed the uptick, with trains rumbling through towns much more frequently, and at much higher speeds.

Last July, a tanker train filled with North Dakota crude derailed in the middle of the night in Lac-Mégantic, a small Canadian town near the border with Maine; the resulting inferno killed 47 people. Since then, derailments in Casselton, North Dakota, and Lynchburg, Virginia, have led to evacuations. The Lac-Mégantic disaster spurred protests from fire chiefs and town officials who said that they were ill-equipped to deal with a possible derailment.

In the year since, officials have moved to formalize several safety measures. This July, the Obama administration proposed a plan that involves banning certain older tank cars, using better breaks on car, restricting speeds and possibly rerouting trains.

That first point, phasing out old tank cars, is a key area of contention. For the most part, the opposition isn’t coming from the railroads; it’s the oil companies that lease the tank cars that are fighting the new regulations. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Matthew Philips explained earlier this summer:

It’s helpful to understand the three industries with something at stake here: railroads, energy companies, and tank-car manufacturers. The railroads own the tracks but not the tank cars or the oil that’s inside. The oil often belongs to big energy companies such as refiners or even trading firms that profit from buying it near the source—say, in North Dakota—and selling it elsewhere. These energy companies tend to lease the tank cars from large manufacturing companies or big lenders such as General Electric (GE) and CIT Group (CIT).

Although it is never their oil on board, the railroads usually end up in the headlines when something goes wrong. That’s why they have been eager for a rule to make energy companies use stronger tank cars. Meanwhile, the oil industry has been busy issuing studies trying to prove that the oil coming out of North Dakota is safe enough to travel in the existing tank cars. The energy lobby also thinks railroads need to do a better job of keeping the trains on the tracks. Tank-car manufacturers, meanwhile, simply want some clarity around what kind of cars they need to build.

Canada, following the Lac-Mégantic disaster, announced plans to phase out one older tank car that has been linked to several accidents over the next three years; the Obama administration proposal would do it in two.

But the oil industry doesn’t want that. Leading the charge is the American Petroleum Institute, an organization that, so far in 2014, has spent $4 million lobbying regulators and Congress. They’ve pushed back against labeling Bakken crude as more hazardous than other crude oil, even though many studies have found that it is.

Environmental groups blame this lobbying effort for several weaknesses in the proposed rules. For one, they would only apply to trains that have 20 or more carloads of Bakken crude. “If the rule is approved as drafted, it would still be legal to transport around 570,000 gallons (the equivalent of the fuel carried by seven Boeing 747s) of volatile Bakken crude in a train composed of 19 unsafe, [aging] tank cars—and none of the other aspects of the new rules, including routing, notification, train speed, and more would apply,” wrote Eric de Place of the sustainability think-tank Sightline Institute, who also criticized the proposal for not immediately banning older tankers.

And even if the regulations were to be put in place despite the API’s attempts to weaken them, there’s the distinct possibility that regulators will fall short. The government has often taken a hands-off approach in determining what gets shipped, and how — and in enforcing existing rules requiring that officials in the cities it passes through be informed that potentially hazardous shipments are coming. In These Times reported that government inspections to make sure railroads are properly labeling the product they are shipping (the Bakken crude was improperly labeled in the Lac-Mégantic disaster) are supposed to be unannounced, but are sometimes pre-arranged. Meanwhile, railroads are cutting back on the number of crew members manning trains, a move that some workers feel will lead to less safe travel.

“No one would permit an airliner to fly with just one pilot, even though they can fly themselves,” wrote John Previsich, the president of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation union’s transportation devision. “Trains, which cannot operate themselves, should be no different.”

John Light blogs and works on multimedia projects for Moyers & Company. Before joining the Moyers team, he was a public radio producer. His work has been supported by grants from The Nation Institute Investigative Fund and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, among others. A New Jersey native, John studied history and film at Oberlin College and holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University

Oil train regulation passes in California Assembly

Repost from Reuters
[Editor: The bill is AB380.  For text, analysis and votes on the bill, see leginfo.ca.gov.  – RS]

Oil train regulation passes in California

By Jennifer Chaussee, Aug 29, 2014

(Reuters) – California lawmakers on Friday passed legislation requiring railroad companies to tell emergency officials when crude oil trains will chug through the state.

The bill would require railroads to notify the state’s Office of Emergency Services when trains carrying crude oil from Canada and North Dakota are headed to refineries in the most populous U.S. state.

It passed its final vote in the Assembly 61-1, with strong bipartisan support within the state legislature in Sacramento. The bill now goes to Democratic Governor Jerry Brown for his signature.

“We have a spotlight on this issue because of the seriousness of the risk to public safety that it presents,” said the bill’s author, Democratic Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, whose district encompasses parts of Sacramento along the trains’ route.

The legislation follows a disastrous oil train derailment in Canada that killed 47 people and spilled 1.6 million gallons of crude last year.

Worried that a similar spill could happen in California, firefighters and other safety officials have urged state lawmakers to increase safety regulations on oil trains and improve communication between railroads and first responders about when oil shipments are coming through.

President Barack Obama proposed new safety requirements last month that could lower speed limits for trains carrying oil and increase safety standards for oil tank cars.

The volume of oil shipped by train through California has increased dramatically in recent years, public safety experts told a legislative committee at a hearing in June.

The influx has been propelled by increased production in Western Canada and North Dakota without an accompanying boost in pipeline capacity.

Oil and rail industry representatives told lawmakers that they had already done much to improve safety. BNSF Railway lobbyist Juan Acosta testified that the company had agreed to slow its oil trains to 40 mph and increase inspections of its tracks.

Railroads are not currently required to proactively share their oil train schedules with first responders.

(additional reporting by Aaron Mendelson in Sacramento; Editing by Sharon Bernstein and Simon Cameron-Moore)