By DAVE KOLPACK, Associated Press | April 24, 2014
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, second from right, is flanked by North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple, North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer, left, and North Dakota Sen. John Hoeven, right, during a meeting on rail safety in Casselton, N.D., Thursday, April 24, 2014. Photo: Dave Kolpack, AP
CASSELTON, N.D. (AP) — The head of the U.S. Department of Transportation said Thursday during his visit to the site of a fiery oil train derailment in North Dakota that his office plans next week to outline options for enhancing tank car standards.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said the proposal is the first step toward establishing new rules for rail safety to prevent accidents like the Dec. 30 crash outside Casselton that left an ominous cloud over the town and led some residents to evacuate.
“The reality is, is that we’re moving as fast as we possibly can to an answer here, but we want to make sure that we’re attacking this issue with the right solution,” Foxx said after a roundtable discussion at the Casselton fire department in front of first responders and other citizens. “And the worst thing we can possibly do is propose a tank car standard that is inadequate to the material that is being transported.”
BNSF Executive Chairman Matt Rose, who spoke at the meeting, said afterward that the company is currently working on the design of a new tank car, but has to wait until federal rules are in place before starting production.
“We’re not wasting time,” Rose said. “We will be done with that process in probably three to four months where we will have actually have a car that’s designed and then can go out to the marketplace. Then we will wait until the federal rule gets approved and then we will make the order.”
The December accident happened near Casselton when a train carrying soybeans derailed in front of a BNSF oil train, causing that train to also derail and set off a fire. The crash spilled about 400,000 gallons of crude oil, which took nearly three months to clean up.
Foxx said North Dakota is at the “tip of the spear” on the issue of safely transporting crude.
He was invited to Casselton by the North Dakota congressional delegation, which is pushing for the railroads, regulators and shippers to work together on improving safety. U.S. Rep. Kevin Cramer said Thursday it’s one issue that has put all public servants on the same side.
“We’re all feeling the same pressure,” Cramer said. “It might feel like we’re going at different speeds once in a while, but we’re all going the same direction.”
North Dakota Sens. John Hoeven and Heidi Heitkamp said they have met with Foxx on numerous occasions to discuss rail safety, but that might not be as productive as him speaking with people who live with the problem.
“Our families should never question whether they are safe in their homes and it’s up to us to do everything possible to make sure they are protected,” Heitkamp said.
Hoeven said the focus is finding a “comprehensive solution.”
“It’s about moving on this issue and having everybody do their part,” he said.
Casselton fire chief Tim McLean, whose department led the response to ensure that nobody was injured, said after the meeting that since the accident, the trains are moving more slowly through town. He also has seen more updated rail cars.
“We know they’re working hard to fix the problem and come up with a solution so it doesn’t happen again,” McLean said. “I think the secretary is pretty down to earth. I think he knows what needs to be done.”
Oil-by-rail loophole keeps U.S. emergency response plans in the dark
Blake Sobczak, E&E reporter | EnergyWire: Tuesday, April 22, 2014
U.S. transportation officials don’t review how railroads would handle worst-case oil train disasters like last summer’s derailment in Quebec, which killed 47 people in a fiery explosion.
While railroads must keep “basic” emergency response plans in their own files, the Federal Railroad Administration does not monitor or review those plans.
That’s because railroads are required to provide “comprehensive” oil spill response plans to the FRA only if they use tank cars that hold more than 42,000 gallons of crude. In an April 10 letter responding to a Freedom of Information Act request from EnergyWire, FOIA officer Denise Kollehlon said the FRA’s files “do not contain any records related to the active comprehensive ‘oil spill prevention and response plans’ for oil shipments.”
Safety experts and environmentalists say the 42,000-gallon threshold is too high. They stress that the 1996 rule that set the limit never applies in practice. Just five tank cars nationwide are designed to store that much oil in a single packaging, officials say, and the FOIA response confirms that none are hauling crude (EnergyWire, Feb. 19).
The threshold predates the recent surge in oil-by-rail transport, which has seen annual crude shipments jump from fewer than 10,000 carloads in 2008 to 415,000 carloads last year, according to industry data.
