More Fiery Oil Train, Pipeline Accidents Unless Government Acts: Report
September 22, 2014
If the U.S. doesn’t quickly address the safe transportation of oil and gas, Americans could pay the price with more fiery train and pipeline accidents, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
“Without timely action to address safety risks posed by increased transport of oil and gas by pipeline and rail, additional accidents that could have been prevented or mitigated may endanger the public and call into question the readiness of transportation networks in the new oil and gas environment,” found the report.
The GAO report focused on the safety of moving crude oil by train and the growing network of “gathering lines,” largely unregulated natural gas pipelines. Both have been subjects of recent investigations by NBC News. The GAO determined that the Department of Transportation had “not kept pace with the changing oil and gas transportation environment.”
Oil and gas production in the U.S. increased more than fivefold between 2007 and 2012, a boom brought on by technological advances in drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Vast volumes of oil and gas production soon outstripped the pipeline infrastructure in place to move them.
Crude producers began to load their oil on trains. More than 400,000 carloads of crude ran over North American rails in 2013, up from just 9,500 in 2008. But a series of explosive wrecks have raised concern about the safety of oil trains — the worst, a 2013 derailment outside a small Quebec town, killed nearly 50 people.
A 2013 NBC News investigation found regulators had long known that the tank cars used to ship oil were vulnerable to rupture in an accident.
The DOT has since issued proposed rules to improve the train cars that carry oil. In its report, the GAO applauded the move, but emphasized safety improvements must go beyond the cars, including testing the makeup of the oil, which the DOT has said is particularly flammable.
The GAO also warned better oversight was needed over the growing network of “gathering pipelines” that move natural gas from the well. In August, an investigation by NBC News found that 250,000 miles of these lines are in rural areas and subject to little or no federal or state safety oversight, despite sometimes running beside homes.
Repost from NORTHJERSEY.COM [Editor: Significant quote by Teaneck Town Councilman Mark Schwarz: “‘If we’re all going to sit here and wait for our [Legislative] District 37 leadership and Congress’ to act, ‘then we’re going to die of old age.'” – RS]
Teaneck Council presses for moratorium on use of older tank cars on oil trains through town
SEPTEMBER 11, 2014, BY AARON MORRISON
TEANECK — Local officials are pushing for a moratorium on the use of old tankers to carry millions of gallons of highly explosive materials on rail tracks through town.
Tank cars lining the CSX tracks near Cedar Lane in Teaneck in May. Fifteen to 30 oil trains pass each week through 11 Bergen County towns. | CHRIS PEDOTA/STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER
Residents and members of the Township Council have expressed concern about the safety risks posed by crude oil traveling in substandard railcars that federal regulators have cautioned against.
The Record has reported that at least 7 million gallons per day of highly combustible Bakken crude oil comes through 11 Bergen County towns — Northvale, Norwood, Harrington Park, Closter, Haworth, Dumont, Bergenfield, Teaneck, Bogota, Ridgefield Park and Ridgefield – on the CSX River Line.
Concerns over the crude on the railways have mounted in recent months after a series of fiery accidents and derailments in North Dakota, Alabama and Virginia. Last summer, 47 people were killed when a train carrying Bakken crude derailed in a small Quebec town.
The Teaneck Council passed a resolution Tuesday night calling for the temporary ban until federal regulators have deemed the tankers adequate. Though ceremonial, the council hopes neighboring North Jersey communities will join in amplifying the message.
“The transportation of this material in such close proximity to homes, businesses and our water supply, raises serious public safety concerns and requires that we take immediate action to eliminate this hazard,” the resolution states.
Mayor Lizette Parker on Tuesday night said the township should hold federal lawmakers accountable, while other members of the council asked for development of a township emergency response plan, in the event of a derailment.
“This is a safety issue that needs to be important to them,” Parker said. “We do have the power of influence. And I don’t mean the seven of us” on the council. “I mean the 39,000 of us.”
Councilman Jason Castle urged his colleagues to consider an emergency management plan he said he circulated “two sessions ago.”
“My daughter just started school at the Rodda Center — she’s at the preschool there and the tracks run right by the Rodda Center,” he said.
Councilmen Henry Pruitt and Mark Schwartz said the township should find other strategies that don’t rely on action from officials in Trenton and Washington.
“If we’re all going to sit here and wait for our [Legislative] District 37 leadership and Congress” to act, “then we’re going to die of old age,” Schwartz said.
Enlisting other towns
While New Jersey officials declined to reveal the number of trains that travel on the rail line, citing security risks, documents provided by New York State officials showed between 15 and 30 oil trains are entering Bergen County from Rockland County each week. The trains also travel through Hudson, Essex, Union, Middlesex, Somerset and Mercer counties, according to a map on CSX’s website.
