Sunday, March 8, 2015

AS OIL/ETHANOL TRAINS CONTINUE TO DERAIL, TOP PENNSYLVANIA OFFICIALS DEMAND FEDERAL ACTION. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, AS MOST OF THE FEDS HAVE BEEN BOUGHT BY THE OIL AND RAIL LOBBIES. THE COST TO PAY FOR DISASTER DAMAGES IS FAR LESS THAN THE COST TO UPGRADE THE INFRASTRUCTURE.








SUNDAY, MARCH 8, 2015

With trains carrying explosive Bakken crude oil continuing to derail in Pennsylvania, the United States and Canada, Gov. Tom Wolf, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey and Lancaster County’s emergency management director are voicing concerns.

“The potential for disaster is too great to ignore,” Wolf wrote in a Feb. 27 letter to President Barack Obama in which he said oil train safety is a top priority for his administration.

“These derailments have raised serious questions about the need to address efforts to prevent future accidents,” said Casey in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, which has been reviewing for months a bill passed by Congress to strengthen oil tank cars, review speed limits for oil trains and increase the number of rail safety inspectors.

Those concerns from the state’s top elected officials come as  new studies show that at least 1.5 million Pennsylvanians live or go to school in buildings within the evacuation zone of an oil train explosion or fire.

It is becoming increasingly clear that there is a problem with these trains.  They derail so easily, even going at low speeds of 4 miles per hour, as it happened in Essex Junction, VT two days ago.  Lack of maintenance, poor maintenance, no/minimal rail inspections, unsafe rail cars, human errors, failing infrastructure, and so on.  The same is going on in the US and Canada.  Profit comes first, and these corporations refuse to perform infrastructure upgrades because they must make their profits first, and issue their dividends and pay the bonuses prior to do it what needs to be done to keep people safe and the environment clean.

As people may understand, or even know, these companies do perform a risk analysis and determine the amount of money needed to upgrade the infrastructure and the amount of money needed to respond and pay for damages.  Well, the cost to pay for damages is far less than the cost to upgrade the infrastructure and this is why it is not being done.  We are talking about many-many billions of dollars to upgrade the railroad system and to force the oil companies to buy safety tank cars.   

We do not see this happening; not until more people get roasted alive by burning oil like it happened to the poor Canadians at Lac-Megantic.  Well, we may very well see that happening here as well the way these derailments and explosions and fires are happening.  It is absolutely reckless to transport 100 tanks of oil, each tank containing 30,000 gallons of oil in a single train.  They need to be forced to cut down the number of oil tanks and reduce the speed (although we dough it will help) of the trains and perform the rail inspections by third-party inspectors.  We simply do not trust the oil and rail companies to be self-inspected.



Oil trains in Lancaster
Oil trains, often with more than 100 tanker cars, are rolling through about 35 miles of Lancaster County along the Susquehanna River from eight to 16 times a week.

“It’s a definite concern for responders here in Lancaster County,” says Randy Gockley, director of the Lancaster County Emergency Management Agency.
The agency has scrambled in recent months to train local fire and ambulance crews and has written a 150-page Crude Oil Unit Train Plan for all fire companies to follow in case of an accident. The plan focuses on local communities at risk.

A derailment with the possibility of a fire, explosion or spill of oil into the Susquehanna “would very quickly turn into an incident that would require assistance from the region and not just the resources here in Lancaster County,” Gockley says.

“Past experience in the United States and Canada has shown that it can happen.”

Lancaster County emergency officials do not know when trains pass through the county. Giving out the location of trains could be a terrorism concern, federal officials have ruled.

An analysis of those in danger in case of an oil train fire released last week by PublicSource showed three schools and a day-care center in Marietta and Columbia within the evacuation zone of Norfolk Southern’s Port Road rail line along the Susquehanna.

They are the Susquehanna Waldorf School in Marietta, Little People Day Care in Columbia, and Park Elementary School and Our Lady of the Angels Catholic School in Columbia.



Oil trains in Pennsylvania
About 1.5 million people in Pennsylvania live within the evacuation zone for a train disaster, according  to PublicSource, a Pennsylvania-based investigative news organization.

Federal guidelines recommend an evacuation zone of a half-mile on either side of railroad tracks.

