crude-by-rail

By Tony Shick - Earth Fix, July 22, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

On a November morning in 2003, a sleeping Union Pacific crew missed a signal in Kelso, Washington. Their train collided with the side of an oncoming BNSF Railway train. Fuel tanks ruptured and spilled 2,800 gallons. Total damage neared $3 million. Unlike a similar collision in the same spot 10 years earlier, the crews escaped alive.

The primary cause, according to investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board: the crew’s fatigue, brought on by irregular work schedules and sleep disorder.

The NTSB had been asking the Federal Railroad Administration to address both issues for years. It made similar recommendations again a year later, after fatigue caused a fatal derailment involving chlorine gas in Texas.

Then in 2011, the crew of a BNSF coal train in Red Oak, Iowa, fell asleep and instead of stopping struck the rear of a parked equipment train, crushing the cab and killing the crew of the coal train, sparking a diesel fire and causing $8.7 million worth of damage.

The primary cause of the accident: the crew’s fatigue, brought on by irregular work schedules and sleep disorder.

Fatigued crews, crude oil increase risk for disaster

Sleeping train crews are the primary cause in at least eight major train crashes investigated by the NTSB since 2000, according to the agency’s reports.

The true prevalence of fatigue in train crashes is likely far higher, said Mark Rosekind, a member of the NTSB specializing in the subject. Human error is the leading cause of train incidents and accidents, and Rosekind estimates fatigue underlies anywhere from 20 to 50 percent of those.

“It’s very likely we have grossly underestimated fatigue in pretty much everything we’ve looked at for a long, long time,” Rosekind said.

The rapid rise in shipments of hazardous crude oil has raised the stakes for addressing fatigue, he said.

• Crude oil was once a rare commodity in rail cars. Last year BNSF, the leading crude oil transporter, hauled more than 600,000 barrels per day across its network, including as many as 18 trains per week through the Columbia River Gorge.

Fiery derailments have prompted intense public scrutiny and calls for improved oil train safety measures, including heftier tank cars and better-equipped emergency responders. Meanwhile, fatigued and unsafe crews remain an unresolved problem for the industry — a problem that rail workers and union officials in the Northwest say has worsened in recent years.

By x356039 - IWW Environmental Unionism Caucus, July 23, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

Hi everyone,

I am a full time graduate student and environmental activist who is doing work on raising awareness around the dangers of Crude by Rail.

On August 22nd Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington will be hosting a major conference for discussing crude by rail, sharing information, and discussing what can be done to stop this danger to our communities and environment.  As is shown in the image above from the aftermath of the Lac-Megantic disaster in Quebec, the first of many such horrible tragedies, the danger this poses is very real.

That is why I am asking you to help me fund my travel expenses so I can attend and participate in the discussion and planning on what is to be done.  The more help you can provide the better as this is an issue that effects us all.  Not only are these bakken crude bomb trains a clear and present danger to the health and safety of all communities living near crude by rail routes, the burning of these incredibly dirty fuel sources is more than our already overstressed planet can take.

Please help me make it out to Olympia to make a difference! 

Donate Here.

By Cole Stangler - DeSmog Blog, July 19, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

For decades, the U.S. railroad industry has successfully shed labor costs by shifting to smaller and smaller operating crews. Now, it’s on the verge of what was once an unthinkable victory: single-member crews, even on dangerous oil trains.

A tentative agreement reached by BNSF Railway and the Transportation Division of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation (SMART) union would allow a single engineer to operate most of the company’s routes. It would mark a dramatic change to a labor contract that covers about 3,000 workers, or 60 percent of the BNSF system.  

It’s not just bad news for workers. The contract has major safety implications—especially amid North America’s dangerous, and sometimes deadly, crude-by-rail boom. Last year’s Bakken shale oil train derailment and explosion in Lac Mégantic, Quebec, which killed 47 people, brought increased scrutiny to oil trains. 

By Joel Connelly - Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

The movement of oil by rail through Washington should be halted until completion of a safety study recently authorized by Gov. Jay Inslee,  according to the Washington State Council of Firefighters.

