Category Archives: Spill prevention and response

National Fee to Respond to Train Spills?

Repost from Governing the States and Localities

Chicago Mayor Calls for National Fee to Respond to Train Spills

In this photo released by the Alabama Emergency Management Agency a tanker train carrying crude oil burns after derailing in western Alabama outside Aliceville, Ala.,  Nov. 8, 2013. Associated Press Photo/Alabama Emergency Management Agency
As the U.S. enters an energy boom and rail remains the chief way of transporting it, cities need to get behind national efforts to improve safety, oversight and emergency response, Rahm Emanuel says.
by | January 23, 2014
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is proposing a national freight fee for hazardous materials to improve rail safety and help cities respond to the kind of disasters that destroyed a small Canadian town last year.

As rail transportation surges to meet the demands of an oil and gas boom underway in the U.S., cities need to take the lead on demanding better oversight, better safety and robust ways of responding to accidents, Emanuel said Thursday during the winter gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. He pointed to the derailment of crude oil tankers in Alabama last year and incidents in North Dakota to illustrate the problem.  He compared an explosion last year in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic that leveled 30 downtown buildings and killed more than 40 people to Dresden after allied bombing raids in 1945.

The federal government would impose the fee on companies that extract crude oil and “the industrial consumers of it,” according Emanuel’s office. The mayor said the fee would fund new investments in rail safety and infrastructure, first responders in the locations of disasters and rebuilding efforts. If not through a national effort, the burden will fall mostly on individual cities, Emanuel said.

“You will end up having to do this because it’s going to be something we haven’t seen in this country in a long time,” he said. “We are literally in the early stages…of an ever increasing amount of this material coming into our cities.”

But the fee, which would take Congressional authorization, was couched within a broader call of improvements that included building safer rail cars, safer railroads and giving local officials more information about the freight entering their cities.

“None of us know what’s coming through our cities,” Emanuel said. “It may be sitting there for days and we may not know.”

The same day Emanuel proposed the fee, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and the Transportation Safety Board of Canada released a joint statement calling for better route planning that avoids more densely populated areas. The organizations also recommended more robust efforts to correctly classify hazardous materials before they’re shipped and oversight to ensure companies have plans for dealing with disasters.

Crude oil shipments by rail have jumped more than 400 percent since 2005, according to the U.S. safety board.

It’s not just big-city mayors who should be worried, said Mayor Butch Brown of Natchez, Miss. Thousands of cars filled with crude oil make their way from Canada each year in Natchez, where they’re transferred to barges headed down the Mississippi River, Brown said.“It’s not just critical to the metropolitan areas; it’s very critical to the smaller areas that have fewer resources to deal with these issues than larger metropolitan areas do,” he said.Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, who served as mayor of Charlotte before his nomination in 2013, said he welcomes all ideas for dealing with the growing problem, but there’s no “magic bullet” and broader action is needed on everything from enforcement to prevention and emergency response.

“We’ve got some work to do convincing our leaders in Congress to give us the resources we need to do inspections in a much more robust way and also make sure we have the enforcement mechanisms,” he said.

A spokeswoman in Emanuel’s office said he’ll be “working with national leaders to find the right way to implement” a more “comprehensive set of safety and infrastructure investments,” of which his proposal is one piece.

Railroad Safety Problem is Old News

Repost from Governing the States and Localities

Railroad Freight Safety Has Been a Problem for a Long Time

by | January 27, 2014

By Curtis Tate

Long before crude oil and ethanol were transported by railroads in large quantities in minimally reinforced tank cars, other flammable and poisonous materials were riding around the country in the same cars, threatening major cities and waterways.

Federal regulators might be weeks away from issuing new safety guidelines for tank cars carrying flammable liquids, after a series of frightening rail accidents over the past six months.

But the type of general-service tank car involved in recent incidents with crude oil trains in Quebec, Alabama and North Dakota _ the DOT-111-A _ has a poor safety record with hazardous cargoes that goes back decades, raising questions about why it took so long for the railroad industry and its federal regulators to address a problem they knew how to fix.

Other, more specialized types of tank cars received safety upgrades in the 1980s, and the industry’s own research shows they were effective at reducing the severity of accidents.

