Category Archives: Tank car design

Federal Railroad Admin: oil industry must do more to boost train safety

Repost from Reuters

Oil industry must join U.S. railroads to boost train safety – regulator

By Patrick Rucker, Mar 13, 2015 6:06pm EDT

WASHINGTON, March 13 (Reuters) – Rail operators are going to great lengths to prevent oil train derailments but the energy sector must do more to prevent accidents from becoming fiery disasters, the leading U.S. rail regulator said on Friday.

Oil train tankers have jumped the tracks in a string of mishaps in recent months that resulted in explosions and fires.

Several of those shipments originated from North Dakota’s Bakken energy fields. Officials have warned that fuel from the region is particularly light and volatile.

Sarah Feinberg, acting head of the Federal Railroad Administration, said the energy industry must do more to control the volatility of its cargo.

“(We) are running out of things that we can put on the railroads to do,” she said. “There have to be other industries that have skin in the game.”

A national safety plan for oil trains, due to be finalized in May, would require trains to have toughened tankers, advanced braking and other safety improvements.

The plan, however, would do nothing to mute the dangers of the fuel itself.

As officials try to prevent mishaps, they will also highlight the energy companies that supplied crude oil involved in accidents, Feinberg said.

Officials want to identify publicly “the owner of the product when we talk about these derailments,” she said.

The American Petroleum Institute said it hoped to work with the rail industry and other stakeholders to prevent mishap.

“Our safety goal, along with the railroads, is zero incidents,” said Brian Straessle, a spokesman for the trade group.

While U.S. officials have warned for more than 12 months that Bakken fuel can be volatile, the verdict is mixed on whether that contributes to the intensity of accidents.

In September, the FRA determined that Bakken crude oil may be no more explosion-prone than other fuels carried by rail.

Ethanol, a corn-based gasoline additive, “poses a similar, if not greater, risk as (Bakken) crude oil when released from a tank car failing catastrophically and resulting in a large fireball type fire,” according to a study from the agency.

On Friday, the FRA said that about 6,000 tankers had a top valve that allowed small amounts of oil to escape. The agency said it ordered the fitting to be replaced and said it would work with industry to identify and replace defective parts more quickly.

That defect was not believed to have played a role in any mishaps, the FRA said.

(Reporting by Patrick Rucker; Editing by Dan Grebler, Bernard Orr)

NPR Interview: Another Train Derailment Raises New Concerns About The Safety Of Transporting Crude Oil

Repost from WAMU, American University Radio – The Diane Rehm Show
[Editor: In this lengthy and informative audio, Diane Rehm interviews Anthony Swift, NRDC; Cynthia Quarterman, Atlantic Council (former Administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration); Dina Cappiello, Associated Press; and Edward Hamburger, Association of American Railroads. Unfortunately, I am unable to embed The Diane Rehm Show here.  To listen to this 51-minute interview, go to the Diane Rehm Show.  – RS]

Another Train Derailment Raises New Concerns About The Safety Of Transporting Crude Oil

The Diane Rehm Show, Mon, Mar 09, 2015
Firefighters and rescue workers work along the tracks where several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire in April 2014 along the James River near downtown in Lynchburg, Va.
Firefighters and rescue workers work along the tracks where several CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil derailed and caught fire in April 2014 along the James River near downtown in Lynchburg, Va. AP Photo/Steve Helber

Fueled by the shale oil boom in North Dakota and Montana, trains now carry more than 500,000 carloads of oil and ethanol to coastal refineries. Now, a series of fiery train derailments in the U.S. and Canada is raising public safety concerns. On Saturday, a train crashed in Ontario, leaking oil into a nearby waterway. Here in the U.S., another train derailed last week in Illinois, causing evacuations and fire damage. Safety advocates say rail cars carrying oil need to meet tougher design standards and lower speed limits. Shippers argue that stricter measures are costly and risks are exaggerated. We look at the rise in oil train derailments and what can be done to prevent them.

Guests

  • Anthony Swift attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.
  • Cynthia Quarterman distinguished senior fellow, The Atlantic Council; former administrator of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA)
  • Ed Hamberger president and CEO, Association of American Railroads.
  • Dina Cappiello national environment and energy reporter, The Associated Press.

As Galena IL Tank Cars Burned, Industry Met at White House to Weaken Safety Standards

Repost from Reuters

U.S. rail industry pushes White House to ease oil train safety rules

By Valerie Volcovici & Patrick Rucker, Mar 10, 2015 2:24pm EDT

(Reuters) – The U.S. rail industry is pushing the White House to drop a requirement that oil trains adopt an advanced braking system, a cornerstone of a national safety plan that will soon govern shipments of crude oil across the country.

Representatives of large rail operators met with White House officials last week to argue against the need for electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, or ECP brakes, saying they “would not have significant safety benefits” and “would be extremely costly,” according to a handout from the meeting.

ECP brakes trigger all axles simultaneously rather than one at a time in current design.

More than a dozen industry representatives made their case at the Washington meeting last Friday, a day after a crude oil train derailed in Illinois.

Reuters reported last month that the national oil train safety plan now under review at the White House Office of Management and Budget would require the advanced braking.

The Transportation Department has concluded that ECP braking would deliver meaningful safety improvements but the industry officials argued that the department estimates “grossly overstate benefits and understate costs.”

The industry claims fitting rail stock with ECP brakes would not prevent accidents, but merely limit the number of cars that derail in an accident.

