Category Archives: Oil spill

Crude By Rail, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Oil spill, Rail inspection, Tank car design

May 9 derailment in Colorado: TV news expose

Repost from KDVR Fox31 Denver
[Editor: This investigative report details a May 9,  2014 derailment and a previous derailment in the exact same location, highly toxic benzene contamination of groundwater and slow notification of local first responders by Union Pacific.  (Apologies for the video’s commercial content.)  – RS] 

Derailed: Railroad delays first responders on riverside oil spill

September 22, 2014, by Chris Halsne

DENVER — FOX31 Denver has confirmed a May 9 crude oil train car derailment near LaSalle, Colorado polluted area groundwater with toxic levels of benzene.

Environmental Protection Agency records from July show benzene measurements as high as 144 parts per billion near the crash site. Five parts per billion is considered the safe limit.

Federal accident records also show six Union Pacific tankers ripped apart from the train and flipped into a ditch due to a “track misalignment caused by a soft roadbed.” One of the tankers cracked and spilled approximately7,000 gallons of Niobrara crude, according to the EPA.

FOX31 Denver’s investigative team also confirmed the oil car accident location, only about 75 yards from the South Platte River, is in the same spot as another Union Pacific derailment four years ago.

Reports show four rail cars full of wheat/grain derailed in October 2010. The cause of that accident was very similar: “roadbed settled or soft” and “other rail and joint bar defects.”

“They did have a derailment at the exact same point. I mean within feet!” witness Glenn Werning, a nearby farmer and local water supervisor, told FOX31 Denver investigative reporter Chris Halsne.

Werning wonders if Union Pacific was negligent in repairing the area after the first crash telling Halsne, “It would have been devastating if it had gotten into the water and flowed down. It would have been, whew! The oil spill would have been a mess to clean up because it would have been on both sides of the river for miles.”

Union Pacific declined FOX31 Denver’s repeated requests for an on-camera interview, but a spokesperson, Mark Davis, sent a statement which says in part:

“The line where the derailment occurred is visually inspected one time per week. The maximum speed limit on the line is 20 mph.  Prior to the derailment the track was visually inspected on April 26, April 28, May 1 and May 5 with no exceptions taken. Our track team visually inspects about 15,500 miles of track daily on our 32,000 mile network in 23 states – this translates into 5.7 million miles annually of visional track inspections.”

There is currently no way to double-check the accuracy or completeness of Union Pacific’s statement because private railroads are allowed to conduct their own safety inspections and keep such records private.

Federal law only allows the Federal Railroad Administration to audit railroad inspections to make sure “the owner of the track” is conducting them appropriately.

However, at least in Colorado, that has not been done for at least three years.

FOX31 Denver’s investigative team sent Freedom of Information Act requests asking how often the FRA audited private railroad safety inspections in Colorado. The answer: From January 1, 2012 to March, 2014 is zero.

San Francisco-based Environmental Attorney and Sierra Club activist, Devorah Ancel, says the fact that private railroads conduct their own rail line and rail car safety inspections with very little federal oversight is a growing problem.

Ancel told FOX31 Denver, “The rail industry wants to get as much of this crude to market as quickly as possible. The more the federal government cracks down on safety standards, inspections, on audits, the more they are going to push back because it`s going to affect their bottom line.”

Ancel is part of a group also pressing the Department of Transportation for improvements in the design of hazardous liquid-carrying rail cars. Currently most crude oil travels across tracks in older-model containers called DOT 111’s.

According to federal authorities, the Union Pacific oil tanker which rolled, cracked and then spewed thousands of gallons of crude onto the ground in May’s accident is considered a DOT 111 design.

“This is extremely volatile crude. The tank cars have thin shells. They have thin head shields that are known to puncture during derailment. They have valves that sheer off and puncture during derailment,” Ancel says.

As if multiple derailments in the same place, unverified safety inspections, and outdated oil tanker containers were not enough of a reason for public concern, FOX31 Denver also discovered that Union Pacific officials are being accused of delaying telling local emergency responders about the latest oil car derailment.

According to Weld County Emergency Manager Roy Rudisill, Union Pacific first rallied its own crews to the scene before putting local firefighters in the loop.