Tank car manufacturers have built new DOT-111A cars to a higher standard since 2011, but the improvements haven’t caught up to tens of thousands of older cars.

To be sure, improper railroad operations or defective track cause many accidents involving tank cars. But the National Transportation Safety Board, which makes recommendations but has no regulatory authority, has cited the DOT-111A’s deficiencies many times over the years for making accidents worse than they could have been.

“Moving as quickly as possible to upgrade the tank cars is critical,” said Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the NTSB who’s now a transportation safety consultant. “No one wants to see it happen again.”

A review of federal reports and documents going back four decades shows that the DOT-111A tank car factored into a wide range of calamities, including:

  • A 1981 rail yard accident that shut down a portion of Newark International Airport and blocked traffic from reaching the Holland Tunnel into Manhattan until a punctured tank car finally burned out its contents of flammable ethylene oxide after 40 hours.
  • A 1983 rail yard accident that triggered the evacuation of 9,000 people in Denver when corrosive nitric acid escaped through a puncture in a tank car, forming a large vapor cloud.
  • A 1991 derailment _ the worst chemical spill in California history _ that sent a tank car loaded with a toxic pesticide tumbling into the Sacramento River, poisoning a 40-mile stretch of one of the state’s most important water supplies and fishing areas.
  • A 1992 spill near Superior, Wis., that resulted in the release of benzene into the Nemadji River, leading to the evacuation of 40,000 people in Superior and nearby Duluth, Minn., and the deaths of 16 species of wild animals near the accident site.
  • A 2001 derailment midway through a 1.7-mile, century-old rail tunnel beneath downtown Baltimore in which a punctured tank car carrying flammable tripropylene fed a raging fire that burned for five days, ruptured a 40-inch water main and prompted the evacuation of the Camden Yards baseball park.

Many tank cars that were built starting in the 1960s were designed to carry as much cargo as possible, which meant thin shells that could easily puncture or rupture in a derailment. While economical, the designs proved disastrous in a number of horrific incidents involving toxic and flammable gases.

The deaths of numerous railroad workers and emergency responders in the 1970s spurred regulators and the industry to improve the safety of the pressurized tank cars used to transport “all kinds of exotic materials that cause battlefield-like damage,” NTSB official Edward Slattery told The Associated Press in 1978.

By the early 1980s, pressurized cars were equipped with puncture-resistant shields, fire-resistant thermal insulation and devices to help the cars stay coupled in derailments, reducing the risk that they could strike and puncture each other.

The non-pressurized DOT-111A, however, was left mostly unaltered. Upgrades probably weren’t necessary when the cars were carrying benign products such as corn syrup or vegetable oils, but regulators also allowed the cars to transport flammable and corrosive materials.

In accident after accident over the next three decades, the NTSB repeatedly referred to the cars’ shortcomings.

“The inadequacy of the protection provided by DOT-111A tank cars for certain dangerous products has been evident for many years,” the NTSB wrote the Federal Railroad Administration in a letter dated July 1, 1991.

Minimal enforcement fines

Repost from the Kansas City Star and McClatchy Newspapers

Federal rail agency collects minimal enforcement fines, documents show

2014-01-31
By Curtis Tate
McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Transportation collects relatively small civil penalties against the railroads it regulates, as concern grows over the safety of shipping large volumes of crude oil and ethanol in tank cars long known to be deficient, federal documents show.

Tiskilwa, IL, 7-Oct-11

A McClatchy review of annual enforcement reports shows that the Federal Railroad Administration rarely fines any company more than $25,000, though it’s authorized to collect a maximum of $175,000 per violation. Some fines are as little as $250, and most settlements are substantially lower than the agency had first proposed.

Additional documents obtained by McClatchy reveal that the agency agreed to a $17,000 settlement in September 2010 with the Canadian National Railway over a June 2009 derailment in Cherry Valley, Ill. The accident killed one person, injured nine – including two firefighters – spilled more than 300,000 gallons of ethanol and caused the evacuation of more than 600 nearby residents.

Two inspection reports filed in the weeks after the accident also show that the violations that resulted in the fine didn’t directly contribute to the accident or its severity, including faulty equipment on cars that didn’t derail or spill their cargo and incorrect documentation of the placement of cars in the train. Such defects would have been violations even if the accident hadn’t occurred.

