Category Archives: National Transportation Safety Board

Bakken Crude, Bay Area Air Quality Management District, Benicia Planning Commission, Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community, California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), DEIR, DOT-111, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Good Neighbor Steering Committee, James River, Lac-Mégantic, Lynchburg Virginia, National Transportation Safety Board, Tar sands crude, Traffic, Valero Crude By Rail

Benicia Herald: Release date of Valero DEIR, background

Repost from The Benicia Herald
[Editor: Note in the concluding paragraphs: “Million said city staff and refinery employees have been in conversation as the review draft has been prepared….This is typical of any application…’We work with an applicant to get them on board.'”  This should not be news, nor surprising, but it underscores the impression among citizen-opponents of the project that our City is a willing partner with Valero.  It will be interesting to see what mitigations and conditions have been written into the DEIR so as not to stand as “deal breakers” for the “applicant.”  – RS]

Crude-by-Rail plan review to be released June 10

May 1, 2014 by Donna Beth Weilenman

The draft of the Environmental Impact Report (EIR) being prepared for the Valero Crude-by-Rail Project will be released by June 10, Principal Planner Amy Million announced Thursday.

The long-awaited document will be given a 45-day public review, during which people may submit their comments, she said.

That review period ends July 25.

“We have been notified that the City’s independent evaluation and Draft Environmental Impact Review (DEIR) of Valero’s Crude-by-Rail project will be available for public comment by June 10,” Chris Howe, Benicia Valero Refinery director of health, safety, environment and government affairs, said in an email Thursday.

Those interested will be able to read the draft EIR on the city’s website, www.ci.benicia.ca.us, by clicking on the Department of Community Development, Planning and Current Projects links under “City Departments.”

They also will be able to examine paper copies at the Community Development Department desk at City Hall and at Benicia Public Library, Million said.

Should a member of the public request it, she said, the city would make CD copies available as well.

The Planning Commission will accept public comment on the matter during a hearing at its July 12 meeting at City Hall, Million said. However, no vote will be cast that night, she said.

Once the comments are received, the city will prepare its response to those observations.

Those comments and any changes to the environmental review will be incorporated into the draft when the city produces the final version of the EIR. “There could be additional information,” Million said.

Should those comments and responses mean the draft needs to be “substantially modified,” the review would be rewritten and undergo a complete recirculation, she said.

Otherwise, if the comments and modifications aren’t considered substantial, the final version of the review would be sent to the Planning Commission for its review and vote as part of the refinery’s use permit request for its rail project.

The commission’s decision would be final, unless an appeal is filed, Million said. Should that happen, the City Council would hear the appeal and render a decision, she said.

The refinery applied for a use permit early in 2013 to extend Union Pacific Railroad’s tracks into Valero property so crude from North American sources can be brought into the plant.

Refinery officials in their application stated that the crude brought by train would not be in addition to the oil that arrives by tanker ships or pipelines, but would be substitutions. Up to 70,000 barrels would arrive daily by rail car, supplanting the same volume Valero currently receives by other methods.

Valero officials, declining to provide what they called proprietary information to competitors, have been reluctant to say where the crude is being drilled. Unlike some oil companies, Valero drills no wells of its own, but buys its crude.

Various company officials, speaking on multiple occasions, have stressed that the raw product would be similar to what it receives at its own local port.

Some opponents to the project, however, have warned that the rail cars would bring in Canadian tar sands, which is a heavier substance made “sour” by a larger percentage of sulfur. Others have suggested the source would be the North American Bakken oil fields, described as much lighter and sweeter.

Bakken crude also has a lower flash point than many oils, and has been associated with several explosions that have occurred after train car derailments.

The most recent accident happened Wednesday in downtown Lynchburg, Va., after breaches apparently developed on some of the crude-carrying rail cars on a CSX train.

A fireball shot 200 feet into the air, according to some observers. Oil was reported leaking into the James River.

Though no injuries were reported initially, at least 300 people were evacuated and neighboring cities were told to switch to alternate water sources, according to reports describing the incident.

It was the latest in a series of fiery accidents on crude-carrying trains, though none is reported to involve Union Pacific, a company that, along with the Valero refinery, continues to stress its safety record. North American rail delivery of crude has increased dramatically in the last couple of years. In the third quarter of 2013 alone, trains delivered 66 million barrels of crude, much from the Bakken fields of North Dakota.