Halsne asked, “Were they a little late to let you know?” Rudisill answered, “In my opinion, yes!”

We checked. According to a federal report, the accident happened at around 8 a.m. on May 9.

FOX31 Denver pulled call logs surrounding the accident and found Union Pacific first notified the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management at 9:10 am.

Radio traffic shows Weld County fire crews and emergency managers were still scrambling another hour later, trying to figure out exactly where the accident had occurred and whether oil was leaking into the South Platte River.

Rudisill told FOX31 Denver, “A quicker phone call, quicker communication, faster communication to local jurisdiction would have been prudent in my opinion. Now we’ve had two incidents out there. What can we do to make sure the proper actions are taking place so we don’t have another one?”

Werning hates to lay blame entirely on Union Pacific admitting “accidents do happen,” but he`s closely watching their latest track repair efforts, never again wanting to count on “pure luck” as a disaster prevention plan.

“Had they perhaps done a better repair (after the first derailment), they wouldn`t have dropped those cars,” Werning said.

The Environmental Protection Agency said it continues to monitor the groundwater contamination issue. Monitoring wells have been installed in the area surrounding the oil spill. Benzene is a common chemical in oil and gasoline and it does naturally dissipate over time.

Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Niobrara crude, Oil Industry, Oil spill, Pipeline transport

Wyoming Oil Spills in 2014 Already Double Amount Spilled In 2013

Repost from Associated Press on Huffington Post GREEN

Wyoming Oil Spills Total 220,000 Gallons In 2014, Already Double Amount Spilled In 2013

By Mead Gruver, 09/19/2014 
WYOMING OIL SPILL
FILE – In this May 22, 2014 file photo provided by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a 25,000-gallon oil spill burns in the Powder River Basin southeast of Buffalo, Wyo., after officials deliberately ignited the crude in what they say was their best cleanup option in the rugged area. State records show the 25,000-gallon spill was one of three big oil spills in northeast Wyoming last spring that involved a storage tank and two pipelines owned by Casper-based Belle Fourche Pipeline. | ASSOCIATED PRESS

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — An oil boom in Wyoming has a filthy side effect: A string of accidents from a remote gulley in the Powder River Basin to a refinery in downtown Cheyenne already has made this year the state’s worst for oil spills since at least 2009, state records show.

Almost 220,000 gallons of oil already has spilled in Wyoming this year, more than double the 90,000 gallons all last year. About 165,000 gallons spilled in 2010, the previous worst year since the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality began tracking spills in a database that year.

“There’s a lot more production,” Joe Hunter, the department’s emergency response coordinator, said Thursday. “If you’re producing more, there’s going to be more opportunities for releases. We’re doing what we can to just make sure the things get cleaned up.”

Much of the oil spilled lately has been in the Powder River Basin, epicenter of Wyoming’s nascent oil boom. Oil production in the basin has doubled in the past five years as companies tap the Niobrara Shale and other deep formations with horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.

All the while, large volumes of oil spill on Wyoming’s remote landscapes with little public awareness. None of the federal or state agencies with purview over oil infrastructure and public lands in Wyoming actively notifies the public about oil spills except in extreme cases.

“Unless it’s going to have an impact on public health, that’s where we would notify the public,” Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Keith Guille said Thursday.

The biggest spills in Wyoming this year haven’t affected waterways, posed no risk to the public and promptly were cleaned up, according to Guille.

Guille said the department is working on developing a publicly accessible spills database. Such public disclosure could help the state agency encourage companies to work harder to prevent oil spills, said one environmental advocate.

“I think they’re more likely to be more careful. It’s a deterrent,” said Jill Morrison with the Powder River Basin Resource Council landowner advocacy group.

Department of Environmental Quality records disclosed in response to a request by The Associated Press show several recent oil spills weren’t inconsequential in scale. Three within a month last spring totaled more than 100,000 gallons and originated with infrastructure owned and operated by a single company, Casper-based Belle Fourche Pipeline:

— On April 30, a malfunction caused a 210,000-gallon oil storage tank owned by Belle Fourche in Campbell County to overflow, spilling 70,000 gallons of crude near a drilling site;

— On May 19, corrosion at a damaged section of a Belle Fourche pipeline spilled 25,000 gallons of oil that flowed three miles down an ephemeral drainage in Johnson County;

— On May 23, heavy equipment damaged one of the company’s pipelines in Crook County, spilling about 9,000 gallons of oil.