Adopting the new technology would lead to more frequent service problems and mechanical delays, industry officials said.

The oil train safety plan being considered by the White House would also demand tougher tank cars and other safety steps that the government estimates would cost at least $3 billion over the next 20 years.

Oil and rail executives contend that much higher costs would needlessly hinder a sector that has helped push a national energy renaissance.

NEW YORK TIMES: Dangerous Trains, Aging Rails

Repost from The New York Times
[Editor:  Another excellent investigative report by Marcus Stern.  New information here – another must-read for CBR opponents.  See his highly-acclaimed December report, Boom! North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem.  – RS]

Dangerous Trains, Aging Rails

By Marcus Stern, March 12, 2015

A CSX freight train ran off the rails last month in rural Mount Carbon, W.Va. One after another, exploding rail cars sent hellish fireballs hundreds of feet into the clear winter sky. Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency, and the fires burned for several days.

The Feb. 16 accident was one of a series of recent fiery derailments highlighting the danger of using freight trains to ship crude oil from wellheads in North Dakota to refineries in congested regions along America’s coastlines. The most recent was last week, when a Burlington Northern Santa Fe oil train with roughly 100 cars derailed, causing at least two cars, each with about 30,000 gallons of crude oil, to explode, burn and leak near the Mississippi River, south of Galena, Ill.

These explosions have generally been attributed to the design of the rail cars — they’re notoriously puncture-prone — and the volatility of the oil; it tends to blow up. Less attention has been paid to questions surrounding the safety and regulation of the nation’s aging network of 140,000 miles of freight rails, which carry their explosive cargo through urban corridors, sensitive ecological zones and populous suburbs.

Case in point: The wooden trestles that flank the Mobile and Ohio railroad bridge, built in 1898, as it traverses Alabama’s Black Warrior River between the cities of Northport and Tuscaloosa. Oil trains rumble roughly 40 feet aloft, while joggers and baby strollers pass underneath. One of the trestles runs past the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater. Yet when I visited last May, many of the trestles’ supports were rotted and some of its cross braces were dangling or missing.

The public has only one hope of finding out if such centenarian bridges are still sturdy enough to carry these oil trains. Ask the railroads. That’s because the federal government doesn’t routinely inspect rail bridges. In fact, the government lacks any engineering standards whatsoever for rail bridges. Nor does it have an inventory of them.

The only significant government intrusion into the railroads’ self-regulation of the nation’s 70,000 to 100,000 railroad bridges is a requirement that the companies inspect them each year. But the Federal Railroad Administration, which employed only 76 track inspectors as of last year, does not routinely review the inspection reports and allows each railroad to decide for itself whether or not to make repairs.

The railroad that operates the Tuscaloosa bridge, Watco Companies, and the Federal Railroad Administration assured me it was safe. But shortly after my reporting was published on the websites of InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel, Watco announced that it would make $2.5 million in repairs. And the Department of Transportation’s inspector general said it would begin a review of the F.R.A.’s oversight of rail bridges.

Even where federal engineering standards do exist, it’s unclear how much safety they provide. For instance, federal track safety standards allow 19 out of 24 crossties to be defective along any 39-foot stretch of the lowest grade of track, where the speed limit is 10 m.p.h. These crossties stabilize the rails. On the best of tracks, which have a speed limit of 80 m.p.h., the standards allow half of the crossties to be decayed or missing.

Five oil trains have exploded in the United States in the last 16 months. Miraculously, there have been no deaths. Canada, however, hasn’t been so lucky. In July 2013, an oil train carrying North Dakota oil burst into flames in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, about 10 miles from the Maine border, killing 47 people.

After that accident, federal officials promised to develop sweeping new regulations to make sure nothing like it happens in the United States. In the interim, the Department of Transportation issued an emergency order requiring railroads to get federal permission before leaving trains unattended with their engines running, a major factor in the Lac-Mégantic explosion. And the railroads agreed to a number of voluntary steps, including keeping oil trains under 50 m.p.h.

But more than a year and a half after Lac-Mégantic, new regulations have yet to be finalized as the railroad and oil industries argue about various proposed provisions. The emergency order didn’t end the practice of railroads’ leaving oil trains on tracks with their engines running; it simply required companies to have a written plan for doing so. And without regulations, reporting or penalties, the public has only the railroads’ word they are complying with the 50 m.p.h. speed limit.

For trackside communities, the stakes are obviously high. New hydraulic fracturing technology has allowed oil developers to tap vast amounts of deeply buried oil in parts of North Dakota, Montana and Canada. Without significant new pipeline capacity, the only way to get the oil to refineries is by train. Rail car shipments of crude oil rose from 9,500 in 2008 to more than 400,000 last year.

To protect communities and the environment, the Transportation Department needs to act quickly to require more resilient rail cars, improve the safety of rail infrastructure and operations, and reduce the volatility of oil at the wellhead, before it is loaded onto trains.

Instead, the debate over regulations inches along as oil trains continue to roll through downtown Philadelphia, suburban Chicago and along the Hudson River in New York and the Schuylkill in eastern Pennsylvania, passing close to a nuclear power plant.

Before leaving office last year, Deborah A. P. Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, questioned whether industry representatives and regulators had a tombstone mentality when it came to oil trains. If nobody dies, she suggested, there’s no pressure to act. So far, the tombstones have all been in Canada.

Marcus Stern has examined the hazards of shipping oil by rail for InsideClimate News, the Weather Channel and the Investigative Fund. He reports for a San Diego-based writers group, Hashtag30.