That amounts to approximately 900 percent of what was delivered during all of 2008.

Last July, 47 people in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, Canada, died when an unmanned parked oil tanker train came loose, derailed and caught fire. People were evacuated in Edmonton, Alberta, last October after another derailment.

Thousands of barrels of oil contaminated an Alabama marshland after an oil train spill last November. A month later, two trains in Casselton, N.D., collided. One carried soybeans; the other, a BNSF train, spilled about 400,000 gallons of crude when 18 tank cars  ruptured and caught fire.

In February, BNSF announced it was seeking vendors to deliver up to 5,000 tanker cars that are stronger than those currently in use. That’s an unusual move for a large carrier, which usually requires clients to buy or lease rail cars. The railroad said it would use the reinforced cars not only for crude but also for carrying ethanol.

At a March public meeting organized by its community advisory panel, Valero officials said the refinery also would use the stronger cars to bring crude to Benicia.

Unlike the U.S. Department of Transportation, Transport Canada announced April 23 that it would remove Department of Transportation-111 unpressurized tank cars from what it called “dangerous service,” saying they didn’t meet standards for carrying dangerous fuel.

In the United States, railroads are federally regulated, a fact that has worried some residents when they learn that state, county and city officials are limited in the controls they can impose on that industry.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has recommended that federal regulators upgrade requirements for oil-carrying cars, most of which are the DOT-111s.

The Association of American Railroads, freight carriers and Amtrak, has endorsed the upgrade. DOT officials have said they have met resistance to that change from those in the oil industry.

In the interim, the AAR and U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx have announced a series of voluntary operating practices for crude-by-rail shipments that began last February. By April, rail lines promised increased track inspections and upgraded braking systems on trains with 20 or more carloads of crude oil.

Railroads said by July they would be using the Rail Corridor Risk Management System to determine which routes would be safer for trains with 20 or more crude-carrying cars, reduce those trains’ speeds and install more wheel-bearing detectors, among other measures.

Originally, Valero employees had hoped the Crude-by-Rail Project would be wrapped up within a year of filing the application in February 2013.

But once the project was announced, City Hall received heavy public input.

Opponents that included both residents and parties outside the city expressed concern about hazards associated with rail delivery of crude, the trains’ impact on traffic near Interstate 680 and inside Benicia Industrial Park, dangers to nearby environmentally sensitive wetlands, the threat posed to Benicia’s neighbors from explosions and spills, and the cumulative impact of rail delivery of crude to other Bay Area refineries.

Proponents said the project would create construction jobs while it was being built, add jobs to Valero once it was complete and equip the local refinery to compete with industry rivals.

The project has received support from Valero’s neighbors, including AMPORTS, which operates the Port of Benicia, and members of the board of the Benicia Chamber of Commerce.

Residents and others packed several city meetings on the project, including a July 11, 2013, Planning Commission meeting at which 31 people spoke.

During such hearings, every chair in the Council chamber has been filled; people lined walls and sat on the floor, waiting to speak or to hear what others said.

Speakers usually were split, with about half speaking passionately in favor of the project and the same number just as determined in their opposition.

The city initially issued a notice of intent to adopt a mitigated negative declaration for the project, which launched a 30-day comment period that ended July 1, 2013. During that time, the city received 34 written comments, some of which were substantial in length. After the closing date, 27 more written comments arrived; comments continue to be sent to City Hall.

The Benicia-based Good Neighbor Steering Committee organized a meeting last year at which a variety of speakers opposed to the project, including Diane Bailey, senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, described hazards associated with the import of tar sands crude from Canada.

Because of the volume of comments, the city notified the Office of Planning and Research, Sacramento, Aug. 9, 2013, that it would prepare an Environmental Impact Report, a much lengthier examination than the mitigated negative declaration, to comply with California Environmental Protection Act requirements.

Valero officials said they concurred with the decision.

“We consulted with city staff and agreed to work with them to prepare an Environmental Impact Report (EIR) for the Crude-by-Rail Project,” Sue Fisher Jones, Valero Benicia Refinery public affairs manager, said at the time.

Even after the city announced its intent to have the have the EIR written, proponents and opponents continued to have meetings about the project.