The Department of Environmental Quality isn’t pursuing fines against Belle Fourche or HollyFrontier, owner of a Cheyenne refinery where 70,000 gallons of oil spilled July 13, Hunter said.

The refinery spill happened when a severe thunderstorm dumped heavy rain and hail on a crude oil storage tank and cause the tank’s floating roof to collapse. The oil remained on site and was cleaned up quickly, according to Hunter.

The department decides whether to pursue fines against companies on a case-by-case basis, Hunter said.

“If we think there’s negligence, we’ll absolutely, 100 percent go after a violation. If surface water is obviously impacted, that’s grounds for seeking enforcement,” he said.

“You can’t really just say, you know, they met this number, so we’re going after enforcement. You’ve got to look at circumstances, was there negligence, could this be prevented?”

A message seeking comment from HollyFrontier wasn’t immediately returned Thursday.

Bob Dundas, environmental coordinator for Belle Fourche Pipeline, said Thursday he would forward a reporter’s message to somebody else in the company who could comment. Nobody at the company called by press time.

“It looks like if we’re going to have more oil production, we’d better step up enforcement,” Morrison said. “We want to be looking at how we’re going to prevent this increase in oil spills.”

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Derailment, Massive increase in crude-by-rail, Oil spill, Rail Safety, Rail traffic

Guy Cooper: I hope you like trains a lot…

Repost from The Martinez Gazette

Martinez Environmental Group: Do you like trains a lot?

By Guy Cooper, September 14, 2014

Hope you like trains a lot.  (Kudos to the Fugs, 1965!)

I just did a presentation as part of the Martinez Environmental Group Community Forum held here in town Sept. 8. My focus was on some trends and projections for crude-by-rail (CBR) nationally, statewide and locally. Then it hit me that there were aspects and implications I had not fully appreciated.

Of course, the safety record doesn’t look good. A 2013 spike in CBR traffic nationally led to consequent spikes in accidents and spills.

trainsalot

In fact, more CBR was spilled in this country in 2013 than in the previous 40 years combined. The sheer volume shipped can mask what is actually happening. A projected 7.7 billion gallons of crude is expected to roll into our state annually by 2016. That makes a mockery of the rail industry’s oft touted 99.99 percent safety record, a record based on volume shipped.

Shipping that much volume into the state allows for the spilling or otherwise loss of over 766,000 gallons a year without even breaking a statistical sweat. You bring it, the accidents will come. The rail companies are actually having accidents about once a week now. Two locomotives derailed in Benicia Monday. Third derailment there in the last 10 months. Hey, stuff happens.

I did my walk in the Marina Park this morning. Saw two freight trains go by, one from the north, one from the south. The one from the south had five or six locomotives pulling about a hundred hopper cars. From my vantage, I couldn’t tell if they were loaded. The train easily spanned the entire Carquinez trestle. We’ve seen the same thing lately with 100-car trains of ethanol heading through downtown.

It struck me. Just how many trains do go through downtown Martinez on a given day, or at least take up room on the Union Pacific (UP) and BNSF rail corridors that bracket Martinez? The Amtrak guys at the station told me they have 42 trains a day.

Forty-two! That’s almost one every 30 minutes. All but two of those travel the UP rails to Sacramento through Benicia, Suisun and Davis via the Union Pacific tracks that will also carry most of the crude oil trains into the Bay Area. Add in the freight trains. Amtrak couldn’t tell me anything about them, said they’re unpredictable. Well, I saw two within the space of an hour.

Add in the projected oil train traffic. We do know that one unit train (100- cars) of Bakken crude travels the BNSF line from the east along the Highway 4 corridor, over the Muir trestle into Franklin Canyon every seven to 10 days. I don’t know what other trains use that route. If all of the regional refinery proposals are allowed, we could also see a unit train a day travel through downtown on its way to the Phillips 66 refinery in Santa Maria near San Luis Obispo. WesPac in Pittsburg wants a unit train a day. Valero in Benicia wants 100 cars per day. Add ‘em up and you’re looking at 20 trains, 2,000 cars, 60 million gallons a week impacting our region, kludging up the rails, slowing other freight and passenger traffic, not to mention complicating the mix with highly volatile and toxic cargoes.