Tim Pellerin, fire chief of Rangeley, Maine, said “tangible, realistic” emergency response plans could help firefighters, who often reach remote disaster sites before railroads’ own hazardous materials crews.
“There’s got to be a system in place that checks this and oversees [railroads] to make sure that there are plans in place,” he said in an interview.
Pellerin led a group of U.S. firefighters 60 miles north into Canada after a 72-car oil train derailed and exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.
The disaster claimed 47 lives and put hazardous materials safety on the map for U.S. and Canadian transportation regulators.
Later derailments and fires in Alabama and North Dakota in the United States and New Brunswick in Canada kept the issue in the spotlight, although they injured no one. Earlier this month, Pellerin called on lawmakers to provide more funding for first responders at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
Local fire departments can request hazardous materials shipping and emergency response information from railroads under voluntary industry standards. But picking out potential weak points in such plans “is an awful lot to expect from a small volunteer fire department with a $2,000-per-year budget,” Pellerin said, adding that his department lacks the specialized knowledge needed to gauge the adequacy of railroads’ response measures. “I’m not an expert in 10,000 things — I’m a fire chief,” he said.
The FRA, part of the Department of Transportation, did not respond to requests for comment, although it has previously said it is taking a “comprehensive approach to improving the safe transportation of crude oil by rail.” In February, the regulator reached a voluntary agreement with railroads to tighten oil train operating practices, lowering speed limits through urban areas and committing $5 million in industry funds to prepare first responders, among other measures.
Holly Arthur, spokeswoman for the Association of American Railroads, noted that railroads are also developing an inventory of oil spill emergency response resources under the terms of the agreement.
“This inventory will include locations for the staging of emergency response equipment and, where appropriate, contacts for the notification of communities,” Arthur said in an emailed statement yesterday. “When the inventory is completed [by July 1], railroads will provide DOT with information on the deployment of the resources and make the information available upon request to appropriate emergency responders.”
Emergency response ‘offloaded to local communities’
Safety officials have questioned whether voluntary arrangements go far enough to protect local communities.
Outgoing National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman wrote in a Jan. 23 letter to FRA Administrator Joseph Szabo that without closely regulated response plans, “[rail] carriers have effectively placed the burden of remediating the environmental consequences of an accident on local communities along their routes.”
Hersman reiterated her crude-by-rail concerns yesterday in her farewell address at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Crude-by-rail “can be a worst-case-scenario event, and we don’t have provisions in place to deal with it, either on the industry side or for the first responders,” she said.
Experts at the NTSB and Canada’s Transportation Safety Board agree that the magnitude of the Lac-Mégantic disaster swamped the small railroad’s response resources, which can include hazardous materials crews and specialized firefighting foam. The railroad involved in the July 6 crash — Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd. — has since declared bankruptcy in the United States and Canada and is in the process of being taken over by the New York-based Fortress Investment Group (EnergyWire, Jan. 23).
“Railroads have for decades offloaded to local communities the responsibilities for emergency response,” said independent hazardous materials consultant Fred Millar, who has worked with environmental groups including Friends of the Earth.
Millar said he was not surprised by the fact that the FRA does not keep tabs on railroads’ oil spill response plans. “Nobody even has a measure of what would be an adequate emergency response capability,” he said.
By contrast, crude pipelines, storage facilities and waterborne oil tankers must comply with lengthier emergency response requirements laid out by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, U.S. EPA and U.S. Coast Guard, respectively.
The 1996 rules for oil-by-rail emergency response plans were crafted by the Research and Special Programs Administration, the precursor to PHMSA.
The agency said then that “on the basis of available information, no rail carrier is transporting oil in a quantity greater than 42,000 gallons in tank cars.”
NTSB has since questioned why the benchmark for comprehensive plans exists if it never actually applies. Officials at the Department of Transportation have until tomorrow to respond to NTSB’s criticisms.
