Category Archives: Rail Safety

New design for safer tank cars

Repost from The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

New method will optimize car design for safer hazmat transport by rail

07/23/2013
http://cee.illinois.edu/tankcardesign
By Leslie Sweet Myrick

Transportation and structural engineering researchers are teaming up to develop an analytical method to measure the safety performance of railroad tank cars. Their techniques will be used to establish new industry standards to ultimately reduce the risk of transporting hazardous materials (hazmat) by rail.

“Although 99.998 percent of rail hazmat shipments reach their destination without a release caused by a train accident, potential tank car releases from train accidents could lead to severe consequences, especially if they happen in highly populated areas,” said M. Rapik Saat (BS 03, MS 05, PHD 09), a research assistant professor in the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center (RailTEC).

Saat and his colleague Christopher P.L. Barkan, professor and executive director of RailTEC, are working with Junho Song and Paolo Gardoni, both associate professors in structural engineering, to understand how new tank car designs will perform in accidents.

“A series of catastrophic tank car accidents in the 1960s and early 1970s led to several new safety features and the compilation of databases of information to measure and predict the safety of cars in service,” Barkan said. “As these databases were expanded and refined, it became possible to assess which combinations of changes in tank car safety design were most likely to maximize safety benefits. As part of a project we are finishing up during summer 2013, we updated a statistical model to evaluate tank car safety design using all the new accident information gathered since 1995. We were able to provide significant insight into the effects of some train operational factors, such as speed, that may be related to potential safety improvements that were not previously recognized because of a lack of quantitative information.”

While statistical models have been useful to evaluate existing tank car designs, the ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between CEE’s railroad and structural engineering groups will pave the way for development of an analytical model to bridge statistical and analytical modeling (i.e. finite element analysis) approaches. For example, the interdisciplinary approach adds the ability to assess potential benefits of using new steel materials and/or structural configurations.

Tank car safety design optimization needs to consider the tradeoff between safety and efficiency, Saat said.

“For example, if you increase a tank car’s thickness, you may make it safer, but you decrease its capacity, and therefore may need more tank cars to carry the same amount of material. Our goal is to help industry find the optimal designs,” he said.

The development of this new analytical model is driven by industry and will be used for policy making.

“For example, with a new tank car design, they will do physical testing and finite element modeling to come up with the puncture energy and then translate the puncture energy to determine potential rate of release with a certain level of uncertainty,” Saat said. “This will advance the industry’s risk-based decision making to ultimately reduce the risk of transporting hazmat by rail.”

The work is a collaborative effort between government agencies and private industries involved in hazmat transportation in North America and is sponsored by the Association of American Railroads, Railway Supply Institute, American Chemistry Council, Chlorine Institute and Fertilizer Institute. CEE graduate students Laura Ghosh and Xiaonan Zhou have contributed to the project as well as Stephen Kirkpatrick from Applied Research Associates and Todd Treichel of the RSI-AAR Railroad Tank Car Safety Research and Test Project. At least one structural engineering student will also join the project team this fall.

The first phase of the new analytical model is expected to be completed in 2014.

Photo: A tank car built by Trinity Industries to the new standards with thicker shell and head and lower-profile protective housing. Risk and optimization models from CEE researcher Rapik Saat’s Ph.D. dissertation work were used to identify potential enhanced tank car designs to transport toxic inhalation hazard materials. These were later used by the U.S. Department of Transportation to develop hazardous material tank car regulations in 2009.

Train sprays crude oil for nearly 70 miles

Repost from The Brainerd Dispatch

Train sprays crude oil for nearly 70 miles

 Posted: February 5, 2014

RED WING – A southbound Canadian Pacific train leaked a trail of about 12,000 gallons of crude oil Monday morning after passing through Red Wing, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

MPCA emergency responders worked with railroad personnel throughout the day Tuesday to gauge the extent of the spill and check for environmental damage, MPCA spokeswoman Cathy Rofshus said.

She described the leak as a “light spray on the ballast rocks” that stretches for nearly 70 miles of track.

A duty officer’s report from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety says the leak started in Red Wing and continued past Winona before it was reported around 9 a.m. Monday. Crews reportedly stopped the train and fixed a missing valve or cap responsible for the spill.

