Category Archives: Oil spill

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fire, Oil spill, Rivers, Water quality

UPDATE: West Virginia derailment, explosion, evacuation, river-spill

Repost from WVNSTV.com, Ghent, WV
[Editor: Significant quote: “Crews said oil is burning everywhere.  There are some environmental concerns if the oil is under the frozen spots in the river.  Crews on the scene said that the oil in those locations will not burn and will have ‘all kinds of negative impacts on the water.'”  – RS]

LATEST: Boomer evacuated due to train derailment fire

By Douglas Fritz, Feb 16, 2015, Updated

4:30 p.m. UPDATE:

Train derailment in the area of Boomer Bottom and Adena Village leads to evacuations. Photo Courtesy: Dan Toney
Train derailment in the area of Boomer Bottom and Adena Village leads to evacuations. Photo Courtesy: Dan Toney

Firefighters with the Boomer Fire Department said that there have been at least six explosions in connection with the fire that started from a CSX train that derailed in the Powelltown Hollow area of Fayette County on Monday, Feb. 16, 2015.  The derailment happened at around 1:30 p.m.  As a result, the entire town of Boomer was evacuated by 4:30 p.m. [BI Editor: population 615 in 2010 census]

The train was traveling from North Dakota to Yorktown, VA carrying crude oil. The scene extends along WV Route 61, near Armstrong Creek road. According to firefighters, the largest explosion happened near a house that was between the railroad tracks and the Kanawha River.  They do not believe anyone was home at the time.  State Troopers said there have been no fatalities reported.

Boomer has been evacuated as a result of a fire caused by a train derailment in Powelltown Hollow, WV.
Boomer has been evacuated as a result of a fire caused by a train derailment in Powelltown Hollow, WV.

Crews said oil is burning everywhere.  There are some environmental concerns if the oil is under the frozen spots in the river.  Crews on the scene said that the oil in those locations will not burn and will have “all kinds of negative impacts on the water.”

3:00 p.m., UPDATE:

Water intakes in Montgomery and Cedar Grove have been closed because of the train accident along the Kanawha River.  That is according to the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources Bureau for Public Health.

It is confirmed that the train was carrying crude oil, some of which spilled into the Kanawha River.  While the intakes are closed, customers are urged to conserve water.  The Montgomery Water System is part of West Virginia American Water Co.  The company released a statement regarding the accident.

“West Virginia American Water is aware of the train derailment just east of Montgomery on the Fayette-Kanawha County line.   The Montgomery water treatment plant, which draws water from the Kanawha River a few miles downstream of the accident, was shut down at approximately 2:30 p.m.,” said Laura Jordan, the External Affairs Manager.  “Customers in the Montgomery area are asked to conserve water and only use it for essential functions at this time.  West Virginia American Water is working with emergency responders and the Bureau for Public Health on continued response efforts.”

The West Virginia State Police expanded the evacuation order for the area at around 3:15 p.m. to include anyone with half of a mile of the fire.  Anyone who is not responding to the scene as a part of the emergency crews is asked to avoid the area.

2:30 p.m., UPDATE:

Dispatchers have announced that the towns of Adena Village and Boomer Bottom are being evacuated because of a nearby train derailment.

Officials said Route 61 is being shut down as a result of the derailment. A shelter is being set up at Valley Elementary School for people who are being evacuated.

According to Lawrence Messina, communications director for the West Virginia Department of Military Affairs and Public Safety, at least one tanker has fallen into the river, and authorities believe crude oil is in the tanker. Messina said officials were unsure if anything else was in the tanker.Messina said the Department of Environmental Protection also was responding to the accident to assess the situation.

2:21 p.m., Original Story:

Firefighters and emergency crews have responded to a train accident in Montgomery, WV busy.

The accident happened at about 1:30 p.m. on Monday, Feb. 16, 2015. Details on what exactly happened are still limited at this time. Officials have said that a train has derailed. The location of the accident is near Montgomery, within a four mile radius. Watch for updates hear and on the air as information becomes available.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fire, Oil spill, Rivers, Water quality

LATEST DERAILMENT: WV train derailment causes massive fire, evacuations (raw video)

Repost from The Los Angeles Times

West Virginia train derailment causes massive fire, evacuations

By Ryan Parker, Feb 16, 2015, 1:31pm

A train derailment Monday afternoon in West Virginia caused multiple explosions and a massive fire, officials said.

At least one home near the derailment in Fayette County caught fire and has been destroyed, according to Lawrence Messina, the state’s public safety spokesman.

The derailment happened about 1:20 p.m. Eastern time, Messina said. Three hours later, the fire was still burning, he said.

The CSX train was hauling crude oil, which is leaking from at least one of the cars, Messina said. There are no reported injuries, he said.

“Our concern is oil is leaking into the Kanawha River,” he said. Two water intakes downstream from the treatment plant have been shut down, he said.

CSX acknowledged that the company was aware of the situation. “We are working with first responders on the scene to ensure the safety of the community,” it said on Twitter.

Some of the tanker cars exploded, and oil on a portion of the river is on fire, according to the office of Kanawha County Emergency Management & Floodplain Management, which was assisting in the response.