“By limiting the comprehensive planning threshold for a single tank size that is greater than any currently in use, spill-planning regulations do not take into account the potential of a derailment of large numbers of 30,000-gallon tank cars, such as in Lac-Mégantic where 60 tank cars together released about 1.6 million gallons of crude oil,” NTSB’s Hersman wrote in her letter to PHMSA, also part of DOT.
In the wake of the Lac-Mégantic derailment, PHMSA has also faced pressure to update decades-old crude tank car rules. Critics say the outdated federal tank car standards and the FRA’s lack of oil spill emergency planning oversight point to the difficulty of keeping pace with the fast-growing crude-by-rail business.
The FRA and the railroad industry cite improving safety statistics, noting that more than 99.9 percent of all hazardous materials shipments reach their destination safely.
But despite declining accident rates over the past decade, regulatory consultant and attorney Paul Blackburn said, “citizens need to be concerned about … what happens over time.”
“After a big event like the Lac-Mégantic disaster, you’d expect the industry to be more cautious,” he said of recent voluntary safety measures. But “as these events fade from memory, there’s nothing to stop the industry from backing off on its commitment to improve spill response” barring federal action.
State faces planning ‘gap’ if faced with a Quebec-type crude disaster
By Marina Villeneuve, Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting
April 17, 2014 8:46 AM
First of two parts. The rail line runs as far south as South Berwick in Maine.
Trains that have carried crude oil have passed through the middle of Jackman — just as they had through Lac-Megantic, Quebec. Jeff Pouland Photography/NFS
Less than a year ago, a runaway train carrying crude oil derailed in Lac-Mégantic, a small Quebec town ten miles from the Maine border.
Thousands of gallons of the highly flammable crude oil spilled from ruptured tank cars, setting off fireballs in the town’s center that killed 47 people and destroyed 30 buildings. Some bodies were likely vaporized and never identified.
In Maine, trains carrying the same crude oil have been passing through dozens of communities, many as close to homes, businesses and people as in Lac-Mégantic.
Railroads carried 4.2 million barrels of crude oil – enough to fill 267 Olympic-size swimming pools – through Maine last year, up from 25,319 barrels in 2011, according to state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) data. No crude oil shipments by rail have passed through Maine since last fall, according to state records, but industry experts say if shipping by rail becomes cheaper than other forms of transport, that could change.
Laura Smyth works at a propane company located behind a gas station in Jackman and not far from the railroad tracks. She said that when townspeople hear a train whistle, it remains them about what happened in Lac-Mégantic.
They don’t know if the train is carrying potatoes, lumber – or crude.
“We always say, ‘It could have happened here!’” said Smyth.
And if it did happen in Jackman or Portland or any of the towns along the rail, is Maine prepared to fight a crude oil fire, save lives and protect the environment?
A investigation by Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting reveals the burden for planning and responding to a Lac-Mégantic level catastrophe will fall on state and local emergency services, which may not have all the information, training or material they could need.
The potential for a crude oil incident in Maine like the one in Lac-Mégantic has prompted three state emergency groups to make the issue a key topic at the April 22-23 statewide Emergency Management Conference in Augusta.
“We’ve been fortunate, but being fortunate doesn’t mean we’re prepared,” said Robert Gardner, a technological hazards coordinator at Maine Emergency Management Agency.
He pointed to another nearby crude oil incident, in New Brunswick, Canada, when on Jan. 7, eight cars carrying crude oil and propane derailed and generated a massive fire and cloud of orange smoke. “We need to learn what others have experienced so we can be better prepared,” Gardner said.
Federal regulators and industry observers say recent fiery derailments across the continent have revealed a glaring lack of emergency preparedness requirements.
Unlike the marine barges, pipelines and fixed facilities that have transported and stored crude oil for years, U.S. railroads are not federally required to have comprehensive plans in case of a worst-case oil disaster.
“It’s a big gap,” said David Willaeur, of emergency management firm IEM and the former planning director for the Greater Portland Council of Governments.
“Now we have crude oil coming by in mile-long unit trains through remote areas along the U.S., and shipped to refineries on the coast … the oil-response plans need to have a land-based component to them.”
