Category Archives: Public Safety

Bakken Crude, Derailment, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, James River, Lynchburg Virginia, Public Safety, Rail Safety

Lynchburg cleanup, and quote by Contra Costa County Fire Marshal

Repost from The Huffington Post
[Editor: A detailed account of the difficulties in emergency response and cleanup.  Look for the quotes by Contra Costa County Fire Marshal Robert Marshall, indicating that they couldn’t adequately fight this kind of fire unless the oil company provide specialized equipment.  – RS]

After Lynchburg, Virginia Oil Train Crash, Fire Chiefs Fear Other Accidents

AP | by By ALAN SUDERMAN and LARRY O’DELL | 05/02/2014
Workers remove damaged tanker cars along the tracks where several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire along the James River near downtown Lynchburg, Va., Thursday, May 1, 2014. Virginia state officials were still trying Thursday to determine the environmental impact of the train derailment. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Workers remove damaged tanker cars along the tracks where several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire along the James River near downtown Lynchburg, Va., Thursday, May 1, 2014.  Virginia state officials were still trying Thursday to determine the environmental impact of the train derailment. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Early reviews found no human error or mechanical failure that could have caused a fiery derailment of an oil train in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia, the National Transportation Safety Board said Friday.

Investigator Jim Southworth said a total of 17 train cars derailed Wednesday afternoon, with three tumbling into the James River. Southworth said one of those cars breached and caught on fire. The CSX train was carrying Bakken crude from North Dakota when it derailed.

CSX said in a statement Friday that all but two of the derailed cars have been position for removal from the site.

Southworth said at a news conference that investigators have interviewed the train’s conductor and engineer, and reviewed footage from a camera mounted on the front of the locomotive and the train’s data recorder that is similar to a black box found on airplanes.

“I don’t see anything in the way the crew handled the train that might contribute to this accident,” Southworth said. He said they would continue to try to find the cause.

He also said no defects have been found in the train cars or the track signals. Southworth said there’s still large amount of work to do to examine the rail itself due to the ongoing cleanup. Recovery efforts are moving slowly because of complexity involved in hauling a more than 200,000-pound tanker car out of the river by crane, he said.

State environmental officials on Thursday spotted oil sheens 12 miles downstream from the derailment site, said Department of Environmental Quality spokesman Bill Hayden. The state has estimated that about 20,000 to 25,000 gallons of oil escaped. Hayden said the department had not seen any oil around Richmond, which is downriver from Lynchburg and draws its drinking water from the James River.

The derailment was the latest in a string of oil-train wrecks, which has brought renewed demands that the Obama administration quickly tighten regulations governing the burgeoning practice of transporting highly combustible crude by rail. Some experts say stronger rules to head off a catastrophe are long overdue.

There have been eight other significant accidents in the U.S. and Canada in the past year involving trains hauling crude, and some of them caused considerable damage and deaths, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Bakken crude ignites more easily than other types.

No one was hurt or killed when a train derailed in Lynchburg, but emergency officials say it underscores that many departments don’t have the resources to deal with such an accident along a busy route for hauling oil from the booming Bakken oil fields in the northern U.S. tier and Canada.

“It definitely raises concerns,” said Williamsburg Fire Chief William Dent. “We have some minimal resources here.”

The worst-case scenario for his department, Dent said, would be an oil-train derailment on a stretch of CSX track passing between the College of William & Mary and the popular Williamsburg historic area. Some buildings on both sides would have to be evacuated, and the department would have to call on neighboring localities for help responding to the disaster.

Lynchburg officials evacuated some buildings and let the fire burn out, but Richmond Fire Chief Robert Creecy said a more aggressive response would be required if an oil train plunged from the elevated CSX track dissecting Virginia’s capital. The track spans Interstate 95 and, like the stretch in Lynchburg, grazes the edge of James River.

Richard Edinger, assistant fire chief in the Richmond suburb of Chesterfield County, said no fire department except those at some refineries has sufficient equipment and materials to deal with exploding oil-filled tank cars.

Edinger, who also serves as vice chairman of the International Association of Fire Chiefs’ Hazardous Materials Committee, said emergency responders have long been aware of the threat posed by the transport of crude oil.

“What’s new to this picture is the scale, the amount of product coming through,” he said. “That’s the game changer.”

Fire chiefs said firefighters receive training on responding to oil tanker fires — Williamsburg just conducted an exercise based on a simulated derailment of Bakken crude March 27, Dent said — but it hasn’t received any special emphasis.

“These are low-frequency, high-consequence incidents,” Edinger said. “When looking at all you need to purchase and train on, this is one of them but it doesn’t always make the highest priority.”

Nearly all of the train’s cars in Lynchburg were carrying crude, and each had a capacity of 30,000 gallons, officials said.

Lynchburg city spokeswoman JoAnn Martin said there was no effect on the water supply for Lynchburg’s 77,000 residents because the city draws from the river only during droughts.

