Repost from PBS News Hour
[Editor: On this highly influential PBS Newshour video, reporter Judy Woodruff gives background on recent derailments and explosions and concludes with an interview of NTSB Chair Deborah Hersman. Hersman urges action by the regulatory agencies to phase out the deadly DOT-111 tank cars, as is being done in Canada. This 8 minute video was seen by millions of PBS viewers on Wednesday, April 23. (My apologies for the unavoidable commercial ad that begins this video.) – RS]
Category Archives: National Transportation Safety Board
Safer tank car rules not expected until late 2014 (at earliest)
Repost from Associated Press – The Big Story
Rail safety effort marred by squabbling
By JOAN LOWY — Apr. 23, 2014 7:37 PM EDT
FILE – This Dec. 30, 2013 file photo shows a fireball going up at the site of an oil train derailment in Casselton, N.D. An effort by government and industry to make the tank cars used to ship crude oil and ethanol safer, spurred by a series of fiery train crashes, is becoming mired in squabbling and finger-pointing. The Department of Transportation, concerned about the potential for catastrophic accidents involving oil and ethanol trains that are sometimes as many as 100 cars long, is drafting new tank car regulations aimed at making the cars less likely to spill their contents in the event of a crash. But final regulations aren’t expected until the end of the year at the earliest, and it is common for such government rulemakings to drag on for years. (AP Photo/Bruce Crummy, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — Spurred by a series of fiery train crashes, a push by government and industry to make safer tank cars used for shipping crude oil and ethanol has bogged down in squabbling and finger-pointing over whether they’re needed and if so, who should pay.
The Transportation Department, worried about the potential for catastrophic accidents involving oil and ethanol trains that are sometimes as many as 100 cars long, is drafting new tank-car regulations aimed at making the cars less likely to spill their contents in the event of a crash. But final rules aren’t expected until late this year at the earliest, and it is common for such government rulemaking to drag on for years.
But one safety official said urgent action is needed.
The Obama administration needs to take steps immediately to protect the public from potentially catastrophic oil train accidents even if it means using emergency authority, Deborah Hersman, chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said Wednesday.
“We are very clear that this issue needs to be acted on very quickly,” she told reporters at the conclusion of a two-day forum the board held on the rail transport of oil and ethanol. “There is a very high risk here that hasn’t been addressed.”
The Transportation Department said in a statement in response to Hersman that: Safety is our top priority, which is why we’re putting every option on the table when it comes to improving the safe transport of crude oil by rail.”
The freight railroad industry proposed tougher tank-car standards last fall, and recently upped its proposal another notch. The government and the Association of American Railroads say oil being shipped from the booming Bakken region of North Dakota and Montana may be more volatile than previously thought.
But oil companies — which own or lease the tank cars, and would have to bear much of the cost of tougher standards — want to stick to voluntary standards agreed to by both industries three years ago unless it can be shown that new standards are needed, American Petroleum Institute officials said. The railroads, they say, are refusing to share the “scientific basis” for their proposal.
The petroleum institute wants “a comprehensive examination” of changes proposed by the rail industry, including whatever computer-modeling was used to support tougher standards so that it can be peer-reviewed, said Brian Straessle, a spokesman for the institute. “So far, no data has been provided,” he said.
The railroads are “pulling this out of thin air,” said Eric Wohlschlegel, another petroleum institute official.
The government, however, says it’s the oil industry that’s not sharing its data. Transportation Department officials complained recently that the agency had received only limited data from a few oil companies on the safety characteristics of Bakken oil, despite requests made in January by Secretary Anthony Foxx. Hundreds of oil producers, shippers, and brokers operate in the region.
So far, only seven oil companies have responded, and several of those provided only sparse information, Foxx said in an interview. The government wants to know what is in the oil so regulators can decide what types of protections are needed for shipping, he said.
“One of the most fundamental questions that cuts across everything in crude oil by rail is how it is classified,” Foxx said. “If it is not classified correctly at the beginning, then it is not packaged correctly and the emergency response needs aren’t understood by the communities through which this material is moving.”
The oil industry is using every tank car available to keep up with the exponential growth in Bakken oil production since hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” made it possible to extract more oil from the ground. Freight railroads transported 434,032 carloads of crude in 2013, up from just 9,500 in 2008. Three years ago, the U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products for the first time since 1949. Ethanol production has also escalated dramatically, creating competition for available rail cars. About 69,000 carloads of ethanol were shipped on rails in 2005. Last year, it was about 325,000 carloads.
In July, a runaway oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, near the Maine border. Forty-seven people died and 30 buildings were incinerated. Rail and safety officials said they were surprised by the ferocity of the fire. They were used to dealing with sludge-like crude that doesn’t ignite easily, but Canadian investigators said the combustibility of the 1.3 million gallons of light, sweet Bakken crude released in Lac-Megantic was more comparable to gasoline.
