File/Danielle Parhizkaran/staff photographer
An oil train travels over a bridge over the Oradell Reservoir near Old Hook Road.
But unlike in other states, that information will remain blocked from the general public in New Jersey, where millions of gallons of Bakken crude travel by rail through densely populated areas — including eastern Bergen County — each week.
The Christie administration will continue to honor an agreement it made last year with CSX not to publicly disclose even the limited information the railway gives the state, an official in Trenton confirmed last week. In accordance with the agreement, release of the information will be confined to first responders and emergency management coordinators, who are still developing plans for responding to possible derailments.
“The CSX agreement is still in place, and there will be no changes to the information-sharing provisions,” said Lee Moore, a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s Office.
While Governor Christie says public disclosure would present a security risk, some of New Jersey’s largest firefighter organizations, along with environmental groups and Democratic lawmakers, insist that residents along the track have a right to know what’s being hauled past their homes.
“The risk is there right now, but the public is just being kept in the dark about it,” said Debra Coyle McFadden, interim director of the New Jersey Work Environment Council, an alliance of labor and environmental groups. “Communities need more information. Our neighboring states don’t think it’s a security issue.”
The number of trains hauling oil has increased more than 4,000 percent in the six years since a large underground reserve was found in North Dakota's Bakken region, where there are few pipelines. Refineries on the East Coast now get most of their crude via rail, compared with almost none three years ago.
New Jersey has become a major corridor for these oil shipments, with 15 to 30 trains rolling every week on the CSX River Line into Bergen County from New York State. Each train carries as much as 3.6 million gallons past thousands of homes in Northvale, Norwood, Harrington Park, Closter, Haworth, Dumont, Bergenfield, Teaneck, Bogota, Ridgefield Park and Ridgefield on its way to a refinery in Philadelphia.
After a series of fiery derailments, including one that killed 47 people in Canada two years ago, the U.S. government issued an emergency order last year requiring rail companies to provide state emergency coordinators with basic information, including the amount of oil being transported, how many trains pass through each county, and the trains’ routes. Most states also have issued the information to the general public as communities have become more concerned about the shipments, even as rail companies and trade groups have fought to keep it secret.
But the Christie administration said last summer it would confine the information to first responders, explaining that providing anything more would pose a “homeland security risk.” Months later, administration officials signed an agreement with CSX essentially blocking all public disclosure, saying the reports from CSX contained “confidential trade secrets and proprietary commercial information” that could harm the company’s bottom line.
Among the groups opposing the policy were the New Jersey Deputy Fire Chiefs Association and the Professional Firefighters Association of New Jersey, which called the administration’s terrorism concerns a “political fig leaf” to ensure the rail industry’s corporate secrecy.
New Jersey residents were able to piece together oil train movements from the information made public by neighboring states, including New York, where CSX reported sending 15 to 30 trains from Albany down the River Line through Rockland County (and presumably into Bergen County). New York’s homeland security commissioner determined no “sensitive security information” was involved.
Under new rules unveiled in May, the Federal Railroad Administration said it, too, would prohibit the release of information to the general public because rail companies were concerned about proprietary information.
But the agency changed course after several lawmakers and one of the largest firefighter unions in North America criticized the new policy. Last week the FRA sent a letter to rail companies reminding them that they still must submit the reports to the states and indicated the policy was going to be made permanent.
In New Jersey, a bill recently introduced by a coalition of mostly Bergen County Democrats would require a rail company to update the routes and volumes of cargo every month on its website.
The federal rules do not require information about specific trains, when they travel or how much oil each carries. Indeed, they have been criticized as too broad because railways are allowed to give wide-ranging estimates.
Rail companies have to notify state officials only if train traffic changes by 25 percent. That means CSX would have to send as few as 11 or as many as 38 oil trains through New Jersey weekly before it had to inform emergency officials of a change. With each train capable of carrying as much as 3.6 million gallons of oil, CSX could be hauling anywhere from 43 million to 133 million gallons a week past thousands of homes and businesses.
Tom Metzler, director of Bergen County Emergency Management, said CSX had supplied information directly to his department along with the train-movement information that is passed down by the state.
Last month Metzler helped CSX run three days of drills for more than 200 Bergen County firefighters, police officers and other officials in which they responded to a simulated derailment.
He said the company had given officials a smartphone app that allows them to punch in a locomotive’s number and learn the contents of the entire train. But Metzler admits that would come in handy only after a derailment.
“We’re not in a position to stop these trains,” Metzler said. “You know that and I know that. The best we can do is to be as prepared as we can possibly be.”