This gap has exacerbated the challenge of planning for oil disasters in rural states like Maine, where:
* State, county and local officials do not know the oil-spill response plans and capabilities of any railroad companies in Maine because the rail firms are not required to share or coordinate such information.
* The first people on scene at a rural oil incident will be declining numbers of volunteer firefighters who are hours from the highly-trained response teams and special kind of equipment, materials and gear needed to handle oil fires. Of 59 communities along rail lines, five have no fire department and 27 rely on solely volunteers.
* Like in all other states, no Maine officials are provided with any information about hazardous materials transported by rail through communities. Last month, Maine Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) asked Pan Am Railways for a list of the top 25 most hazardous goods shipped through Maine in 2013 and is awaiting a response, said agency director Bruce Fitzgerald.
The need to improve emergency response planning for crude oil rail disasters came up at an April 9 U.S. Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing on railway safety, where both Sen. Susan Collins, a ranking member of the subcommittee, and Rangeley Fire Chief Tim Pellerin spoke on the need to better train and prepare rural firefighters.
“It’s also important to recognize that much of that rail network exists in rural America, and that presents unique challenges to small communities that often lack the resources to effectively respond to hazardous material emergencies,” Sen. Collins, a Republican, said at the hearing.
Feds don’t require railroad emergency plans
Do railways transporting crude oil through Maine have adequate response plans in case a catastrophe happens? Thanks to a federal loophole, no one – including the state of Maine – knows.
Two railroads have carried crude oil from the Bakken shale region of North Dakota into Maine: Pan Am Railways and Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, the carrier that operated tank cars that derailed and ruptured at Lac-Mégantic.
Pan Am Railways Executive Vice President Cynthia Scarano did not respond to repeated interview requests over the course of two months. MMA Railways filed for bankruptcy last August, when it also stopped shipping crude oil. The New York-based firm Fortress Investment Group is in the process of purchasing its assets.
MMA Railways didn’t have sufficient resources to respond to Lac-Mégantic – and it would have been just as unprepared if it had happened in the U.S, according to the National Safety Transportation Board’s (NTSB) Jan. 23 letter to the Federal Rail Administration.
There are no federal rules for how railroads should prepare for any emergency involving hazardous materials, including crude oil, said Willaeur.
“It’s all voluntary, and there’s no standard for what they need to do,” said Willaeur, who has conducted studies of hazardous materials transport in states, including Maine. “So you have a pretty wide range of responses between railroads.”
The country’s seven Class 1 railroads, which have annual revenues of $250 million or more, have system-wide plans that include handling emergencies in local communities and sensitive geographic areas, according to Willaeur.
“On the other end, you have railroads that may have only a rudimentary plan in place,” he said, noting there are 550 smaller railroads known as short-line and regional railroads. Maine is one of four continental states with no Class 1 carrier.
When it comes to oil spills – as opposed to emergency planning — railroads must write basic response plans, but they don’t need to be shared with state agencies or sent to the Federal Rail Administration.
These basic plans don’t include training drills and exercises, assigning a qualified individual to man the response or plans for a worst-case discharge – which can result in up to three million gallons spilled.
“[O]il spill response planning requirements for rail transportation of oil/petroleum products are practically nonexistent compared with other modes of transportation,” NTSB Chairman Deborah Hersman wrote to the federal Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration on Jan. 21.
Railroads only have to file comprehensive plans if they haul a tank car with a 42,000-gallon capacity – and no tank cars currently in use can hold that much.
This means no shippers have to tell the government, or anybody, what they’d do in case of a disaster, even if they’re hauling ten, average size-tank cars carrying a total 300,000 gallons of crude oil. The rule was developed when crude oil wasn’t being shipped in trains that carry only crude and can haul millions of gallons at once.
This current regulatory scheme “circumvents the need for railroads to comply with spill response planning mandates of the Clean Water Act,” Hersman wrote to the hazardous materials agency.
Comprehensive plans must only be submitted to the Federal Rail Administration, which is not required to review and approve them, Hersman wrote.
