Derailments highlights crude oil train, water safety issues

Derailments highlights crude oil train, water safety issues
http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20150217/GZ01/150219372/1419
Tuesday, February 17, 2015
Derailment highlights crude oil train, water safety issues

by Ken Ward Jr., Staff writer
Early in the morning on July 6, 2013, a 72-car runaway train carrying crude oil from North Dakota to New Brunswick, Canada, crashed in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic. The resulting fire and explosion left 47 people dead and half of the downtown’s buildings destroyed.

It could have happened here, as this week’s derailment showed.

Early Monday afternoon, a CSX train with 107 cars of highly volatile Bakken crude oil from North Dakota left the tracks not far from the Fayette-Kanawha County border.

Many details remain sketchy about the crash and its immediate aftermath, in which flames shot high into the sky and black smoke billowed over the area, creating a frightening scene for a community already hit by a daytime snowstorm and continued frigid temperatures.

Twenty-six of those 30,000-gallon tanker cars derailed and nearly 20 of those caught fire. At least one home was destroyed. More than 2,400 nearby residents were initially evacuated. Drinking water intake pumps that serve the nearby community of Montgomery were closed out of concern that oil had contaminated the Kanawha River. Remarkably, no one was killed and the only injury appeared to be one person treated for respiratory problems.

The near-disaster brought immediate repeats of long-standing calls for action amid the nation’s growing reliance on oil from the Bakken and the recent dramatic increases in the amount of it being shipped by rail.

“This accident, and the pattern of regularly occurring horrifying accidents we’ve seen over the last two years, shows that you cannot safely transport this crude oil by rail,” said Kristen Boyles, a staff attorney with the group Earthjustice. “The federal regulators are missing in action and are exposing millions of Americans to exploding death trains.”

Earthjustice is among the groups have been pushing the U.S. Department of Transportation for stronger regulation that would take effect sooner to ban older cars that many experts consider unsafe for carrying crude oil because they are prone to rupture during derailments.

Over the last three years, railway shipments of crude oil in the U.S. have skyrocketed, from fewer than 75,000 cars in 2011 to more than 400,000 in 2013, according to industry figures.

The National Transportation Safety Board has also called for tougher standards, warning of “major loss of life, property damage and environmental consequences” that can occur when crude oil or other flammable liquids are carried in significant volumes as a larger train’s only cargo.

“The large-scale shipment of crude oil by rail simply didn’t exist 10 years ago, and our safety regulations need to catch up with this new reality,” then-NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman said last year. “While this energy boom is good for business, the people and the environment along rail corridors must be protected from harm.”

CSX officials said that they are still trying to sort out exactly what happened on Monday afternoon, and that the results of investigations would provide valuable information to prevent future incidents.

“We try to run a safe railroad,” company spokesman Gary Sease said Tuesday morning on the West Virginia MetroNews “Talkline” radio show. “Obviously, something has gone wrong there in West Virginia.”

Sease confirmed Tuesday that the train that derailed in West Virginia was using a newer model of tanker called the CPC-1232, named for an information circular and designed to meet a voluntary industry standard.

Fred Millar, a Washington, D.C.-based hazardous materials safety advocate, said that the CPC-1232 is only “marginally better” than the older tanks, known as “111s.” Though those tanks are no longer made, thousands of them are still in use, and a major issue for critics is that government regulators haven’t moved quickly enough to outlaw them.

“The rail infrastructure is really not ready for ... new massive transcontinental shipment of 100-car unit trains at high speeds through our cities and along our rivers,” Millar said.

In West Virginia, citizen groups were quick to note that the crude-oil derailment — just upstream from two public water intakes — occurred just hours after lawmakers held a public hearing at which environmentalists warned of efforts to gut new chemical storage tank and drinking water protections passed after last January’s Freedom Industries chemical leak on the Elk River.

Evan Hansen, a consultant with the firm Downstream Strategies, noted that a new state commission studying such issues recommended in December that public drinking water systems be given more information about potential contamination threats from “transportation of contaminants by road, rail and water.”

“This is a vivid example of the threats to our drinking water and the need for planning to minimize the risk of contamination,” Hansen said. “I hope the Legislature pulls back on efforts to gut key portions of Senate Bill 373 and instead thinks about how to strengthen it.”

Angie Rosser, executive director of the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, said, “It is wickedly ironic that just hours before the train derailment, citizens were speaking up at a legislative public hearing for the Category A protection of the Kanawha River as a drinking water supply. Then catastrophe hits the Kanawha, and the Montgomery water system shut down. If this isn’t enough of a message that better protection of our water supplies and adequate backup systems are necessary, I don’t know what is.”

Reach Ken Ward Jr. at kward@wvgazette.com, 304-348-1702 or follow @kenwardjr on Twitter.

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