Kanawha County is downriver from Fayette County.

Adena Village, near the derailment, has been evacuated, and authorities were beginning to evacuate homes across the river from the fire about 4:30 p.m., Messina said. At least 100 people have been evacuated, he said.

Fayette County is about 60 miles southeast of Charleston.

Pictures on social media, which a spokesman for the Montgomery Fire Department confirmed were of the scene, showed fire engulfing the train.

Heavy snow is falling in the area, but Messina said it is unclear if that will help extinguish the fire.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Evacuation, Explosion, Fire, Oil spill

Record number of oil train spills in 2014

Repost from NBC News

Oil Train Spills Hit Record Level in 2014

By  Tony Dokoupil , January 26, 2015

Oil-train-spills-hit-record-levels-in-2014_Lynchburg-VAAmerican oil trains spilled crude oil more often in 2014 than in any year since the federal government began collecting data on such incidents in 1975, an NBC News analysis shows. The record number of spills sparked a fireball in Virginia, polluted groundwater in Colorado, and destroyed a building in Pennsylvania, causing at least $5 million in damages and the loss of 57,000 gallons of crude oil.

By volume, that’s dramatically less crude than trains spilled in 2013, when major derailments in Alabama and North Dakota leached a record 1.4 million gallons — more than was lost in the prior 40 years combined. But by frequency of spills, 2014 set a new high with 141 “unintentional releases,” according to data from the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). By comparison, between 1975 and 2012, U.S. railroads averaged just 25 spills a year.

The vast majority of the incidents occurred while the trains were “in transit,” in the language of regulators, rumbling along a network of tracks that pass by homes and through downtowns. They included three major derailments and seven incidents classified as “serious” because they involved a fire, evacuation or spill of more than 120 gallons. That’s up from five serious incidents in 2013, the data shows.

“They’ve got accidents waiting to happen,” said Larry Mann, the principal author of the landmark Federal Railroad Safety Act of 1970. “Back in 1991 I said, ‘One day a community is going to get wiped out by a freight train. Well, in 2013 that happened and unless something changes it’s going to happen again.”

Mann was referring to the Lac-Mégantic disaster, a deadly derailment in Quebec just miles from the Maine border. A 72-car oil train rolled downhill and exploded on July 6, 2013, killing 47 people and destroying most of the town.


In the months that followed American regulators convened a series of emergency sessions. They promised sweeping new safeguards related to tank car design, train speed, route and crew size. To date none of those rules have been finalized.

On January 15 the Department of Transportation missed a deadline set by Congress for final rules related to tank cars, which have a decades-long history of leaks, punctures, and catastrophic failure. The rules are being worked on by PHMSA and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA).

In response to questions from NBC News, PHMSA declined to explain the delay in new rules but it defended the relative safety of oil-by-rail. “More crude is being transported across the country than in any time in our history, and we are aggressively developing new safety standards to keep communities safe,” PHMSA spokesperson Susan Lagana said in a statement.

“Last year, over 87,000 tank cars were in use transporting crude oil, and 141 rail crude oil releases were reported,” she continued. “The amount of crude oil released in these spills was less than the capacity of two tank cars.”

The FRA declined a request for comment. It did, however, provide data that suggests the railroads are getting better overall at transporting hazardous material. Between 2004 and 2014, for example, the number of collisions and derailments involving trains carrying hazardous material fell by more than half, from 31 to 13, according to the data.

Ed Greenberg, a spokesperson for the Association of American Railroads (AAR), the industry’s principal trade group, said the railroads themselves support stronger tank cars. The oil industry actually owns most of the cars used to transport its product, he said. That has complicated the rule-making process and set off a debate over which industry should cover the cost of an upgrade.

Greenberg also sharply disagreed with the idea that oil-by-rail was getting more dangerous. With 40 times more oil being hauled along U.S. rail lines in 2015 than in 2005, he acknowledges that the raw number of incidents has increased. But he argues that the railroads have never been safer overall.

“Railroads have dramatically improved their safety over the last three decades, with the 2014 train accident rate trending at being the lowest ever,” he told NBC News, citing multi-billion-dollar investments in new cars, tracks, and workers.

Last year, he added, 99.97 percent of all hazardous material on the rails reached its destination without incident. Of the 141 oil spills included in the federal data, meanwhile, the AAR calculates that fewer than 10 involved the loss of more than a barrel of oil.

But critics say that’s little comfort to the estimated 25 million Americans who within the one-mile evacuation zone that the US Department of Transportation recommends in the event of an oil train-derailment.

“Moving oil from one place to another is always risky, and even a single spill has the potential to harm land and marine ecosystems for good,” said Karthik Ganapathy, communications manager for 350.org, an environmental group that has helped organize protests against oil by rail. “These new data confirm what we’ve known to be true all along—oil-by-rail is incredibly dangerous.”

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Oil spill

Preparing for a railway disaster in Ashland, Virginia

Repost from The Herald-Progress, Ashland, VA

Preparing for a railway disaster in Ashland

January 28, 2015

Every day, 40 trains carry 30,000 loads of freight – some containing volatile materials – while another 22 trains transport 6,000 passengers through the “Center of the Universe.”