Investigators spent the day Tuesday looking for areas where the oil may have pooled, but so far none has been found, Rofshus said.

Panel of experts – Martinez, Feb. 26

On Facebook: facebook.com/events/834097813284056/

Big Oil in our Midst: From Canada to the Carquinez Strait

BigOilInOurMidst_headerA forum about increased rail accidents, refinery dangers, and climate change.

A panel of experts and activists will educate residents of Benicia, Rodeo, Martinez, and nearby communities on Big Oil’s plans locally, regionally, and globally. How will refinery expansion and transportation of crude oil by rail affect your community?

Panelists, followed by Q&A:

  • Marilaine Savard: spokesperson for a citizens’ group in the region of Lac-Mégantic, Québec.  In 2013, a string of exploding petroleum rail cars destroyed the center of the town and claimed 47 lives.
  • Antonia Juhasz: oil industry analyst, journalist, and author of “The Tyranny of Oil: The World’s Most Powerful Industry and What We Must do to Stop It” and “Black Tide: the Devastating Impact of the Gulf Oil Spill”.
  • Diane Bailey, senior scientist at the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).
  • Marilyn Bardet:  Valero refinery watchdog, activist, and founding member of Benicia’s Good Neighbor Steering Committee.
  • Nancy Rieser: spokesperson from the Crockett-Rodeo-Hercules Working Group, challenging Phillips 66 on its “propane recovery” project.
  • A member (TBD) of the Pittsburg Defense Council, fighting against the proposed WesPac oil terminal.

Forum sponsored by the Sunflower Alliance, in partnership with the Sierra Club, Pittsburg Defense Council, Communities for a Better Environment, ForestEthics, the Good Neighbor Steering Committee, and the Crockett-Rodeo-Hercules Working Group.

For those in other towns, we have related forums in Pittsburg and Richmond!

Oil Companies Fined For Mislabeling Crude Shipments

Repost from Huffington Post / Reuters

U.S. Oil Companies Fined For Mislabeling Crude Shipments In First Move After Series Of Derailments

Reuters, 
Main Entry Image

In this Dec. 30, 2013 file photo, a fireball goes up at the site of an oil train derailment in Casselton, N.D. (AP Photo/Bruce Crummy, File) | ASSOCIATED PRESS

By Patrick Rucker
WASHINGTON, Feb 4 (Reuters) – Three oil companies operating  in North Dakota were fined $93,000 on Tuesday for wrongly  classifying fuel shipments in the first sanctions since a series  of fiery derailments put the energy industry under a spotlight.

The Department of Transportation said Hess Corp,  Marathon Oil Corp and Whiting Petroleum Corp   were cited for wrongly classifying cargo tanks that were hauling  crude oil from the field to a railhead.

Fuel shipments must be designated with a hazard class to  alert emergency responders in the event of an accident. Eleven  of eighteen samples of one survey were mislabeled, the DOT said  in a statement.

“The fines we are proposing today should send a message to  everyone involved in the shipment of crude oil: You must test  and classify this material properly,” said Transportation  Secretary Anthony Foxx.

A spate of explosive derailments, including one in Quebec  last July which killed 47 people, has led to concerns over the  safety of shipping crude oil by rail and improper labeling.

Officials have already warned that some fuel found in North  Dakota’s energy patch, the Bakken, could be more volatile and  explosion-prone than other crude oil and that shippers should  take precautions.

Typically, crude oil carries a ‘hazard class 3’  classification and can be shipped in a standard tank car. The  shipments are further assigned a ‘packing group’ to alert to  dangers – that portion of the shipping paper was faulty, the DOT  said.

While the DOT’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety  Administration (PHMSA) has been testing crude samples for months  and issued several industry warnings, Tuesday’s action is the  first sanction.

Phmsa Administrator Cynthia Quartersman said the fines  reflected “initial findings” and that officials would scrutinize  the corrosivity, pressure and other traits of Bakken crude.

The DOT did not specify which companies would be expected to  pay what share of the $93,000 fines but by any measure the sums  were small for large energy companies.

Officials from Hess and Marathon could not immediately be  reached for comment.

Jack Ekstrom, a spokesperson for Whiting, said that the  company had not yet been contacted by the DOT about a possible  fine.