Bailey returned to Benicia last March for a meeting organized by the Steering Committee of Benicians for a Safe and Healthy Community. Joining her were Andres Soto, who has organized Communities for a Better Environment that opposes the increased delivery of crude by rail in the Bay Area; Damien Luzzo of Davis, who expressed worries about dangers to cities such rail cars would pass or go through; and, by video, Marilaine Savard, a resident of Lac-Megantic who described how the explosion devastated her home town.

At Valero’s own public meeting in March, speakers included refinery safety officers and environmental managers; Liisa Lawson Stark, director  Union Pacific public affairs; and Phillip Daum, an engineer who has participated in investigations of recent rail explosions, including the one at Lac-Megantic.

Valero Benicia Refinery officials won’t get to see the draft EIR any sooner than anyone else, Million said.

“We will receive the document at the same time it is available to the public,” Howe concurred. “We will have the same opportunity to provide comments as anyone else during the public comment period.”

He said his company anticipates arranging another public meeting once the draft EIR is released, and “the details for the meeting will be determined” then.

Million said city staff and refinery employes have been in conversation as the review draft has been prepared.

“They have been an integral part, because they have in-house expertise to answer technical questions,” she said. “They have a grasp of what the document says.”

This is typical of any application, she said, and Valero isn’t being treated differently from the way another individual or business that applies for a use permit or variance would be treated.

“We work with an applicant to get them on board,” she said of the way her department interacts with anyone filing an application.

Applicants also are given “a head’s up” about an environmental report’s developments, she said, adding that some applicants decide certain conditions are deal breakers.

The mitigations and conditions of approval for permits “are what the city feels is needed,” she said. “Ultimately, the comfort level is with the city.”

CPC-1232 standard, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Rail routing, Tank car retrofit, Train speed

NRDC Senior Scientist: Another explosion, and slow progress on tank car regulations

Repost from NRDC Switchboard, Diane Bailey’s Blog

This Washington, that Washington on Crude Oil by Rail

 Diane Bailey | Posted April 30, 2014

Diane Bailey

This afternoon brought news of another fiery crude oil train derailment.  Luckily no one was hurt in the Lynchburg, Virginia accident, but flames were shooting up as high as the 19th floor of one bystander’s office building, oil was spilling into the James River and hundreds have been evacuated.  The billowing black plumes of smoke serve as a warning not just to the 77,000 people living in Lynchburg but to everyone living near rail lines or terminals that the growing transport of long crude oil trains is incredibly dangerous.

It’s not clear that mile long crude oil trains can ever be made safe, but they are upon us, so while we are fighting to keep them out of communities, we better make every effort to improve the situation.  This blog includes notes on the National Transportation Safety Board Rail Safety Forum on the Transportation of Crude Oil and Ethanol  in Washington D.C. last week from Fred Millar, a well-known rail safety expert; and a summary of fieldwork from a leading activist, Matt Landon, who is oil trainspotting in Washington State. (What is oil trainspotting?)

The NTSB Forum in DC last week was packed with industry shippers and carriers, NTSB oil forum.jpgtechnical, policy, emergency response and regulatory experts, all talking about hazardous materials transportation issues and crude oil train derailments disasters. From that discussion, the top two strategies to address these safety risks involve federal regulations: (1) Ordering a fast retrofit of existing tank cars with a strong safety standard, and a similarly strong standard for new tank cars; and (2) re-routing the unit trains around major cities.

As far as the tank cars go, NTSB Chairman Hersman noted that federal agencies could use emergency powers to quickly issue safety-forcing Emergency Orders and even Interim Final Regulations.  She recounted an expeditious federal action in the 1970’s, when the DOT ordered speedy retrofits of pressurized “jumbo” tank cars DOT-112A and DOT-114A that experienced dangerous failures.

In February 1978, a rail tanker explosion killed 16, in Waverly, TN.  Less than a year later, in January 1979 the DOT Secretary reported that nearly all of the defective tanker cars had been retrofitted, and soon thereafter it was obvious that the package of three railcar retrofit devices had reduced serious pressurized railcar releases significantly. During that rulemaking process, it’s important to note that although the industry warned that only four shops could do railcar retrofits and they would take 3 days each, the NTSB ultimately found that 100 shops could retrofit tank cars, and each would take 93 minutes.

