Category Archives: Rail routing

Bakken Crude, Crude By Rail, Hazmat notification, High Hazard Flammable Trains (HHFTs), Public Safety, Rail routing

Minnesota Governor Pens Scathing Letter To BNSF President Over Oil Trains In Twin Cities

Repost from CBS Minnesota
[Editor:  Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton learned about new routing of oil trains in a major metropolitan area AFTER THE FACT.  That is how the railroads notify the public of major changes in crude by rail transport.  It is important to have a sitting Governor join the chorus of voices on this highly significant issue of rail routing and notification.  See the TV news video below, and read Gov. Dayton’s full letter  here.  – RS]

Dayton Pens Scathing Letter To BNSF President Over Oil Trains In Twin Cities

By Jennifer Mayerle, October 21, 2015 10:34 PM

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — Gov. Mark Dayton says he’s deeply concerned about an increase in the number of oil trains traveling through heavily populated areas of the Twin Cities.

In a letter to the President of Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway, Dayton estimates an additional 99,000 people are living within an evacuation zone. The areas include spots where thousands gather at a time, like Target Field and the University of Minnesota.

Kathy Harrell-Latham lives in downtown Minneapolis with her family.

“We chose this neighborhood because it’s accessible and the risks were relatively limited,” Harrell-Latham said.

She was concerned to learn 11 to 23 crude oil trains per week are being transported on the Willmar-Minneapolis-St. Paul rail line. And it goes by Target Field, Target Center, the U of M and downtown Minneapolis.

“There are people that live here and work here all day and we need the safety measures to go above and beyond,” Harrell-Latham said.

Gov. Mark Dayton wrote a scathing letter to the President of BNSF Railway citing safety concerns and outrage over not being informed of the “significant change in operation, which puts an additional 99,000 Minnesotans at risk.”

That brings the total number in the state to roughly 425,000.

“The Governor is absolutely right there should not be these dangerous oil and ethanol trains being routed through population areas,” DFL Rep. Frank Hornstein said.

Hornstein championed last year’s crude oil transport response bill. He applauds the Governor’s request for the railway to: issue a public statement about the temporary route, to not operate under Target Field during events and to extend first responder training to affected communities, among others.

It’s in an effort to prevent accidents like this BNSF train that derailed in Montana in July, and a 2013 accident in Quebec that killed 47.

“We need to have a much stronger safety protocol for these trains as they come through but the railroads are not cooperating and now we have more evidence of that,” Hornstein said.

In response, BNSF issued this statement:

“BNSF has multiple routes in the metro area that we utilize for hauling a variety of commodities. We comply with the law and report to the state crude volumes of a certain size and their routes and when they change by 25 percent. That occurred in this case where we have a major expansion project occurring and are rerouting some traffic to accommodate that construction work. Crude oil was already being shipped on the route in question. Volumes and routes can fluctuate for a number of reasons. In all areas of the metro region where we move crude oil and other hazmat, we take a number of steps to reduce risk. We’ll be talking directly with the Governor on his concerns and our ongoing efforts to safely move all commodities by rail.”

 Gov. Dayton has asked BNSF to provide a progress report by the end of the month, and urges them to inform him and the public about changes.

Read Gov. Dayton’s full letter here.

 

Blast zone, Crude By Rail, Rail routing, Schools

National Education Association (NEA) Opposes California Oil-train Project

Repost from The Center For Biological Diversity
[Editor:  Significant paragraph: “Thirteen school boards and five teachers’ unions in California have publicly opposed the Phillips 66 project, including in Ventura, Martinez and Oakland. Last month both the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers sent letters to county officials urging them to deny the project….”  See more below.  – RS]

NEA Opposes California’s Phillips 66 Oil-train Project Over Risks to Students

Dangerous Bomb Trains Would Threaten Hundreds of California Schools
For Immediate Release, July 15, 2015

WASHINGTON— Out of concern for the safety and wellbeing of students and teachers, the National Education Association today opposed the proposed Phillips 66 oil-train offloading facility in San Luis Obispo County. If approved the project would bring millions of gallons of hazardous crude oil nearly every day through highly populated areas near hundreds of schools.

With nearly 3 million members in 50 states and the District of Columbia, NEA is the nation’s largest professional employee organization and union. Its Representative Assembly voted earlier this month to send a letter urging the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors to reject the project permit.

The NEA letter notes that at least 29 schools in San Luis Obispo County alone are close enough to the planned crude-by-rail route to suffer catastrophic consequences from a train derailment or an oil spill. “Please put student safety first,” the letter urges.

“Our members are concerned for the safety, health and wellbeing of their students,” said NEA President Lily Eskelsen García. “Hundreds of schools across California are within a mile of the potential ‘blast zone’ and could suffer catastrophic consequences in the event of a train derailment or oil spill.”

The county’s planning commission is expected to vote on the project in the coming months.

Thirteen school boards and five teachers’ unions in California have publicly opposed the Phillips 66 project, including in Ventura, Martinez and Oakland. Last month both the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers sent letters to county officials urging them to deny the project, citing the high risk of train derailment and toxic diesel emissions, which are especially harmful to children.