The agency originally proposed a $25,000 fine for the accident, in which 13 tank cars of ethanol derailed, leaked and caught fire.

In contrast, the railroad reached a $36 million settlement in October 2011 with the family of the woman who was killed when the fire engulfed her car at a road crossing.

“The Federal Railroad Administration uses a variety of tools to ensure that railroads are operating safely, including civil penalties, enforcement actions and partnerships to drive change within safety culture,” said Kevin Thompson, a spokesman for the agency. “These tools are an integral force in driving continuous safety improvement, resulting in significant declines in all measureable safety indicators.”

Patrick Waldron, a spokesman for Montreal-based Canadian National, said the company agreed to pay the fine and, as with any report it discusses with its U.S. regulators, “continually reviews our own internal procedures for regulatory compliance and safety improvements.”

The railroad administration collected $13.9 million in civil penalties last year.

The small settlement amounts demonstrate a “symbiotic” relationship between railroads and their federal regulators, said Mary Schiavo, a former DOT inspector general during the Clinton administration.

“Fines are a cost of doing business,” she said.

The Cherry Valley accident prompted a warning in 2012 from the National Transportation Safety Board about the inadequacy of the DOT-111A tank car, the most common type in service on North American railroads. The NTSB is an advisory board that has no enforcement power. Agencies within the Department of Transportation may accept or ignore its recommendations.

Since October 2011, tank car manufacturers have voluntarily built DOT-111A tank cars to a higher standard, with features that help prevent punctures and ruptures that could release hazardous materials, and heat damage due to fire exposure.

But that still leaves tens of thousands of vulnerable older tank cars that are carrying massive quantities of crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region to refineries and transfer terminals across the continent.

After fiery derailments in Quebec, Alabama and North Dakota, regulators concluded that the Bakken crude, which is extracted from shale rock through hydraulic fracturing, is more volatile than conventional oils.

No one was killed or injured when Bakken crude oil trains derailed near Aliceville, Ala., in November and Casselton, N.D., in December, but the accidents together spilled more than 1.15 million gallons of oil.

The derailment of an unmanned, runaway crude oil train killed 47 people last July in Lac-Megantic, Quebec.

Philadelphia had a close call last week, when a CSX crude oil train derailed on a bridge over the Schuylkill River but didn’t spill any of its cargo.

State and local officials, members of Congress, rail companies and petroleum producers have called on the federal government to issue new guidelines for the safe handling of crude oil by rail and to update the safety standards for tank cars.

The Association of American Railroads, an industry group, estimates that railroads moved 400,000 carloads of crude oil in 2012, mostly Bakken. Railroads moved 325,000 carloads of ethanol in 2010, according to industry estimates.

The tank cars in the Quebec, Alabama, North Dakota and Illinois accidents weren’t considered defective under federal guidelines.

Oil by rail in New York – Executive Action

Repost from DESMOGBLOG.COM 2014-01-30  by Justin Mikulka

(Editor: Note excellent video below.)

New York Governor Cuomo Issues Executive Order on Oil by Rail Safety

Yesterday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order directing several state agencies to review the risks posed by trasportation of crude oil by rail in New York. This issue has recently gained attention in Albany as the public has become aware of the large amounts of Bakken crude oil being shipped into Albany by rail, where it is then transferred to tankers that travel down the Hudson River.

The Governor’s order requests many relevant actions but also acknowledges that most of this is under federal jurisdiction and thus there isn’t much the state can do about it.  Much of what the Governor is requesting has been suggested by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) many times over the years, as the agency did again this past week.

The new suggested NTSB changes have the support of the American Association of Railroads. However, the companies that actually would be responsible for most of the costs associated with improving rail car safety are the oil companies themselves. The American Petroleum Institute responded to the new safety regulations by pointing the finger at the rail companies, stating that, “the first step is to prevent derailments by addressing track defects and other root causes of all rail accidents.”

And the dance that has gone on around this issue for years continues on, resulting in more press releases, but no action.

Here is a video I produced about the oil by rail issue in New York:

Image credit: Transportation Safety Board