Rail executives this year agreed to more track inspections and a reduction in train speeds in highly populated areas, but they haven’t been swapping out their fleet of old tanker cars. Even though the National Transportation Safety Board has called the tankers inadequate for transporting such flammable materials, federal officials are only recommending that railway companies stop shipping crude in the old cars.
Two weeks ago, the Teaneck Council asked Township Manager William Broughton to send letters to the other Bergen County municipalities along the CSX line. Broughton told the council he had not received any responses as of Tuesday.
The manager also said the township is already working with CSX “on this issue of preparedness and response.” This week, CSX paid for one of the township’s deputy fire chiefs to attend safety training in Pueblo, Colo. The course deals specifically with fires from crude oil, Broughton said.
Residents at Tuesday’s meeting praised the council’s attention to the issue. Some even vowed to take drastic measures to stop the trains from coming past their homes and businesses and force federal reforms.
“I will personally sit on those tracks, and anyone else who wants to can join me,” said Paula Rogovin, who organized a protest at one of the railway bridges in town.
by John Light, September 2, 2014
In this July 16, 2013, photo, railroad oil tankers are lined up at the Port of Albany, in Albany, NY. (AP Photo/Mike Groll, File)
If you reside in the US, there’s around an eight percent chance that you live in an oil train’s blast zone. And there’s a fight going on at the state and federal levels, between monied interests and regulatory agencies, over efforts to ensure that these trains — which have shown a tendency to burst into flames — will be relatively safe.
The increased use of hydraulic fracturing — fracking — has made oil that was previously inaccessible available to drillers. The crude then has to make its way to refineries, and while the boom in pipeline projects has received quite a bit of attention, roughly 60 percent of it travels by rail.
On Friday, California legislators passed a bill that would require railroads to tell emergency officials when oil trains filled with explosive Bakken crude — oil from a particularly productive region in western North Dakota — would pass through the state. The law reflects growing concern, across America, about the dangers of these trains moving through dense communities, including Sacramento, California’s capital.
Oil tanker cars move along a web of routes that crisscross the United States. In 2013, about 400,000 cars made the journey, a 4,000 percent increase over the previous five years. The boost in oil cars has been so great that less lucrative industries are having trouble finding rail transport for their products. In March, General Mills announced that it had lost 62 days of production on such favorites as Cheerios because the trains that had shipped agricultural products were being leased by the fossil fuel industry.
Most oil reaches its destination without any problems, but as production has skyrocketed, the railroads have become increasingly taxed. Those who live near railways have noticed the uptick, with trains rumbling through towns much more frequently, and at much higher speeds.
Last July, a tanker train filled with North Dakota crude derailed in the middle of the night in Lac-Mégantic, a small Canadian town near the border with Maine; the resulting inferno killed 47 people. Since then, derailments in Casselton, North Dakota, and Lynchburg, Virginia, have led to evacuations. The Lac-Mégantic disaster spurred protests from fire chiefs and town officials who said that they were ill-equipped to deal with a possible derailment.
In the year since, officials have moved to formalize several safety measures. This July, the Obama administration proposed a plan that involves banning certain older tank cars, using better breaks on car, restricting speeds and possibly rerouting trains.
That first point, phasing out old tank cars, is a key area of contention. For the most part, the opposition isn’t coming from the railroads; it’s the oil companies that lease the tank cars that are fighting the new regulations. As Bloomberg Businessweek’s Matthew Philips explained earlier this summer:
It’s helpful to understand the three industries with something at stake here: railroads, energy companies, and tank-car manufacturers. The railroads own the tracks but not the tank cars or the oil that’s inside. The oil often belongs to big energy companies such as refiners or even trading firms that profit from buying it near the source—say, in North Dakota—and selling it elsewhere. These energy companies tend to lease the tank cars from large manufacturing companies or big lenders such as General Electric (GE) and CIT Group (CIT).
Although it is never their oil on board, the railroads usually end up in the headlines when something goes wrong. That’s why they have been eager for a rule to make energy companies use stronger tank cars. Meanwhile, the oil industry has been busy issuing studies trying to prove that the oil coming out of North Dakota is safe enough to travel in the existing tank cars. The energy lobby also thinks railroads need to do a better job of keeping the trains on the tracks. Tank-car manufacturers, meanwhile, simply want some clarity around what kind of cars they need to build.
Canada, following the Lac-Mégantic disaster, announced plans to phase out one older tank car that has been linked to several accidents over the next three years; the Obama administration proposal would do it in two.
But the oil industry doesn’t want that. Leading the charge is the American Petroleum Institute, an organization that, so far in 2014, has spent $4 million lobbying regulators and Congress. They’ve pushed back against labeling Bakken crude as more hazardous than other crude oil, even though many studies have found that it is.