___

O’Dell reported from Richmond.  Associated Press Writer Joan Lowy in Washington contributed to this report.
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.”

Derailment, DOT-111, National Transportation Safety Board, Public Safety, Rail tanker cars

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, 2014

Rail 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.”

Emergency Readiness & Response, Local Regulation, Oil Industry, Pacific Northwest, Public Safety, Rail industry, Rail routing

Oregon Department of Transportation serving rail companies rather than public

Repost from The Oregonian
[Editor: QUESTION: has anyone asked the California DOT for similar information?  Here is a simpler version of this article from Grist: Oregon Tells oil companies to keep oil deliveries secret.   – RS]

ODOT acts to limit disclosure of oil train shipments after The Oregonian won its release

By Rob Davis | April 22, 2014
oil train report redactions
Heavily redacted forms released by ODOT show where oil moves by rail in Oregon and the specific volume. The agency plans to no longer seek the reports.

The Oregon Department of Transportation, the state’s rail safety overseer, says it will no longer ask railroads for reports detailing where crude oil moves through the state after The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.

Railroads “provided us courtesy copies with the understanding we wouldn’t share it — believing it might be protected,” ODOT spokesman David Thompson said in an email. “We now know that the info is NOT protected; so do the railroads.”

The result? At a time of heightened public concern about increasing volumes of crude oil moving by rail in Oregon, ODOT is reducing the flow of information that has benefited not only the public but its own employees.

State law requires railroads to annually submit detailed reports saying what dangerous substances they’ve moved, where and in what volume. They’re due to emergency responders across the state by March 1 of each year. That hasn’t been happening.

The reports have been sent to ODOT instead, which historically acted as a central hub, providing the information on request to firefighters across the state.

ODOT officials say that process needs reform. But as ODOT begins working to change those disclosure rules, its officials say they no longer need any reports.

“The exact quantity of those specific shipments doesn’t impact our work,” said Shelley Snow, another ODOT spokeswoman. “Our focus is on any and all shipments traveling through the state.”

If ODOT safety inspectors need to know anything about hazardous material trends, Snow said, they can call railroads to ask.

The reports ODOT has received are the public’s only way to know how much oil moves by rail through specific corridors in Oregon. They provide the most comprehensive view of the volumes hauled through Portland, Salem, Bend, Eugene and Klamath Falls.

oil train.JPG
Trains in Oregon carry the same type of flammable North Dakota oil involved in three high-profile explosions last year, including one that killed 47 people and leveled part of a Canadian town.  Rob Davis/The Oregonian

They’ve also been valuable for ODOT’s employees. Michael Eyer, a retired ODOT rail safety inspector, said he used the annual reports to do his job. The reports helped Eyer spot trends, see whether new hazards were moving and decide where to target his field inspections.

“It was our only institutional memory,” Eyer said. “There’s no other place to get the data, no other way to have this information.”

Railroads won’t tell the public how much hazardous material such as crude oil they move, saying it’s a security risk, even though the tank cars move openly in labeled containers.

The Oregonian in March obtained an order from the state Department of Justice that required ODOT to release the reports. Not disclosing them “could infringe on the public’s ability to assess the local and statewide risks” posed by crude oil rail shipments, a Justice Department attorney said.

The heavily redacted forms showed exactly where oil moved in the state through 2012. But ODOT said it did not have reports for 2013, a year in which oil-by-rail shipments increased 250 percent in Oregon.

The Oregonian requested 2013 records on April 14, more than a month after they were due. ODOT said it still didn’t have them and didn’t plan to seek them from railroads.

The decision typifies the unusual lengths to which ODOT goes to accommodate the railroads it regulates. Though it is supposed to be an independent safety watchdog, ODOT’s rail division treats the companies it oversees as cooperative stakeholders.

“I’m certainly concerned by what I hear and want to find out about that,” said state Rep. Barbara Smith Warner, a Portland Democrat who’s taken an interest in oil train safety.

Eyer and another retired ODOT rail official said the agency’s move is a bad idea that could threaten public safety.

“Because of your records request, they’re trying to bail out,” Eyer said. “I don’t think for safety it’s the wisest decision. It puts us in a situation where no one knows the overall picture. Things will fall through the cracks.”

If the reports aren’t collected, new rail inspectors hired by ODOT won’t have any background material to know what’s historically moved around the state, Eyer said. “Any new inspector coming in will be dependent on the kindness of strangers,” he said.

Claudia Howells, a former ODOT rail administrator, said forcing the state’s lone hazardous materials inspector to make phone calls to determine what dangerous substances were moving around the state would only add to the workload of someone already responsible for overseeing tens of thousands of shipments statewide.

“Part of the function of government regulatory systems is to act as a referee and provide assurance to the public that things are as they should be,” Howells said. “Right now, I have a higher level of confidence in the railroads than their regulator.”