So, technically and politically, rail tanker cars can be retrofitted or replaced quickly. And in the case of the puncture-prone DOT-111 tanker cars now used to carry significant amounts of crude oil, speed is called for in their replacement as well.  According to researcher, Dr. David Jeong of DOT, using sophisticated models, the “legacy” DOT-111 tank cars are estimated to spill their contents in an accident over 25 percent of the time, whereas other models are less likely to breach in an accident. For example, COC-1232 tanker cars with full height head shields are estimated to breach in only 6 percent of accidents; and the proposed new design for more robust tanker cars with a thicker shell would only breach in 4 percent of accidents. While imperfect, these newer designs are clearly much safer and should be phased in immediately.

It remains to be seen what this week’s expected federal proposal on rail car safety will bring.  In the meantime, the Canadian government announced last week that industry must – at its own cost – replace 5,000 DOT-111 tanker cars within 30 days, and another 65,000 DOT-111 cars must be removed or retrofitted within three years.

This is a significant step, although three years is a long time to wait, and the regulations do not address re-routing of trains around cities.  In Canada, however, the railroads will have to provide hazmat rail flow information to local emergency responders (note: the public still will not have access to this). The US has no such requirement on the railroads.  Also, to make matters worse, the current “routing selection tools” used by railroads in the U.S. are not disclosed to anyone and receive minimal government oversight.  Railroads and governments have blocked any effort to keep dangerous trains away from the most populated areas by keeping the routing secret and unaccountable, unmeasured as to effectiveness.

firefighter tanker train.jpgHow can emergency responders deal with crude oil rail accidents?  A panel concluded that the best tactic is to let a derailment burn, pull back, and take a “defensive posture”.  Emergency responders were clear that the ongoing crude oil rail disasters are beyond their capabilities to handle.  “Even with an infinite amount of costly foam”, letting them burn is the only sensible approach (and this is what was done in Lynchburg this afternoon).  They note that major derailments would require enormous amounts of foam, there is not enough water to apply it especially in rural areas, and anyway, they cannot get close enough to the fires to apply it.  Derailments in urban areas would pose significant operating risks that go well beyond current operational capabilities for emergency responders.

In the meantime, Matt Landon with the Vancouver Action Network, set out to find whether crude oil trains are leaking fumes in the other Washington – State, that is. This past month, Matt initiated the Washington State Train Watch 2014 covering Spokane, the Columbia River Gorge, Washougal, Camas, Vancouver, Fruit Valley, and Everett, recording the number of oil and coal trains coming through these communities.  Using a FLIR Gasfindir GF320 hydrocarbon viewing video camera, this footage of air emissions from a train carrying crude oil thought to be from the North Dakota Bakken was posted.  Watching this video makes you wonder who is monitoring the air emissions from leaky crude oil trains, how much is leaking, who is exposed and how dangerous is it?

leaking oil train.jpg

Back in Washington D.C., waiting for an announcement on new rail safety measures from U.S. DOT, Fred Millar provided more information from the rail safety forum.  Participants in the NTSB Forum recognize the scope and seriousness of the Crude by Rail issues, given that 80 percent of the 1 million barrels per day of Bakken crude oil produced is shipped by rail, and production is growing, yet there is no single silver bullet to address the rail safety risks.

In addition to the need for improved tanker cars and routing discussed above, there are additional improvements that can be made to rail operations and to emergency response.

One key factor in train derailments that influences the extent of damage is speed.  The models that predict failure rates of tank cars during derailments use an “average accident” speed of 27 mph. Yet, even the NTSB Chair Hersman pointed out that it is not realistic, given the higher speeds seen in some of the serious derailments in recent years and the fact that the new standard adopted by the railroads on routes outside of major cities is 50 mph.  Reducing train speeds would be one effective strategy to reduce risk of catastrophic derailments.

It is also essential to strengthen emergency response capabilities. No one at the Forum asked or speculated on what would it cost if railroads paid for adequate emergency preparedness or if FRA increased their oversight in any serious way. The scale of the needs here is vast, given that there are an estimated 2 million firefighters, 80% of which are volunteers, and 20% of those turn over every year.  They all need hazmat training and appropriate resources to respond in any real way to a unit crude oil train accident.rail placard.jpg

Finally, in order for emergency responders to do their jobs, they need to know what substance they are dealing with during an accident.  Full disclosure of tanker train contents and characteristics is essential.  Communities also have a right to know this information about the mile long trains hurtling through their neighborhood, but this was never even mentioned during the Forum.