“The WSCFF asks Governor Inslee to do all in his power to halt the movement of this crude by rail until completion of his study in March 2015 and the determination that this crude by rail can be moved safely through our cities and rural areas,” the firefighters said in a toughly worded resolution adopted last week.

In September of 2008, the Tesoro refinery in Anacortes accepted its first shipment of oil by rail.  Since then, refineries in Anacortes and at Cherry Point, north of Bellingham have rapidly moved to increase volume.

At the same time, the firefighters list a series of derailments and explosions, the most catastrophic a year ago in Lac Megantic, Quebec — 47 people were killed and the town center leveled — but also notably an explosion in an near Casselton, North Dakota.

Tesoro has announced that it is phasing out aging, 1960′s vintage DOT-111 tank cars.  Tesoro is proposing what it calls the Vancouver Energy Distribution Terminal on the Columbia River.

It would handle up to 360,000 barrels of oil a day, taken from trains and put on ships to supply West Coast refineries and possibly for future export.

By Justin Mikulka - DeSmog Blog, July 9, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

“How did it get missed for the last ten years?”

That was the question Deborah Hersman, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), posed to a panel of industry representatives back in April about how the rail industry had missed the fact that Bakken oil is more explosive than traditional crude oil.

“How do we move to an environment where commodities are classified in the right containers from the get go and not just put in until we figure out that there’s a problem,” Hersman asked during the two-day forum on transportation of crude oil and ethanol. “Is there a process for that?”

The first panelist to respond was Robert Fronczak, assistant vice president of environmental and hazardous materials for the Association of American Railroads (AAR). His response was telling.

“We’ve know about this long before Lac-Megantic and that is why we initiated the tank car committee activity and passed CPC-1232 in 2011,” Fronczak replied, “To ask why the standards are the way they are, you’d have to ask DOT that.”

So, now as the new oil-by-rail safety regulations have been sent from the Department of Transportation (DOT) to the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, it seems like a good time to review Hersman’s questions.

How did we miss this? Is there a process to properly classify commodities for the right container before they are ever shipped? 

By Eric de Place - Sightline Daily, July 6, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

A year ago today, in the small hours of the morning, a parked oil train slipped its brakes, rolled downhill, and derailed in a small town in Quebec. When the tank cars breached, they caught fire and erupted into a towering fireball that leveled several blocks of town and incinerated 47 people almost instantly.

That horrific disaster ushered in a new era of fear about crude oil-by-rail shipments.

Two weeks earlier Sightline had published the first regional inventory anywhere of oil-by-rail projects. We pointed out that Oregon and Washington are home to nearly a dozen active or proposed oil train depots that in aggregate would move about as much crude as the Keystone XL Pipeline—and far more than the region’s oil refining capacity. We released the report widely, and the response we got back sounded a lot like crickets chirping.

But after the explosion in Quebec, our phones started ringing off the hook.

Press Release - Earth Fix, July 2, 2014

Disclaimer: The views expressed here are not the official position of the IWW (or even the IWW’s EUC) and do not necessarily represent the views of anyone but the author’s.

SNOHOMISH, Wash. — Curtis Rookaird thinks BNSF Railway fired him because he took the time to test his train’s brakes.

The rail yard in Blaine, Washington, was on heightened security that day, he remembers, because of the 2010 Winter Olympics underway just across border in Vancouver, B.C.

The black, cylindrical tank cars held hazardous materials like propane, butane and carbon monoxide. The plan was to move the train just more than two miles through three public crossings and onto the main track. Rookaird and the other two crew members were convinced the train first needed a test of its air brakes to guard against a derailment.

But that kind of test can take hours. A BNSF trainmaster overheard Rookaird talking over the radio about the testing. He questioned if it was necessary. The crew was already behind schedule that day.

Rookaird stood firm.

“If you don’t have brakes the cars roll away from you,” Rookaird would later say. “You don’t have control of the train, you can crash into things.”

The trainmaster replied by saying he didn’t intend to argue. They’d talk about it later. Then he phoned their boss.

Minutes later, managers had a crew ready to replace Rookaird’s. Within a month, after Rookaird got federal investigators involved, he received a letter from BNSF informing him his employment had been terminated.