FEBRUARY 19, 2015
BISMARCK, N.D
The derailment in West Virginia of a train
carrying oil from North Dakota is prompting complaints that state and federal
governments aren't doing enough to ensure the safe transport of crude by rail.
A train carrying 3 million gallons of crude from North
Dakota's Bakken oil fields derailed Monday in the unincorporated town of Mount
Carbon, West Virginia. The derailment leaked oil into a river tributary, burned
down a house, prompted the evacuation of hundreds of families and forced nearby
water treatment plans to temporarily shut down.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader told KFGO radio that it's
"a national emergency" and he's calling for a congressional
investigation into rail accidents involving North Dakota crude, after half a
dozen incidents since 2008.
Trains hauling Bakken oil also have been involved in major
accidents in Virginia, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Alabama, as well as in
Canada, where 47 people were killed by an explosive derailment in 2013 in
Lac-Megantic, Quebec.
"This is a serious safety issue affecting the American
people," Nader said.
The oil train that exploded in West Virginia met the
industry's voluntary 2011 safety standards, but an increase in accidents has
the Obama administration considering tougher rules for tank cars — such as
thicker tanks, shields to prevent tanks from crumpling, rollover protections
and electronic brakes that could make cars stop simultaneously, rather than
slam into each other.
The Dakota Resource Council environmental group said in a
statement that North Dakota officials are to blame for not ensuring Bakken oil
is safe to transport by rail.
"Responsibility for this (West Virginia) explosion is
squarely at the feet of North Dakota officials from Gov. (Jack) Dalrymple on
down for their inept handling of regulating oil extraction in North
Dakota," the group said. "(Dalrymple's) administration is putting
people's lives and property at risk here and across the continent."
Dalrymple's spokesman, Jeff Zent, said the statement indicates
that the group is either uninformed or is choosing not to acknowledge the
state's progress to ensure safe oil transport. He cited a recent order that
includes strict parameters for temperatures and pressures for transported oil.
"Most producers have already installed the equipment
necessary to meet the final deadline of April 1," Zent said.
As we wrote before, the railroads are plagued with numerous
derailments due to lack of maintenance of the rail lines, human errors, and so
on. To us, transferring 3 million gallons
of hazardous material such long distances is plain and simply reckless. These people and companies are playing Russian
roulette with the lives, property and water and land resources of so many
people.
We need to come up with a big picture system of how to deal
with our energy resources and how to transport them on a nationwide scale. We cannot rely on individual producers and
transporters to do their little thing and expect all hazardous material extraction and transportation and processing to go well.
How can we possibly expect to transfer millions
of gallons of fluids across the US without a problem? We need to cut down on the length of these transportation
routes by building processing facilities close to the production sites. We do know that all pipelines
leak and lose at least 3 percent of the product, it is just the leak is not
detected. So, pipelines do lose a lot of product as well.
Eventually, a weak link will happen (whether this weak link
is a faulty rail line, or human error, or defective equipment, or unsafe tank
cars or corroded pipelines, and so on) and a disaster will happen; and there have been quite a few of them.
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