There have been eight significant accidents in the U.S. and Canada in the past year involving trains hauling crude oil, including several that resulted in spectacular fires, according to a presentation by crash investigators at a two-day National Transportation Safety Board forum this week on the transport of crude oil and ethanol. Most of the accidents occurred in lightly populated areas, although one derailment and fire in December occurred less than two miles from the town of Casselton, N.D.
Railroads can’t be sure what they’re hauling, said Robert Fronczak, assistant vice president of the rail association. Given that uncertainty, he said, they want oil shipped in tank cars with thicker shells like those required for chemicals that form toxic vapor clouds when released.
Regulators who have tested some Bakken oil samples on their own warned emergency responders and the public in January that it could be more dangerous than many conventional types of crude. But petroleum institute officials say they don’t believe Bakken crude is significantly different than other light crudes, such as those from Texas.
Transportation officials are now “assessing whether or not we will need to take additional steps to gather the information we requested” from oil companies, according to a government statement provided to The Associated Press.
Thousands of older tank cars that predate the voluntary standards adopted three years ago may also have to be discontinued for oil transport, Fronczak said. Canadian authorities announced Wednesday that they will require a three-year phase out or retrofit of older cars like the ones that ruptured in Lac-Megantic. But oil industry consultant Lee Johnson, testifying for the petroleum institute, told the safety board that U.S. oil companies need the “flexibility” to continue to use the older cars, and any decision on retrofits should be “data-driven.”
Of course, if the railroad industry were to do a better job of fixing broken and substandard track, a major cause of accidents, or installing positive train control, a technology designed to reduce human error and prevent the most catastrophic kinds of collisions, there might be fewer crashes, Christopher Barkan, executive director of the railroad engineering program at the University of Illinois, told the board.
Rail officials: older tank cars have 1 in 4 chance of leaking if they derail
Repost from The Star Tribune – Business, Minneapolis, MN
Failure rates raising new fears over use of aging oil tankers
Article by: JIM SPENCER , Star Tribune | April 22, 2014Rail industry estimated their chance of leaking in derailments at 1 in 4.
A BNSF Railway train hauled crude oil near Wolf Point, Mont, in November. A National Transportation Safety Board forum on Tuesday looked at the safety in transporting crude oil and ethanol. One focus was the use of older tank cars, especially as oil train traffic increases. Photo: Associated Press file.
WASHINGTON – Tens of thousands of older tanker cars used to haul North Dakota crude oil and Midwestern ethanol run a one-in-four risk of leaking if they derail, railroad officials told the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Tuesday.
The failure rate, estimated by the Rail Supply Institute and the American Association of Railroads, illustrates a growing concern for safety that has accompanied skyrocketing shipments of crude oil across the country.
Crude oil shipments originating in the United States have grown from about 6,000 carloads in 2005 to roughly 400,000 in 2013 as the United States has tapped domestic petroleum sources. At the same time, the government has yet to issue new standards for safer tanker construction.
About six North Dakota oil trains per day travel across Minnesota and through the Twin Cities, many of them 100 cars long. Each tank car holds 25,000 to 30,000 gallons of crude oil. Ethanol trains, which pose a similar hazard, move on Union Pacific tracks through the state.
But recent fiery crashes have convinced some policymakers that the threat of derailments like the one that happened in December in North Dakota put the public at unacceptable risk.
“A spate of recent accidents in the United States and Canada [demonstrate] that far too often, safety has been compromised,” NTSB chairwoman Deborah Hersman said.
While the rail industry says it moves 99.9 percent of its crude oil shipments incident-free, industry data show that 46,400 rail cars have been damaged in 29,000 accidents since 1970.
The older, general-use tanker cars hauling oil and ethanol meet current government safety standards, but government videos on the first day of a two-day forum about safety in crude oil and ethanol transport showed an older car rupturing during a puncture test, spraying its contents over the test site.
“Taking [older cars] out of the fleet reduces risk,” Robert Fronczak of the Association of American Railroads told the board.
But, he said, eliminating them by attrition alone could take 40 to 50 years.
Setting new standards
The sturdier tank cars being built now are half as likely as the older model to spill contents in a derailment, the rail industry estimates. But car construction standards being discussed by the government could lower the chances of a derailment leak to less than one in 20.
However, the rail supply industry has “to have regulatory certainty” before it commits to major new tanker production and retrofitting of old cars, William Finn of the Railway Supply Institute told the board.
Lee Johnson, representing the American Petroleum Institute, questioned the spill data attributed to older, so-called “legacy cars.” He called the numbers “preliminary.”
