Slashdot Mirror
Oil Train Explosion Triggers Evacuation In North Dakota
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "The LA Times reports that the small town of Casselton, North Dakota dodged a bullet after being partially evacuated when a train carrying crude oil collided with another train, setting off a large fire and explosions. Officials received a report at 2:12 p.m. of a train derailing about a mile west of Casselton, a city of 2,432 people about 20 miles west of Fargo. At some point, another train collided with the derailed train, belonging to the BNSF Railway, carrying more than 100 cars loaded with crude oil. The explosions and fire erupted after cars from a grain train struck some of the oil tank cars. 'A fire ensued, and quickly a number of the cars became engulfed,' said Sgt. Tara Morris of the Cass County Sheriff's Office, adding that firefighters had managed to detach 50 of the 104 cars but had to leave the rest. This was the fourth serious accident involving trains hauling crude in North America this year. In July, an unattended train with 72 tank cars carrying crude oil from North Dakota's Bakken shale fields rolled downhill and set off a major explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. The accidents have put a spotlight on the growing reliance on rail to move surging oil production from new fields in Texas, North Dakota and Colorado. U.S. railroads are moving 25 times more crude than they did in 2008, often in trains with more than 100 tank cars that each carry 30,000 gallons. Though railroads have sharply improved their safety in recent years, moving oil on tank cars is still only about half as safe as in pipelines, according to Eric Smith, associate director of the Tulane University Energy Institute. 'You can make the argument that the pipeline fights have forced the industry to revert to rail that is less safe,' says Smith. One problem is that the trains go through small towns with volunteer fire departments, not well schooled in handling a derailment and explosion. Casselton Mayor Ed McConnell says it is time to 'have a conversation' with federal lawmakers about the dangers of transporting oil by rail. 'There have been numerous derailments in this area,' says McConnell. 'It's almost gotten to the point that it looks like not if we're going to have an accident, it's when.'"
One problem is that the trains go through small towns with volunteer fire departments, not well schooled in handling a derailment and explosion.
More importantly, the towns through which these trains travel aren't told what's being shipped through them. Even after Lac Megantic the Canadian government is doing everything possible to allow rail companies to not provide prior details of dangerous cargo being shipped by rail.
Three Squirrels
Thank everyone against which pipeline? Keystone? Phase 1 has been operational since 2010 - and oh, look, it runs right through North Dakota. If I recall, phase 2 is built now too (somewhere else in the country) and phase 3 (part of Keystone XL) is under construction to connect those phases to the gulf coast. Oh, did you mean phase 4 of Keystone XL? That wouldn't even run through North Dakota... but if they build it, apparently that'd be another 2% of US daily oil consumption in pipelines.
I'd be very interested in knowing where this train came from and was going to, 'cos it sounds like it must not have been going where the perfectly good existing pipeline goes, or where any of the proposed bits would go.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Back in the late 70's I used to work for the only company in Canada that manufactured very large ball valves for pipelines. We are talking in excess of 10 ton's with 42" flanges. We supplied Trans Canada Pipelines, Foothills, etc. I designed the pressure testing rig and tank for these very large units.
Know what the biggest problem was/is with pipelines? Materials used in manufacturing.
"Sour" gas vs "Sweet" gas valves (and the pipeline itself) are made of completely different materials. An "O" ring housing for example may be made from Titanium for a corrosive sour gas and Stainless Steel for sweet non corrosive gas.
More than once, on smaller valves (gate or ball, I forget now) we had to investigate why a valve failed and it was always the incorrect material. Some worker swapped a part behind QC's back thinking "no big deal, they look the same".
Perhaps traceability and manufacturing has improved (I would hope so) by now though.
On an interesting side note, the big guy's were tested at 20,000kpa, or about 2900psi. The rumor went that if there were ever a pinhole leak in one of the 3" deep welds, or porosity in the casting and you walked through it without seeing it, it would cut you in half.
Nothing is perfectly safe, but I do think a pipeline is "safer" than rail transport.
Bullshit.
Creating a single pipeline will not remove demand for oil on rail. In order to reduce that demand you'd have to create a network of oil pipelines as big as the rail network itself. Oil goes by rail beause it's relatively efficient (compared to trucks et al) and can go anywhere without the need to build out huge amounts of infrastructure.