The residents of Lynchburg, Virginia and thousands of others who have witnessed the devastation of crude oil train derailments over the past year probably join me in wondering whether the federal government is going to do anything to keep these dangerous oil trains out of communities, or try to make those tanker trains safer, or make the trains slow down, or provide adequate emergency response resources, or… anything.  How many more fiery derailments will it take to act?

Full notes of Fred Millar are available to community, public health and safety advocates upon request.

Bakken Crude, Federal Rail Administration, Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Rail accidents, Rail inspection, Rail Safety

Cozy relationship between North Dakota’s oil industry and a chief federal inspector

Repost from In These Times

Official Tipped Off Hess Rail Yard About Oil-Carrier Inspection

Emails cast doubt on the integrity of a federal crackdown on unsafe shipping practices.
BY Cole Stangler  /  Web Only / Features » April 29, 2014
Oil containers wait at a train yard near Williston, North Dakota before transporting crude oil across North America. Shippers and carriers often mislabel their cargo, which leads to improper handling and potentially dangerous accidents. (Andrew Burton / Getty Images)

Emails obtained by In These Times show a cozy relationship between North Dakota’s oil industry and a chief federal inspector charged with monitoring the safety of shipping crude oil by rail. The emails cast serious doubts on the integrity of the federal government’s supposed crackdown on the industry’s shoddy shipping practices—a subject of growing concern in the midst of a largely unregulated, and in some cases, deadly, transport boom.

Last August, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Agency (PHMSA) and Federal Railroad Administration announced they were rolling out the “Bakken Blitz”—a crackdown on shippers and carriers that mislabel their cargo. Federal hazmat regulations require trains carrying oil to properly classify and identify their shipments with placards. These practices are supposed to ensure that oil is safely packaged before being shipped. They’re also aimed at informing railroad personnel and, in the event of a mishap, any emergency responders. Regulators introduced the Blitz just one month after the Lac Mégantic disaster, when a runaway freight train carrying oil exploded in the small Quebec town, killing 47 people. In that case, Canadian safety investigators found American shippers in North Dakota’s Bakken region had understated the volatility of the oil that ignited and destroyed much of Lac Mégantic’s downtown area. Improper classification caused the shipment to be transported in an improper package. Emergency responders, too, were caught by surprise at how quickly the fire spread and how long it burned.

As part of the Department of Transportation’s new enforcement effort, PHMSA officials show up unannounced at rail facilities to conduct classification inspections—at least that’s what an agency spokesperson told In These Times at first. An email obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request strongly suggests that Kipton Wills, Central Region Director of PHMSA’s Office of Hazardous Materials Enforcement, pre-arranged at least one of his agency’s visits to a Hess Corp. rail yard in Tioga, North Dakota, last October.

“We will accommodate your request to inspect trucks at the Tioga Rail Terminal,” Jody Schroeder, the rail terminal supervisor, wrote in an email to Wills dated October 3, 2013—five days before the inspection took place. “At your convenience please let me know your schedule for this event.”

Schroeder later confirmed that Wills reached out to him about the visit.

Earlier this month, PHMSA spokesperson Gordon Delcambre told In These Times that such inspections are impromptu. “They’re unannounced,” he said. “[Inspectors] figure out who they’re going to visit ahead of time, make plans, go to the area and then start knocking on doors.”

Indeed, this is normal procedure. The agency’s handbook notes “the policy of the PHMSA hazardous materials enforcement program is to conduct unannounced inspections.” Exceptions can include cases of “apparent imminent danger to enable the company to correct the danger,” instances where special preparations, records and equipment are necessary, and cases where “giving advance notice would enhance the probability of an effective and thorough inspection.”

Delcambre said he would follow up with PHMSA’s Central Region director Wills to confirm the crude-by-rail inspections were unannounced. “Our field hazmat inspector procedures have not changed with our Bakken region effort,” Delcambre wrote later that day in an email. “PHMSA inspectors still do ‘unannounced’ visits to hazmat shippers and offerors and have been taking crude oil samples as needed at the facilities they call on.”

But when asked to respond for this story, Delcambre qualified that answer.

“Because we were conducting inspections on Hess Property of other entities (highway carriers) and in order to do that safely, in some cases such as this one, prior open coordination for facility orientation and confirmation of appropriate personal protective equipment was needed,” he wrote in an email.