“It’s a pitiful pretense of regulation,” said rail security consultant Fred Millar, who worked for the liberal activist group Friends of the Earth for 18 years. “Railroads have gotten themselves exempted from the same kind of response planning and right-to-know laws that apply to everyone else.”
If requirements had been updated as crude shipments began skyrocketing, the federal rail regulators could have required MMA Railway to plan for a disaster on the scale of Lac-Mégantic, wrote Hersman to the regulators.
“DEP and to some extent local communities have taken on that responsibility to be prepared in the event of a spill,” said Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s response director Peter Blanchard.
Responding to rail incidents is challenging in Maine, where railroads traverse cities, rural communities and water bodies – many inaccessible by road, according to Blanchard.
DEP asked Pan Am Railways for copies of their response plans, but never heard back, according to Blanchard.
Blanchard said railroads have made “some effort” to help DEP in preparing for an oil spill, citing a collaboration with MMA Railway that yielded a vulnerability map of sensitive natural resources and remote access points along rail lines.
The DEP has 25 spill responders, with five always on-call at offices in Portland, Augusta, Bangor and Presque Isle. Their equipment includes oil skimmers and two 5,000-barrel oil recovery barges stationed in South Portland and Bucksport.
Volunteers may be first to crash
Recent train derailments involving crude oil and ethanol have raised a question for emergency planners: Who responds when incidents happen in the middle of nowhere?
“When they happen in remote areas, away from populated areas, you not only have fewer resources but volunteer fire departments that don’t necessarily have the capability to handle an incident of that size,” said Willaeur of emergency management firm IEM.
About 90 percent of Maine’s firefighters are volunteer, estimates the Maine Fire Services Institute’s Bill Guimond.
“Probably the biggest challenge facing a lot of departments is just resources on the initial response, especially in the rural communities,” Guimond said. “Firefighters are not always available, and a lot of communities are strapped with resources right now.”
Along rail lines that have carried crude oil, five cities have professional departments. Five small communities have no fire departments, 27 rely on an all-volunteer force and 22 rely on both volunteer and career firefighters.
“It’s certainly a different kind of response when you don’t have everybody right on-call all the time,” said MEMA’s Fitzgerald. “They have to get out of their job, they have to travel to get their equipment, they have to go and respond. Those communities rely almost entirely on mutual aid, because no one department up there is big enough to handle an event.”
If a rail catastrophe happens, local responders like firefighters would receive support from other towns through mutual aid agreements, 17 state-supervised hazardous material teams, spill responders, MEMA and, potentially, federal agencies and out-of-state and Canadian responders.
Since last July, hazardous material teams in Paris and Jonesboro have shut down because they lacked enough people to maintain staffing and training requirements. Rail communities like Jackman, Greenville and Vanceboro are up to two hours away from specially-trained teams in Orono, Skowhegan and Houlton.
Maine’s hazardous material teams train regularly for major oil fires, train rollovers and derailments, according to Mark Hyland, MEMA’s operations and response director. In the past decade, Maine railways have provided locomotives and tank cars to train firefighters and spill responders, according to Blanchard.
Some fire officials said though they appreciate the seminars, training efforts with railroads are not institutionalized, proving a problem for departments with high rates of turnover.
Waterville Fire Chief David LaFountain asked Pan Am Railways last year for specialized training in dealing with volatile Bakken crude oil, but he never heard back from the railroad.
In Maine, state and cities like South Portland have invested in the costly resources – like protective gear and specialized foam – needed for a fiery disaster even a fraction of Lac-Mégantic’s size.
In 2009, Maine Emergency Management Agency received a Homeland Security grant to buy three $80,000, 990-gallon foam trailers and placed them in South Portland, Searsport and Sweden. The Air National Guard at Bangor International Airport has 2,000 gallons of foam concentrate.
South Portland has 20,000 gallons of alcohol-resistant foam to smother petroleum fires. Fire chief Kevin Guimond said his team is ready to respond statewide, with 64 full-time firefighters and paramedics and 40 on-call firefighters.