Pipelines are a total red-herring.
What is clear is that the North American rail industry has a terrible safety problem. That needs to be resolved. Unfortunately, the fact the entire industry was prepared to rally behind Ed Burkhardt, whose shoe-string rail operation in Montreal and Maine was happy to leave an oil train with a burning locomotive unattended on a slope on the main line, apparently in large part due to understaffing, I don't see any evidence there's even any respect for the concept of a safety culture in this part of the industry, or any desire to see one. Honestly, people in it seem to see "Keeping a railroad open" as more important than "Ensuring terrible horrific accidents don't happen."
The FRA will, undoubtedly, have to act. When it's done so in the past it's done so with no regard to the relative efficiencies of rail vs road, or relative safeties thereof, and it'll probably do something that ends up pushing large amounts of oil transportation onto the roads where they'll do even more damage. In the mean time, pipeline proponents will get a free pass, despite offering "solutions" that don't actually make any substantial difference.
This is a cluster fuck. Thanks Obama!
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Problem with solar is that its hard to run cars on it. Fix that, and we're walking in tall cotton. As much as you might like, we just can't leave this stuff in the ground. Yeah, cheap oil is possible, its called fracking. We're accessing billions of barrels in N. Dakota alone, and there's more in lots of other places. Too many of those places are on gov't land, which "O" is obstructing from being explored / exploited. We need to do everything we can to make oil production cheap, and rely on industry to research cheaper ways to make solar into electricity, and run cars on electricity. As soon as someone invents the magic battery, the devil will be out for breakfast in terms of building new electrical generating capacity.
Electricity: See if I can work this math again. Chevy Volt gets 35 miles on 7.5 Kwh of electricity, so use that as an efficiency for cars. 4.6 miles per KwH. There are about 3 trillion vehicle miles driven per year in the USA, so that's ( 3 X 10^12) X 4.6 = 13.8 trillion KwH or 13.8 X 10^15 watt-hours. Our largest nuke is in Arizona and has a capacity of 3,875 Mw or 3.875 X 10^9 watts. So, you have to run a plant this size for 13.8 / 3.875 X (10 ^ (15-9)) hours per year to power all the cars in the USA that have the efficiency of a Chevy Volt. That'd be 3.56 X 10 ^ 6 hours per year. Unfortunately, there are only (24 X 365) = 8,760 hours in a year, so you'd need 3.54 / 8.76 X (10 ^ (6 - 3)) = 0.404 X 10 ^ 3 or 404 new nuclear plants the size of the one in Arizona to be built to power these electric cars. But wait, almost all cars are far less efficient than the Chevy Volt in terms of size, weight, and frontal area, and then we need to include trucks. Multiply the need for new, giant nuclear power plants by a factor of 4, ballpark. 1600 new giant nuclear power plants the size of our largest one in Arizona. 32 per state on average. What do you think the chances of that happening are? Probably more likely than being able to afford the construction of enough wind machines and solar farms that produce seriously expensive electricity. The Arizona nuke produces at 6.33 cents per KwH, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palo_Verde_Nuclear_Generating_Station
You can do the math for the wind machines and solar panels to generate that same amount of electricity. Think we'd have any birds left after all the wind machines knock them out of the sky with their whirling blades occupying probably every square foot of the country that has any significant wind? Cost comparison for electrical generation shows Wind and Solar putting up some really ugly numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source
So, solve the envirowacko opposition to new nuclear plants, envirowacko opposition to new power lines, the hideous cost of solar and wind energy, and then we can talk about leaving the oil in the ground. But until then, we NEED it - we simply cannot support the size of our population without it. People have to get to work, get back, go to the store and buy things, and yeah, recreation is necessary. Trucks and trains and airplanes have to bring us things. You probably couldn't cut the transportation required by more than a few percent, and doing so would make everyone miserable waiting for buses to arrive and trains to depart and force them to live like sardines in a can in some high-rise apartment complex, which would be miserable enough for me to contemplate suicide. I've got an acre on which I have a really fine ham radio antenna system, with another tower / antenna planned, and not being able to do that hobby, with my other hobbies also requiring lots of transportation (I have 70K miles on my car for 21 months of driving due to my other hobby) and without being able to do them, I'm miserable.