The inspection of the Hess facility, which also services other oil and gas companies like Marathon, did turn up “probable violations.” Out of 18 oil samples that PHMSA collected and tested at the Tioga plant, the labeling on 10 of them understated how flammable the cargo was. In each of those cases, Hess and Marathon misclassified Packing Group I oil as belonging to Packing Group II. Packing Group I is the highest risk designation, reserved for crude oil with an initial boiling point lower than 95 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s the most explosive kind of crude.

Months after the inspection took place, on February 3 of this year, PHMSA slapped Hess with a proposed $51,350 fine and Marathon Oil with a proposed $30,000 fine for the improper classification. Whiting Oil & Gas was hit with a proposed $12,000 fine for misclassifying Packing Group II oil as Packing Group III.

But Martin MacKerel, an environmental activist with the Bay Area-based Sunflower Alliance, says that these fines could have been much higher. “It’s clear that announcing the inspections gave the oil company the opportunity to reduce their fines,” says MacKerel. “These kinds of inspections need to be unannounced to have any real value.”

As he announced the slew of fines, the only federal enforcement thus far to stem from the “Bakken Blitz,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx sounded a stern warning:

The fines we are proposing today should send a message to everyone involved in the shipment of crude oil. You must test and classify this material properly if you want to use our transportation system to ship it.

But emails from the top PHMSA official on the ground to Hess strike a much friendlier tone.

On February 4, the day that the fines were publicly announced, Schroeder reached out to PHMSA’s Wills asking if he knew anything about the violations that the inspector’s higher-ups had just announced. Wills replied to Schroeder that he had just learned about the fines, but said that he hoped PHMSA and industry leaders could “get it all on one page working together as a coordinated effort not an enforcement effort.”

Avoiding “enforcement” would appear to contradict the point of the Bakken Blitz, not to mention the very mission of PHSMA—whose job is to enforce existing regulations. After all, federal hazmat regulations are nothing new. The Department of Transportation’s crackdown is only supposed to make sure that North Dakota oil shippers are following the same practices that other truck drivers and railroad operators across the country have to comply with every day.

The emails may indicate a disconnect between federal priorities and those of local regulators. Just before the fines were issued, safety concerns over crude-by-rail shipments had again taken the national stage. On December 30, 2013, a derailed grain train collided with an oil train in Casselton, North Dakota, sending 400,000 gallons of Bakken crude up in flames, and forcing residents to evacuate. Days after that, PHMSA issued a safety alert warning, noting “the type of crude oil being transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude oil.” And later that month, Secretary Foxx issued a “Call to Action” and met with railroad executives and major players in the oil and gas industry like the American Petroleum Institute.

Referencing this meeting in his email to rail supervisor Schroeder, Wills appeared to suggest the impetus for the fines came from agency superiors in Washington “Once the results came back and the Secretary of Transportation met with the energy companies and railroad CEO’s [sic], it left the control of field staff and became a larger issue,” he wrote. “In my mind, the solution is getting the bosses from both sides around the table and discussing feasible testing schedules, etc. I will be in North Dakota next week and I am hoping to have a lot more information from my own agency by then on what the [Notice of Proposed Violation] means and what we can do as far as working in partnership.”

Those bosses eventually did sit around the table. PHMSA spokesperson Gordon Delcambre tells In These Times that officials from the agency’s Hazmat Safety Office met with representatives from the North Dakota Petroleum Council on April 1 to discuss “joint interest in the safe transportation of crude oil.” The Council does not publicly disclose all of its members, but the board of directors includes Hess, Marathon, Whiting and other major energy companies such as Enbridge Pipelines and ConocoPhillips.

There have been no fines announced since February, although Delcambre says that Bakken Blitz is still ongoing.

Safety advocates say the emails illustrate a business-friendly regulatory approach that runs counter to the core mission of the agency.

“It’s telling that PHMSA has no interest in enforcement,” says Matt Krogh, Tar Sands Free West Coast campaign director at ForestEthics, an environmental group based in the Pacific Northwest. “Their goal appears to be to work together with industrial violators, not to provide the enforcement mechanism provided for in the law, and requested by higher ups in the Department of Transportation. Companies that routinely misclassify hazardous materials destined to transit America’s main streets and urban centers should be prosecuted, not coddled.”