Johnson said the oil industry needs to keep shipping oil in the older cars “to move increasing production.” There are not enough of the newer, sturdier tanker cars available to meet oil producers’ demands, especially in North Dakota’s Bakken field, which Johnson said will soon be producing 2 million barrels of oil per day.
Roughly 23,000 older “legacy cars” now carry crude oil, and 29,000 more carry ethanol. The United States may soon have even more crude oil moving in the more vulnerable rail cars because of a surcharge Canada now places on their use. That means railroads may divert newer, sturdier cars to haul oil to Canada. Retrofitting older legacy cars to make them more leakproof will take years, if not decades, several participants said.
“We don’t want to disrupt the country’s need for the fuel these cars are hauling,” Finn said.
Why the details matter
Meanwhile, a better car design remains the subject of debate.
Greg Saxton, chief engineer of the Greenbrier Cos., one of the country’s four major train car builders, believes in greater tanker wall thickness. “Engineers deal with uncertainty by adding some margin of safety,” he explained to the board.
Others argue that thicker walls add weight and reduce storage space without improving safety.
Wall thickness is probably the biggest sticking point in the tanker safety discussion. The Railway Supply Institute wants a standard width of seven-sixteenths of an inch. The Association of American Railroads wants nine-sixteenths of an inch.
“Crude oil contains a significant amount of dissolved gas,” the railroad association’s Fronczak said. A nine-sixteenth-inch wall will contain the vapor pressure that can build inside a crude oil tanker.
Videos shown Tuesday explained why such minutiae might matter. In one, a train car with a thicker wall withstood the whack of a giant prod traveling 14.7 miles per hour, while a car built to current DOT 111 standards ruptured in a 14 miles-per-hour collision.
Other issues include reinforcing the ends of tanker cars where they are most likely to be struck in a derailment, installing pressure-relief valves on tankers to keep crude oil from exploding in the event of a derailment and applying additional thermal protection to cut the risk of fires.
The NTSB’s Hersman asked Johnson how long he felt the older, more vulnerable cars would be needed to haul crude oil.
When Johnson couldn’t provide a specific time frame, Hersman replied: “You’re not making me feel very optimistic.”
Fire safety officials to NTSB: very little we can do
Repost from the White Plains NY Journal News on LoHud.com
NTSB hears concerns on derailments of oil trains
Brian Tumulty, TJN | April 23, 2014
WASHINGTON – Crude oil and ethanol fires caused by derailed freight trains are left to burn out on their own because first responders can’t extinguish them, fire safety officials told the National Transportation Safety Board on Wednesday.
“They are no-brainers,” Greg Noll of the National Fire Protection Association said during the second day of a two-day forum on safety issues linked to rail transport of crude oil and ethanol. “There is very little we as first responders are going to do.”
Even multiple fire departments located near the site of a railroad tanker fire don’t have enough foam to extinguish such blazes, which can spread from car to car. The DOT-111 tankers that carry most crude oil moved by freight rail can’t quickly vent high-pressure vapors that build up inside the cars, railroad experts said during the first day of the forum Tuesday. They said those vapors can ignite into a thermal mushroom cloud.
The use of so-called unit trains carrying up to 100 tanker cars of crude oil or ethanol is a relatively new phenomenon that risks catastrophic events such as the July 2013 accident in Quebec that caused 47 deaths and the evacuation of more than 2,000 people.
The engineer on that crude oil train failed to properly secure it on an incline when it was parked overnight. The train rolled into the community of in Lac-Megantic, derailing at a speed of 64 mph.
An estimated 434,000 tanker loads of crude oil were shipped by rail last year, compared to only 9,500 in 2008, according to the Association of American Railroads.
Much of that oil was carried, mostly on freight trains, from the Bakken Formation oil field in North Dakota and Montana to refineries on the East, West and Gulf coasts. Oil production in the Bakken field reached 1 million barrels a day in December and is forecast to peak at 2 million barrels a day in seven years, Skip Elliott of CSX Transportation told the NTSB.
Deadly derailments of trains carrying crude oil and ethanol also have raised questions about tanker car design, but industry groups say they haven’t been able to agree on the thickness of steel in the shell of new tankers.
Rail tanker manufacturers said they’re ready to increase production to meet increased demand, but want regulatory certainty about the future standard.
Industry officials said a disagreement over one-eighth-of-an-inch thickness of steel for the shell — whether to continue using 7/16ths of an inch or move to 9/16ths of an inch — led them to ask federal regulators to promulgate a rule setting the standard for new tanker cars.
The federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, which has jurisdiction over rail tanker car safety standards, has not yet proposed a new standard. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who oversees the agency, has told Congress no date has been set for releasing a draft of the proposed standard.