A lot could go wrong.

But CSX and local emergency services officials assured members of town council last week that stringent planning and strong communication between agencies should help ensure a swift response in the event of a train emergency or prevent one all together.

The issue of rail safety is tied to what Bryan Rhode, CSX regional vice president in charge of state government affairs in Virginia, called an “energy revolution” currently underway in the United States.

Crowds line the train tracks in downtown Ashland as a CSX train makes its way through town in this 2012 Herald-Progress file photo.
Crowds line the train tracks in downtown Ashland as a CSX train makes its way through town in this 2012 Herald-Progress file photo

With increased domestic oil production come questions about how to get those resources to market. Rhode said that traditionally, crude oil would be transported by pipeline, but that infrastructure doesn’t exist in many of the new areas where the raw materials are being extracted, and that’s where rail comes in.

“This idea of moving crude [oil] by rail really sprung up a couple years ago,” Rhode said. “I’ve talked to people who have been with CSX much longer than I have and they tell me if somebody had come to them five years ago and said we’d be moving crude oil by rail, they would have said, ‘You’re crazy.’”

But it’s now something railroads are doing in increasing volumes even though Rhode said transporting crude oil still only constitutes about 2 percent of CSX’s business.

The issue has received increasing attention following a CSX train derailment in Lynchburg last April, when a large shipment of crude oil exploded along the James River and near the city’s downtown sector.

“In a lot of ways we got very lucky because nobody was hurt or killed,” Rhode said. “But it was still something that impacted Lynchburg, impacted the James River and something that we strive every day to avoid allowing to happen again.”

Even prior to the Lynchburg crash, there had been a push for safer crude oil transport. In February 2013 the Federal Railroad Administration issued a number of emergency orders and regulations aimed at enhancing safety. Following the crash, Rhode said the federal government implemented more stringent regulations concerning the shipment of crude oil by rail and HAZMAT materials, in general.

But despite those regulations and what Rhode called a culture of safety at CSX, accidents still can and do occur.

“We do everything we can to prevent accidents from happening, but when you’re moving huge amounts of material in large equipment, we all recognize that sometimes, despite our best efforts, things do happen,” Rhode said. “Our goal is zero preventable accidents.”

Emergency plans in place

Hanover is contained in the RF&P sub-division of what CSX calls its Baltimore division, bookended by Richmond to the south and Philadelphia to the north.

According to Henry Moore, division chief of planning for Hanover Fire-EMS, molten sulfur and crude oil comprise half of all hazardous materials making their way through the county on a daily basis. Ethanol carloads are also increasing with about 210,000 gallons of the volatile substance making its way by rail to Stafford County on a daily basis.

Moore said Hanover and the region have bolstered their foam suppression capabilities in preparation for a derailment or catastrophic event and that regional response teams routinely participate in emergency exercises in preparation for railroad accidents where hazardous materials are present.

Hanover has in place a standard operating guideline for responding to railroad emergencies and also maintains an initial responder checklist for public safety personnel created for joint response to train crises.

Anthony Callahan, deputy chief of the Ashland Police Department, said all Ashland officers are trained in how to handle critical incidents. In the advent of a train-related incident, responding officers are taught to first establish communication and to contact other resources. Officers are also instructed to designate a “danger zone,” where only emergency responders are allowed, and to set up inner and outer perimeters. They would then implement an incident command post to direct emergency personnel and secure a staging area for other first responders.

However, Callahan said that his officers will assume different roles based on the severity of the actual incident. In cases where a car is stuck on the tracks, for example, Callahan said the first responding unit would get in touch with CSX and work to get the occupants out of the vehicle, with the immediate consideration being the health and safety of individuals on scene and in the area.

In cases where there has been a collision requiring any sort of spill cleanup, Callahan said Fire-EMS would take the lead, with APD in a support role.

In case of an incident, Rhode said CSX also brings a number of resources to the table, including trained personnel and heavy equipment staged throughout its network to ensure a quick response.

If a community is impacted, CSX steps up to offer relocation services and local aid.

Rhode said that in the advent of an actual emergency, cross-jurisdictional communication is key. In the case of the Lynchburg incident, officials from CSX had existing relationships with state and local emergency response teams.

“We weren’t handing out business cards. We all knew each other; we’d worked together before,” Rhode said. “If you don’t know each other and you’re not talking to each other before [an emergency] happens, you’re probably going to have issues.”

Fortunately, ties are strong between CSX and local fire, EMS and law enforcement agencies, officials told town council.

Rhode said CSX partners with local first responders to make sure they have the training they need to effectively respond to an incident. This takes place through online courses and local “tabletop” exercises on up to specialized, in-person, training dealing specifically with crude oil accidents.

Moore said Fire-EMS is in the final stages of planning a joint Amtrak derailment tabletop exercise in Ashland with Randolph-Macon College and the Ashland Police Department. The training should take place in the coming spring, one more safeguard aimed at ensuring this train town also remains a safe town.