“Our schoolchildren at these schools are in extreme risk if there is a major oil-train accident,” said Kathleen Minck, 30-year elementary school teacher and member of the Lucia Mar Unified Teachers Association, which sent a letter of opposition to the project last month. “Also, increasing air pollution from the trains will affect all our children with asthma, even in the absence of a major accident.”

Nearly 20 local governments along the rail route affected by the Santa Maria Phillips 66 project have also submitted letters or passed resolutions against the project, including San Jose, Berkeley, Davis and Ventura County. More than 23,000 people from across California have also voiced opposition to the project.

“Teachers across America want San Luis Obispo’s dangerous oil-train project stopped in its tracks,” said Valerie Love with the Center for Biological Diversity. “County officials must understand that approving this facility would endanger hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across California and beyond. It’s critical not to put schools and communities in the path of these explosive bomb trains.”

Background
The nearly 3 million-member NEA is the largest professional employee organization and labor union in the country — representing public school teachers and other support personnel, faculty and staffers, retired educators, and college students preparing to become teachers — with affiliate organizations representing 14,000 school communities in every state and the District of Columbia as well as educators working on military bases in the United States and abroad.

In 2015 there have already been five major fiery oil-train derailments, including in West Virginia, Illinois and Ontario. In May the U.S. Department of Transportation released new rail tank car regulations, which will take 10 years to be phased in — and which still leave the public at severe risk from oil trains.

Shipments of crude oil by rail have increased by 4,000 percent since 2008. More oil was spilled in train accidents in 2013 than in the previous 38 years combined, and in 2014 there were more oil train accidents than in any other year on record.

Crude By Rail, Derailment, Explosion, Fire, Lac-Mégantic, Public Safety, Rail routing, Take Action

Lac-Mégantic protest: crude oil trains should bypass our town

Repost from the Montreal Gazette
[Editor:  Another perspective: for a local report that completely ignores the protest in Lac-Mégantic, see In Lac-Mégantic, everyone marks the anniversary in their own way, including a brief news video of church bells and a solemn ceremony.  – RS]

Lac-Mégantic marches against crude oil returning

By Jesse Feith, July 5, 2015 9:09 AM EDT
Anti-oil demonstration in Lac-Megantic
(To play the video, click the image which takes you to the Montreal Gazette page.)

Two years after the deadly derailment in Lac-Mégantic, people are starting to feel comfortable about standing up for what they want, says Jonathan Santerre, an activist and founder of the Carré bleu Lac-Mégantic citizens’ group.

The group organized a walk against crude oil in Lac-Mégantic on Saturday afternoon, where about 150 people walked from the town’s high school down Laval St. toward the old downtown.

At first, residents were afraid to speak out after the train derailment that killed 47 people in July 2013, Santerre said.

Sending loud political messages while many continue to mourn could be seen as insensitive by some, but, Santerre said, “we have no choice.”

“Emotions and politics are tied together in this, unfortunately,” he continued. “It’s shocking that after everything that happened, people’s lives still come second to money.”

Though Saturday’s march was held to denounce crude oil, Santerre knows getting oil shipments through Lac-Mégantic banned isn’t realistic. When Central Maine and Québec Railway Canada bought the line in 2014 after Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway went bankrupt following the derailment, it was clear from the beginning that oil would return come 2016.

The town needs the railroad to survive economically, and CMQ needs to ship oil on it to be profitable.

But the goal that everyone is holding onto now is a new set of tracks that would bypass Lac-Mégantic’s residential sector, even though it could take years to get one.

“What’s important is that the conversation goes on,” Santerre said. “That the debate takes place.”

The town council and a number of vocal residents haven’t seen eye to eye on decisions taken since the disaster, but the one idea both sides agree on is the new railroad. Town officials weren’t on hand for Saturday’s protest, but it had been approved by council.

“With every passing day, residents are more determined to see it done,” said Mayor Colette Roy-Laroche earlier this week about the bypass railway. “As a municipal council, we consider it a must. Not a week goes by that it’s not brought up.”

Until then, she said, “we’re preoccupied with prevention, better security measures, well-maintained infrastructure and limited speeds.”

People dressed all in white for Saturday’s march, to contrast the colour of “dirty oil.”

“Say yes to a bypass railway,” they chanted as they descended toward downtown, “say no to another oil spill.”

Gilles Fluet, 67, said he was walking to make sure what happened never does again, in Lac-Mégantic or anywhere else.

MONTREAL, QUE.: July 04, 2015 -- Gilles Fluet, centre kneeling, stopped with other protesters by the train tracks in Lac-Megantic, 250 kilometres east of Montreal Saturday July 04, 2015 to voice their opposition to the transport of oil by rail through their community. The demonstration took place two days before the anniversary of the 2013 train derailment that levelled the centre of the town and killed 47 residents. (John Mahoney / MONTREAL GAZETTE)
MONTREAL, QUE.: July 04, 2015 — Gilles Fluet, centre kneeling, stopped with other protesters by the train tracks in Lac-Megantic, 250 kilometres east of Montreal Saturday July 04, 2015 to voice their opposition to the transport of oil by rail through their community. The demonstration took place two days before the anniversary of the 2013 train derailment that levelled the centre of the town and killed 47 residents. (John Mahoney / MONTREAL GAZETTE) John Mahoney / Montreal Gazette 

He was at the Musi-Café the night of the derailment, leaving just before the tankers crashed and ignited.