In its own study, also last week, Philadelphia-based PennEnvironment estimated 3.9 million Pennsylvanians live in evacuation zones. The higher estimate is because PennEnvironment used rail lines in the state that do or could carry crude oil.

With refineries in Philadelphia and Delaware, Pennsylvania’s railroad network has become one of the most heavily used in the United States for transport of Bakken crude oil, primarily originating in North Dakota.

Bakken crude is more flammable and explosive than traditional crude oil.
About 60 to 70 oil trains pass through Pennsylvania weekly.

There have been four oil train derailments in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and Westmoreland County since January 2014. None resulted in injuries, though one resulted in a spill of 10,000 gallons of crude oil.

Norfolk Southern responds
Norfolk Southern spokesman David Pidgeon said railroads are required by federal law to haul hazardous materials, including crude oil.

“We are as concerned as the public about the safety of oil trains,” Pidgeon said. “Any measures to address the train safety questions have to be grounded in reality.”  Translation:  we prefer to pay damages for any disaster, rather than pay the multi-billions required to upgrade our operations.

He said Norfolk Southern has spoken with Governor Wolf, state and federal legislators, as well as local emergency management officials about the best way to improve safety.

“We strive to keep our communities and our natural resources safe. For years we have been advocating for higher standards for tank cars,” Pidgeon said.
Pidgeon noted that “the vast majority” of tank cars are owned or leased by customers, not the railroad.  Many times, the oil industry is not providing the correct description of what type of oil product is contained.


Accidents heighten concerns
Contributing to the new wave of concerns over possible crude oil train accidents is the release last week of a U.S. Department of Transportation study that predicts up to 15 derailments of trains carrying crude oil or ethanol each year in the United States.

The most recent Bakken oil train accident in West Virginia also has heightened concerns. On Feb. 16, a derailed CSX train caught fire and exploded. A river was contaminated, tankers on fire burned for days, a house was burned to the ground and hundreds were evacuated from homes.  Several recent oil tank derailments have also occurred in Canada, causing massive explosions and fires.  In addition to the oil train derailments, we also have the ethanol, liquified propane tanks and other hazardous material trains.  For the public to feel safer, we need a third-party independent inspection service.  We cannot continue having the wolf guarding the sheep.

Moreover, cars that ruptured and caught fire were of the newer, supposedly safer models.  Good luck with that, as the forces imposed upon a 30,000 gallon tank car are truly enormous.  Their new and improved designs are a joke, as the oil companies are notorious cost cutters and they only buy the cheapest possible tank that will meet the fed regs.  But the feds are behind the A-ball and they only respond to catastrophes.  We have to have a Lac-Megantic in the states for things to change;  but even then, the rail and oil lobbies are too powerful for passing much safer standards.  And certainly not when the oil price is at $50 barrel.


A more recent derailment in Ontario on Feb. 14, in which 21 cars caught on fire, also were the upgraded tankers that the United States deemed safer.

Just last Thursday, another oil train derailed in a rural area outside  Galena, Illinois. Twenty-one of the 105 cars came off the tracks and two caught fire. Fire spread to another three and the fire was still burning as of Friday.

Residents living within 1 mile of the BNSF Railway tracks were evacuated.
The tankers that caught fire also were newer model tankers.

It was the third derailment of an oil train in the U.S. and Canada  in the last three weeks.

The worst oil train accident so far since Bakken crude shipments ramped up a couple years ago was in 2013 when a derailment in the Quebec town of Lac-Megantic resulted in an explosion and fires that killed 47 people and leveled half the town.

Critics have pointed out that all four accidents occurred despite trains traveling within lower speed limits that had been imposed on oil trains.

In its report, “Danger Around the Bend: The Threat of Oil Trains in Pennsylvania,” PennEnvironment calls the rail lines and bridges that many oil trains travel over “antiquated” and criticizes regulations that don’t force railroads to reveal locations of oil trains to local communities.  These regulators are heavily influenced by the oil and rail lobies; do not expect much to be done.  The same happened to the pipelines: the feds have been behind the A-ball for many years and only recently woke up, but it is too late and so many massive spills have happened due to the deteriorated infrastructure.


Shipments of crude oil have increased 4,000 percent in the United States since 2008, the start of the fracking  oil boom.
Source: www.lancasteronline.com