Each unit train is over a mile long, weighs over 28 million pounds and carries about 3 million gallons of oil. Remember, for each one coming in, there has to be one going out. I think that’s one of Newton’s laws of motion, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, so double the number of unit trains: 40 a week by 2016.

Add in 294 AMTRAK trains per week, and a conservative estimate of 28 other freight trains a week (4/day). Total: 362 trains per week, each blowing its whistle three of four times at each crossing. Every 30 minutes.

So I hope you like trains a lot.

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, CSX, Derailment, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Oil spill, State regulation, Tank car design, Water quality

CSX reimburses Lynchburg $107,853; Virginia regulators negotiating further penalties

Repost from The Richmond Times-Dispatch

State regulators expect penalty for CSX oil train wreck

April CSX wreck sent oil into river at Lynchburg
By Alicia Petska, The News & Advance, August 21, 2014 10:30 pm

LYNCHBURG — State environmental regulators are in talks with CSX to negotiate the terms of a consent order that will be issued in response to the estimated 29,916 gallons of oil released into the James River during the April 30 train derailment in downtown Lynchburg.

The order is expected to include a financial penalty, but the amount has not been determined yet, said Robert Weld, regional director for the Department of Environmental Quality.

Other measures may include long-term monitoring of river conditions and replanting vegetative buffers along the riverbank.

Water quality testing in the weeks after the derailment found no contaminants of concern, Weld said, but visual checks and other monitoring will continue out of an “abundance of caution.”

It remains unclear just how much of the Bakken crude oil that leaked during the downtown derailment actually mixed into the river or made its way downstream.

Much of it burned in the large fire that erupted after 17 cars on a 105-car oil train derailed near downtown Lynchburg. Three cars tumbled over the riverbank, and one ruptured. There were no injuries or building damage.

The incident drew Lynchburg into a national debate over how to safely ship the volatile crude found in Bakken shale around North Dakota, where production has skyrocketed in recent years.

On Wednesday, Weld was among more than a dozen state officials who convened in Lynchburg for the second meeting of a new rail safety task force formed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe after the derailment.

The meeting, held at City Hall, included a presentation from the federal agency charged with regulating hazmat shipments and public comments from environmental advocates and rail employee representatives.

CSX had offered to reimburse the city for the cost of its emergency response and sent the final check last week, according to Lynchburg’s finance department.

The reimbursement totaled $107,853 for personnel and equipment costs, as well as minor property damage to trees, curbs and sidewalks.

The new rail safety task force has been asked to advise the state on how it can improve its own preparedness and response efforts.

It also might weigh in on the federal regulations that govern most aspects of rail operations. The U.S. Department of Transportation has been studying the oil-by-rail issue since a deadly oil train derailment in Quebec in July 2013.

Last month, federal officials released a set of proposed rules that may lead to phasing out older DOT-111 model tankers that have been criticized as puncture prone.

There also may be higher standards for braking systems, speed limits and testing of volatile liquids. The proposed rules are in a 60-day public comment period that will end Sept. 30.

During a public hearing Wednesday, water quality advocates with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and James River Association urged officials to take a comprehensive look at the rail safety issue and not limit themselves to one region, cargo or issue.

The proposed federal regulations may not do anything to deter the kind of derailment that occurred in Lynchburg, said Pat Calvert of the James River Association, whose office is close to the derailment site.

Given the location of the derailment — near several downtown businesses and a popular trail system — it’s a miracle no one was injured, he said.

“We dodged a bullet,” Calvert said. “But we shouldn’t necessarily be playing Russian roulette here.”

The cause of the Lynchburg derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB said it could be a year or more before its report is ready.

The state’s rail safety task force plans to hold its next meeting in September in the Norfolk area. It hopes to tour the Yorktown oil refinery — where oil-by-rail shipments through Virginia end up — and meet with a representative of the NTSB.