“I couldn’t be closer to it without dying, I had to run to avoid burning,” he said, holding up a sign that said “47 reasons” with a picture of residents lying across the tracks.

The post-traumatic stress symptoms have been present ever since, he said. First he avoided the sunshine because the bright light and heat reminded him of the fire he ran away from that night.

Then when the trains started coming through again in December, the sound they made was too much for him to handle.

“There are a bunch of different things that trigger it,” he said. “You don’t know when it’s going to hit you, and you don’t understand when it does.”

He fears oil returning could worsen his symptoms, or trigger some for other residents.

Nathalie Beaudet drove down from Varennes, on the south shore, to participate in the demonstration. She lost a close friend in the derailment, and recently, oil tankers have started rolling on the tracks behind her house.

“It’s scary, it terrorizes us,” she said. “I want Lac-Mégantic to get its new tracks because I know what it will do to residents once the oil starts again. They’ve been through enough, this shouldn’t be imposed on them.”

After marching through the town’s side streets, the group made its way to the railway longing the fence that cuts off the old downtown core, now a mountain of soil as decontamination work continues.

Demonstrators lined up elbow-to-elbow on the tracks, and together, symbolically crossed their arms.

Cleanup funding, Crude By Rail, Derailment, DOT-111, Emergency Readiness & Response, Explosion, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Fire, Rail inspection, Rail routing, Spill, Train length

Senator: Using bad tank cars? Then pay a fee

Repost from The Columbus Dispatch

Using bad tank cars? Then pay a fee, Brown proposes

By Rick Rouan, June 30, 2015 11:36 PM

Sen. Sherrod Brown wants shippers using tank cars that have been linked to fiery train derailments to pay fees that would be used to reroute train tracks, train first responders and clean up spills.

Brown has proposed fees that start at $175 per car for those using the DOT-11 [sic], a tank car that federal regulators have warned hazardous-material shippers against using.

The fees would pay to clean up hazardous-material spills, to move tracks that handle large volumes of hazardous material and to hire more railroad inspectors. Brown’s bill earmarks about $45 million over three years to train first responders near rail lines that carry large quantities of hazardous material.

Earlier this year, federal regulators tightened rules on newly manufactured tank cars but did not require shippers to immediately remove the old cars.

“(The rule) probably didn’t go far enough,” Brown said on Tuesday at the site of a 2012 derailment and explosion near the state fairgrounds. “If it’s a threat to public safety, they probably need to be off the rails.”

The federal rule will phase out or require retrofitting of thousands of the oldest tank cars that carry crude oil by 2018. Another wave of the oil-carrying tankers would have to change by 2020.

Some of the tank cars that aren’t carrying crude oil would not be replaced or retrofitted until 2025.

Brown’s proposal calls for a tax credit for companies that upgrade their tank cars to the new federal standard in the next three years.

Chet Thompson, president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers trade association, said his organization would oppose the fee structure Brown proposed.

“We think the federal focus should be on the rail carriers and their efforts to improve track integrity,” he said. “We want to see legislation that beefs up track integrity to keep the trains on the track.”

A spokesman for the American Association of Railroads declined to comment on Brown’s proposal. The organization is appealing the new federal standard, arguing that it doesn’t do enough to require shippers to stop using the DOT-111 tank cars and should require more heat protection on the cars, spokesman Ed Greenberg said.

The cars have been involved in several fiery derailments while carrying crude oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota to East Coast refineries. In July 2013, a runaway train killed 47 people and destroyed the business district in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

And in February, a train carrying volatile Bakken crude derailed in Mount Carbon, W.Va., after it likely traveled through Columbus. The train was run by CSX, which has three tracks that carry crude oil converging in Columbus before they head toward West Virginia.

On July 11, 2012, a Norfolk Southern train slipped the rails just north of Downtown. One of the cars punctured, spilling ethanol and causing an explosion and fire. Two people were injured and about 100 people were evacuated.

The National Transportation Safety Board said a broken track caused the derailment.

“Unfortunately, that was not an isolated incident,” Brown said.

A recent analysis for Franklin County Emergency Management and Homeland Security found that crude oil represents the largest share of hazardous material transported by rail through the region, Director Mike Pannell said.

Earlier this year, the state released reports showing that 45 million to 137 million gallons of Bakken crude travel through the state each week.

Local first responders have procedures in place to handle derailments but not specific plans for every piece of track, including lines that run through residential areas, said Karry Ellis, an assistant chief in the Columbus Fire Division.

Brown’s proposal calls for the U.S. Department of Transportation to study whether first responders are prepared for flammable-liquid spills and whether longer freight trains pose a greater risk.

Information from the Associated Press was included in this story.