But that big cache of foam is four hours away from communities along rail lines like Jackman and Vanceboro. Half of communities on the rail lines are two to four hours away, with 15 facing wait times of more than three hours.
Information hard to get Maine officials don’t know much about hazardous materials transported by rail, including what kinds go where, or when, how often, and how much they’re shipped. Railroads say sharing such information could jeopardize security.
“There’s a lack of rail transportation response plans because it’s hard to get the information,” said Willaeur. “Many local officials don’t have an idea of what’s going along rails or highway corridor.”
Though U.S. railroads don’t have to disclose any information about hazardous materials to communities, they are not prevented from doing so.
Voluntary industry standards encourage railroads to do so – upon request, and as long as first responders do not make such information public.
MEMA’s Fitzgerald wrote to Pan Am on Feb. 7 requesting a list of the top 25 most hazardous materials transported through Maine in 2013. He is still awaiting a response.
Currently, first responders can figure out what a derailed train car is hauling by reading the placard affixed to the side of a rail car, finding the crew member who has a paper document showing where hazardous materials are located on the train, or calling the railroads’ 1-800 number.
According to an 1817 Congressional act and the interstate commerce clause, railroads can’t refuse to ship anything, including hazardous goods, and only the federal government can restrict such movement, said MEMA’s Hyland.
“But you know, having said that, we’d like to know what’s coming through, just so we can prepare our communities and our regional response teams for what they’d see,” he said.
LaFountain said in his opinion, the rail yard in Waterville – a town where trains carrying crude pass through – is his city’s “most dangerous spot,” and he worries how his team could respond if there was a crude oil emergency.
“To be honest with you, when I saw what happened in Lac-Mégantic, the behavior of the product catching fire and having the ignition it had and the fire conditions it had, that wasn’t what I expected for typical crude oil,” said LaFountain. “Now hearing that this crude oil is different because of where it comes from, it raises concern. It’s not safe.”
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CRUDE-BY-RAIL IN MAINE
Railroads carried 4.2 million barrels of crude oil – enough to fill up 267 Olympic-size swimming pools – through Maine last year, up from 25,000 barrels in 2011 and down from 5.2 million barrels in 2012.
The 2013 amount does not include the months of April to August when Pan Am Railways temporarily stopped reporting how much crude oil it shipped into Maine and paying into the state’s three-cent per gallon oil spill clean-up fund, according to Department of Environmental Protection spokeswoman Jessamine Logan.
At the time, the company told the Bangor Daily News that state law did not specifically require them to do so. The state legislature revised the statute effective last October.
After several fiery train explosions involving crude from the Bakken shale region of North Dakota, federal regulators issued a Jan. 2 warning that the crude may be more flammable than other varieties. A federal “Bakken Blitz” investigation has revealed that in eleven out of 18 random samples, Bakken crude was misclassified as a less volatile variety.
Three railroads – Pan Am Railways, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, and Eastern Maine Railroad – have carried Bakken crude oil through Maine to an Irving Oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick.
The MMA Railway line enters Maine at Jackman and then traverses across central Maine to Mattawamkeag. The now-bankrupt company, whose assets are in the final steps of being purchased by a New York-based investment firm, stopped carrying crude oil last August.
A Pan Am line enters Maine at South Berwick and carries crude through towns near Interstate 95, including Portland and Bangor, before heading to Mattawamkeag.
There, the Irving Oil subsidiary Eastern Maine Railroad transports the crude oil from Mattawamkeag, to Vanceboro, to the refinery. Eastern Maine Railroad does not pay into the clean-up fund because state law only impacts carriers bringing oil into Maine, according to Logan.
In Maine, crude oil shipments by rail have dropped off since last fall, but industry experts say dynamic global oil prices could quickly change that.
North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources director Lynn Helms has estimated that up to 90 percent of the state’s crude will be transported by rail in 2014.
Following growing scrutiny on the rupture-prone DOT-111 tank cars involved in recent derailments, Irving Oil announced in February that by April 30, it will voluntarily retrofit its crude oil fleet to meet higher standards recommended by the Association of American Railroads for tank cars built after 2011.