It’s a familiar critique of what’s been referred to as a “sleepy, industry-dominated organization.” PHMSA routinely comes under fire for being too friendly with the energy industry that it regulates and for taking too long to issue much-needed rules. The small-budget agency also has oversight of the nation’s interstate oil and gas pipelines. Its 151 inspectors cover more than 2 million miles of pipeline across the country. And the unexpected shale-drilling boom has left the agency in charge of another daunting task—monitoring crude-by-rail shipments. Grappling with a dearth of pipelines, North Dakota oil producers have found rail to be the easiest, cheapest means of getting their product to market. Railroads carried more than 400,000 carloads of crude oil last year, according to the Association of American Railroads—compared to only 9,500 in 2008.

As shipments have increased, so, too, have accidents. The industry’s safety practices—from the tank-cars and routes it uses to the way it tests and classifies its shipments—garner increasing national and international attention. Last week in Washington, the National Transportation Safety Board convened a “Rail Safety Forum,” bringing together different government agencies and industry officials to discuss growing challenges. And in an unprecedented move, earlier this month, a United Nations panel on hazardous materials agreed to weigh in to the matter. The panel reportedly accepted a request from American and Canadian authorities to examine whether existing shipping rules in North America properly account for how dangerous and volatile Bakken-drilled crude actually is.

Washington may well be making moves to beef up safety practices and enforcement efforts. However, the emails obtained by In These Times raise questions about how successfully that message is being transmitted to inspectors on the ground.

—–


Cole Stangler is an In These Times staff writer and Schumann Fellow based in Washington D.C., covering labor, trade, foreign policy and environmental issues. His reporting has appeared in The Huffington Post and The American Prospect, and has been cited in The New York Times.
Federal Regulation (U.S.), National Transportation Safety Board, Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), Public Safety, U.S. Department of Transportation

Federal Pipeline and Oil-by-Rail Regulator Making 9% Staff Cut, Confounding Experts

Repost from Inside Climate News

Job cuts come at a time when PHMSA is struggling to regulate the nation’s aging pipeline network and new pipelines tied to the oil and gas boom.
By Elizabeth Douglass, InsideClimate News | Apr 24, 2014

Ruptured aging pipeline, image courtesy of PHMSA. If employees accept all of the available buyouts, PHMSA will shrink to a full-time staff of 386, putting it 112 jobs short of its approved payroll for the current fiscal year.

The federal regulator for petroleum pipelines and oil-toting railcars is offering employee buyouts that could shrink the agency’s staff by 9 percent by mid-June—a step that has confounded observers because the agency is widely regarded as being chronically understaffed.

Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) spokesman Damon Hill said the buyout offers are meant to “help the agency manage attrition in areas where a large and growing number of employees are eligible for retirement by offering an inducement for a limited number of employees to voluntarily retire or resign.”

Hill said PHMSA is continuing to hire in key areas at the same time. “I understand how some folks may be looking at [the buyout effort], but it’s part of an overall plan to retain expertise and plan for retention and things like that,” he said. “There is some good that comes out of this.”

Still, the job cuts come at a time when PHMSA is already under considerable duress. Politicians and the public have been pushing the agency to more rigorously regulate the nation’s aging pipeline network as well as the many new pipelines tied to surging domestic oil and natural gas production. A spate of damaging pipeline spills and oil-by-rail accidents is adding to the workload, exposing PHMSA’s shortcomings and intensifying scrutiny of the agency.

PHMSA, which is part of the Department of Transportation, regulates the 2.6 million miles of U.S. pipelines that carry hazardous liquids such as crude oil and fuels. It’s also responsible for making sure that more than 6 million tons of other hazardous material travels safely across the country each day via air, rail, ship and vehicle.

Carl Weimer, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust and a member of PHMSA’s technical committee for pipeline safety standards, was puzzled by news of the agency’s move to trim its staff.

“It seems like a lot of people … [and] an inopportune time,” he said. “They have all these Congressional mandates, they have all these requests from [the National Transportation Safety Board] to fix things, there’s been a series of incidents that they’re trying to investigate, and they’re even saying out loud how they don’t have enough inspectors and how they would like to do more.”

Weimer’s concern was echoed by Barbara Lawrence, who lives on a lake in Texas that has pipelines running through it carrying thick, diluted bitumen from Canada’s oil sands.

“I’m actually shocked because there’s a proliferation of [oil and natural gas] drilling in this country with the shale revolution, they’re bringing in tar sands, and they’re building pipelines like crazy,” she said. “Some of this stuff is hazardous, and [PHMSA] should be expanding at an incredible rate to make sure that all this stuff is safe.”