Environmental groups blame this lobbying effort for several weaknesses in the proposed rules. For one, they would only apply to trains that have 20 or more carloads of Bakken crude. “If the rule is approved as drafted, it would still be legal to transport around 570,000 gallons (the equivalent of the fuel carried by seven Boeing 747s) of volatile Bakken crude in a train composed of 19 unsafe, [aging] tank cars—and none of the other aspects of the new rules, including routing, notification, train speed, and more would apply,” wrote Eric de Place of the sustainability think-tank Sightline Institute, who also criticized the proposal for not immediately banning older tankers.
And even if the regulations were to be put in place despite the API’s attempts to weaken them, there’s the distinct possibility that regulators will fall short. The government has often taken a hands-off approach in determining what gets shipped, and how — and in enforcing existing rules requiring that officials in the cities it passes through be informed that potentially hazardous shipments are coming. In These Times reported that government inspections to make sure railroads are properly labeling the product they are shipping (the Bakken crude was improperly labeled in the Lac-Mégantic disaster) are supposed to be unannounced, but are sometimes pre-arranged. Meanwhile, railroads are cutting back on the number of crew members manning trains, a move that some workers feel will lead to less safe travel.
“No one would permit an airliner to fly with just one pilot, even though they can fly themselves,” wrote John Previsich, the president of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation union’s transportation devision. “Trains, which cannot operate themselves, should be no different.”
John Light blogs and works on multimedia projects for Moyers & Company. Before joining the Moyers team, he was a public radio producer. His work has been supported by grants from The Nation Institute Investigative Fund and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Awards, among others. A New Jersey native, John studied history and film at Oberlin College and holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University
State regulators expect penalty for CSX oil train wreck
April CSX wreck sent oil into river at Lynchburg
By Alicia Petska, The News & Advance, August 21, 2014 10:30 pm
LYNCHBURG — State environmental regulators are in talks with CSX to negotiate the terms of a consent order that will be issued in response to the estimated 29,916 gallons of oil released into the James River during the April 30 train derailment in downtown Lynchburg.
The order is expected to include a financial penalty, but the amount has not been determined yet, said Robert Weld, regional director for the Department of Environmental Quality.
Other measures may include long-term monitoring of river conditions and replanting vegetative buffers along the riverbank.
Water quality testing in the weeks after the derailment found no contaminants of concern, Weld said, but visual checks and other monitoring will continue out of an “abundance of caution.”
It remains unclear just how much of the Bakken crude oil that leaked during the downtown derailment actually mixed into the river or made its way downstream.
Much of it burned in the large fire that erupted after 17 cars on a 105-car oil train derailed near downtown Lynchburg. Three cars tumbled over the riverbank, and one ruptured. There were no injuries or building damage.
The incident drew Lynchburg into a national debate over how to safely ship the volatile crude found in Bakken shale around North Dakota, where production has skyrocketed in recent years.
On Wednesday, Weld was among more than a dozen state officials who convened in Lynchburg for the second meeting of a new rail safety task force formed by Gov. Terry McAuliffe after the derailment.
The meeting, held at City Hall, included a presentation from the federal agency charged with regulating hazmat shipments and public comments from environmental advocates and rail employee representatives.
CSX had offered to reimburse the city for the cost of its emergency response and sent the final check last week, according to Lynchburg’s finance department.
The reimbursement totaled $107,853 for personnel and equipment costs, as well as minor property damage to trees, curbs and sidewalks.
The new rail safety task force has been asked to advise the state on how it can improve its own preparedness and response efforts.
It also might weigh in on the federal regulations that govern most aspects of rail operations. The U.S. Department of Transportation has been studying the oil-by-rail issue since a deadly oil train derailment in Quebec in July 2013.
Last month, federal officials released a set of proposed rules that may lead to phasing out older DOT-111 model tankers that have been criticized as puncture prone.
There also may be higher standards for braking systems, speed limits and testing of volatile liquids. The proposed rules are in a 60-day public comment period that will end Sept. 30.
During a public hearing Wednesday, water quality advocates with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and James River Association urged officials to take a comprehensive look at the rail safety issue and not limit themselves to one region, cargo or issue.
The proposed federal regulations may not do anything to deter the kind of derailment that occurred in Lynchburg, said Pat Calvert of the James River Association, whose office is close to the derailment site.
Given the location of the derailment — near several downtown businesses and a popular trail system — it’s a miracle no one was injured, he said.
“We dodged a bullet,” Calvert said. “But we shouldn’t necessarily be playing Russian roulette here.”
The cause of the Lynchburg derailment is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB said it could be a year or more before its report is ready.
The state’s rail safety task force plans to hold its next meeting in September in the Norfolk area. It hopes to tour the Yorktown oil refinery — where oil-by-rail shipments through Virginia end up — and meet with a representative of the NTSB.