Even stricter federal standards for the tank cars could be released by the end of 2014, said Cynthia Quarterman, head of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration at a Feb. 26 Congressional hearing.
Last year, U.S. railroads spilled more crude oil – 1.15 million gallons – than in the last 38 years combined, according to a McClatchy news service analysis of federal data that does not include the 1.6 million gallons spilled in Lac Megantic.
The Association of American Railroad states that through 2010, 99.9977% of rail shipments of hazardous material reached their destination without a release caused by a train accident.
In Maine, railroads have spilled more than 200 gallons of hazardous materials like flammable gas oil and sulfuric acid since 2003, according to a review of Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration data. This represents a large decrease from the 120,000 gallons of hazardous materials like fuel oil and sulfuric acid reported spilled between 1976 to 1999.
Approximately one gallon of crude oil spilled in March of 2013, when 13 tank cars operated by Pan Am Railways derailed near the Pencobst River in Mattawamkeag, according to a report filed to the National Response Center. Each car in the 96-car unit train was carrying 31,000 gallons of crude.
— Marina Villeneuve
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The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting is a nonpartisan, non-profit news service based in Hallowell. Email: mainecenter@gmail.com. Web: pinetreewatchdog.org.
Repost from The Sacramento Bee, Capitol Alert
[Editor: for more on Assemblyman Dickinson’s bill, see his press release here. I am unable to find the bill’s number as of this writing. The press release concludes with “The bill will be heard by the legislature in the coming months.” More info via Dickinson’s office: Contact: Taryn Kinney, State Capitol, P.O. Box 942849, Sacramento, CA 94249-0007, Tel: (916) 319-2007, Fax: (916) 319-2107 – RS]
VIDEO: Dickinson bill seeks crude oil train emergency preparedness
April 17, 2014 | VIDEO BELOW: The Sacramento Bee/Dan Smith
Pointing to the catastrophic derailment in Quebec of a train transporting oil and similar accidents, Assemblyman Roger Dickinson, D-Sacramento, has unveiled legislation to get emergency responders more information about crude-carrying trains that roll through California.
As the United States reaps the fruits of a domestic energy boom, driven in part by huge volumes natural gas extracted via hydraulic fracturing, the amount of oil transported via rail has grown apace. According to the California Energy Commission, 6.1 million barrels of crude chugged into California on trains in 2013, accounting for 1.1 percent of the amount processed at California refineries.
“It is safe to say that we’ve all become alarmed with learning about the large increase in certain types of crude oil and oil products that California refineries will be receiving,” Dickinson said during a Thursday news conference at the downtown Sacramento train station.
Now, with a Bay Area refinery planning to move huge amounts of crude oil on a rail line running through downtown Sacramento, Dickinson has proposed legislation requiring railroads to disclose more information about oil shipments to those who would be dispatched to handle a potential rail accident.
“Because of this rapid change in the transportation of crude by rail, state safety rules are simply not what they need to be,” Dickinson said.
Currently, railroads don’t have to notify cities in advance about their cargo. Trains carrying hazardous materials, like oil or acid, must have warnings stenciled on the side of the cars containing the dangerous commodities.
Under Dickinson’s bill, blueprints detailing facts like the volume of oil being transported in a given day; how many cars are being used; and the characteristics of the oil being conveyed would go to local officials. The state agency that now obtains that information would be compelled to share it with local fire and police departments.
“If (responders) know what they’re dealing with,” Dickinson said, “they’ve got a much better chance of controlling and containing the incident and also protecting their own lives.”
Gov. Jerry Brown has also taken note of the growing risk. Under the governor’s budget, the state’s Office of Oil Spill Prevention and Response would get more money and staff to deal with the growing risk of inland oil spills. As it stands now, the agency responds to oil spills in marine areas.
PHOTO: A tanker truck is filled from railway cars containing crude oil on railroad tracks in McClellan Park in North Highlands on Wednesday, March 19, 2014. The Sacramento Bee/Randall Benton.
VIDEO: The Sacramento Bee/Dan Smith
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