Hill, the PHMSA spokesman, said the agency is offering financial incentives for early retirement or resignation until mid-May, and those who volunteer must leave their jobs a month later. The buyouts were offered to investigators and engineers, as well as to transportation specialists, public affairs specialists and administrative, human resources and legal personnel.

“Industry offers buyouts periodically to entice older people to retire, and I think that’s all it was about,” said John Pepper, an engineer and inspector who left PHMSA for a natural gas storage company in February, between the buyout offers. Still, he said, “It was bizarre to me. We needed people and they offered that [buyout plan]. It didn’t really make sense.”

If all of the authorized slots are filled, the agency will lose 33 employees. Spokesman Hill said 13 employees left PHMSA through a similar offer that closed at the end of 2013.

Together, the buyout programs could result in the loss of up to 46 employees. But because PHMSA recently hired six new people, the net loss to the agency would be 40 people, or 9 percent of the full-time workforce since the end of last year.

The size of PHMSA’s payroll cut seems small compared to private sector layoffs and the big reductions that have hit elsewhere in the federal government. But the losses are likely to have an outsized effect on PHMSA, which is already hampered by substantial vacancies, a plodding hiring process and the lengthy training that’s required for many of its new hires.

If employees accept all of the available buyouts, PHMSA will shrink to a full-time staff of 386, putting it 112 jobs short of its approved payroll for the current fiscal year. Despite having fallen further behind in its hiring because of the buyouts, PHMSA’s budget proposal for 2015 seeks a major expansion to 602 full time positions.

Previous efforts to substantially boost PHMSA’s budget and staffing have been thwarted by political wrangling over the federal budget and the regulator’s inability to hire and retain enough inspectors and other key employees.

The administration had hoped to beef up PHMSA in 2013, but Hill said it got a $10.5 million funding cut instead because of the federal government’s across-the-board budget cuts called for under the sequester agreement between Congress and the White House. The agency saw a modest rise in funding for the current fiscal year, but PHMSA is hoping for a more significant increase in the next budget.

In making the case for more money, the regulator’s 2015 budget proposal said, “The pressing dangers of aging pipelines, the introduction of increasingly vulnerable pipeline materials, and the significant growth in new pipeline infrastructure demand PHMSA not only sustain, but increase current [inspection and enforcement] staffing levels to prevent incidents involving major injury to humans and damage to property and the environment.”

Hiring has been a problem, according to Pepper, the former PHMSA inspector.

“It’d be nice if they had a lot more inspectors, but it’s just almost impossible to hire them,” said Pepper. “I don’t know why they were letting inspectors go [in the buyouts].”

The rapid expansion of oil and natural gas drilling—and the pipelines that go with it—has led to a worsening shortage of inspectors and engineers throughout the industry. Multinational corporations with plenty of money to lure new talent are scrambling to land enough skilled personnel, so the task is doubly hard for governments that offer workers much lower salaries.

That has undermined PHMSA’s staffing ambitions, but they’re not alone. The National Transportation Safety Board, which conducts investigations following major pipeline or other accidents, recently noted that it has just 10 rail inspectors to handle 20 ongoing investigations involving railroad oil tankers.

PHMSA’s buyout offers could exacerbate the problem by letting experienced engineers go before replacements are ready to take over. It’s already happened elsewhere within the pipeline agency.

Weimer from the Pipeline Safety Trust cited the loss of two PHMSA employees who volunteered for the PHMSA buyouts and were gone shortly thereafter.

The employees handled requests for agency information submitted by the public—including groups like Weimer’s—under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Their departure has crippled the pipeline agency’s FOIA office, undermining efforts to be more transparent and responsive to the growing demand for pipeline information to be made public.

“It was a blow for getting stuff out of the FOIA office,” Weimer said. “But we have also had conversations with multiple PHMSA people in [Washington, D.C.] who mentioned how much institutional memory and staff abilities were lost because of the last minute early retirement of many people within PHMSA.”

PHMSA’s spokesman said the buyout process was meant to avoid that problem.

“We have quite a few retirement-eligible employees,” said Hill, PHMSA’s spokesman. The agency’s buyout program, he added, “gives us time to work with those folks who decided to accept the offer and garner their expertise, and help us get other people ready to assume those responsibilities.”