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Feds Issue Emergency Order On Crude Oil Trains
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Joan Lowy writes for AP that the Department of Transportation has issued an emergency order requiring that railroads inform state emergency management officials about the movement of large shipments of crude oil through their states and urged shippers not to use older model tanks cars that are easily ruptured in accidents, even at slow speeds. The emergency order follows a warning two weeks ago from outgoing National Transportation Safety Board Chairwoman Deborah Hersman that the department risks a 'higher body count' as the result of fiery oil train accidents if it waits for new safety regulations to become final. There have been nine oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada since March of last year, many of them resulting in intense fires and sometimes the evacuation of nearby residents, according to the NTSB. The latest was last week, when a CSX train carrying Bakken crude derailed in downtown Lynchburg, Va., sending three tank cars into the James River and shooting flames and black smoke into the air. Concern about the safe transport of crude oil was heightened after a runaway oil train derailed and then exploded last July in the small town of Lac-Megantic in Canada, just across the border from Maine. More than 60 tank cars spilled more than 1.3 million gallons of oil. Forty-seven people were killed and 30 buildings destroyed in the resulting inferno. Hersman says that over her 10 years on the board she has 'seen a lot of difficulty when it comes to safely rules being implemented if we don't have a high enough body count. That is a tombstone mentality. We know the steps that will prevent or mitigate these accidents. What is missing is the will to require people to do so.'"
You know, a PIPELINE would be a lot safer way of transporting crude oil around the country... Stopping the construction of pipelines results in more of these rail car accidents you know.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
Shipping crude oil by railroads is not the case where industry was willing to engage in meaningful self-regulation. Railroads showed complete unwillingness to properly classify cargo (some forms of crude are outright explosive) or use proper equipment (modern tanker cars that resist spills/ruptures during derailment) or follow proper safety measures (multiple operators and not shipping through high-density urban areas). Instead, they are playing shell game where liability outsourced to low-asset holding company that rents everything from the mother company.
There will be another accident in the next couple of weeks, a false flag of course, after which a total ban on moving crude oil by vehicle will be enacted.
Made cicra 1910s. Upgraded circa 1940s. In dire disrepair by 2014. When it's not the track curvature, then it's negligent maintenance of undercarriage. But I will always bet my money on poorly mainained rail track trail scenario.
If only there was some other method of transporting lots of of oil.
A tube, or pipeline perhaps.
Sounds like a billion dollar idea. Has somebody thought of this already???
Warps in train track can induce oscillations in individual carrier wagons to derail them at somewhat higher speeds 50 MPH plus plus. Mainly in freezing conditions and heat-stroke wave situations.
I wonder if environmental groups in fact intended this to happen so they would gain more power and control. If people see deaths and burning oil everywhere they can claim it is horrible for the environment and too dangerous to transport. If the pipeline had been built there would be thousands of primary jobs and ten's of thousands of secondary tertiary jobs. The oil would make it to market safely and the environuts would be without a leg to stand on. I honestly hope the intelligent members of the public will see this duplicity and push more towards a pipeline and take away a good portion of the environuts power. I know we need environmental safeguards, but with the technology and safety rules in place a pipeline is very safe. We have thousands of them crisscrossing this country already (USA), and one more is unlikely to end the world.
What I call the "suffering quotient": if 1 person dies, that 1 unkonwn person's death is largely ignored. If 50 or 100 die, we might do something about preventing the next accident (we might not.) Conversely, if a famous person dies, we pay attention and deal with the problem that killed our celebrity. We need to get some famous people killed by these crude oil spills or nothing will be done.
Cranky educator.
Ensure that the insurance charges for moving crude oil fully covers the entire cost of the disruption; all deaths evaluated at $10m, $1m for significant injury etc. This will force the rail companies to use only safe methods compared with the alternatives because the use of old wagons will be stupidly expensive in insurance fees.
There, problem solved.
That said, I'm surprised there isn't a US reality TV show "Train Wreck".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"requiring that railroads inform state emergency management officials about the movement of large shipments of crude oil "
there not doing that now? that's the most basic courtesy and emergency preparedness. It's irresponsible.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If so, then why does your brain takes a vacation when we start talking about petroleum?
Why do you have to be abusive in making your point?
And shame on the mods for not modding parent as Flamebait.
As noted elsewhere in this discussion, we need to have good pipeline regs, but let's not compare oil spills in nature to rail car accidents in which lots of oil gets spilled anyway AND which directly lead to the deaths of dozens of people.
a lot of difficulty when it comes to safely rules being implemented if we don't have a high enough body count
Congress won't really care unless it's rich people getting killed, Wall Street banks getting destroyed or the accidents are FIIMBY -- Fuck It's In My Back Yard -- (thank you The Daily Show for that acronym).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
So how much energy is there in a train load of Cude Oil?
Energy denisty of crude oil ~46MJ/Kg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density)
DOT-111 tanker car of Lac Magantic fire is 131,000 L (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOT-111_tank_car)
Assuming 1L/1Kg - some of these oils float some of the really thick stuff sinks.
Per Tanker car 6.026x10^12 J/ Tank Car.
Little Boy explosion was equivalent to 16,000 tons of TNT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy)
16000 tons of TNT is 66944000 MJ of energy (http://www.kylesconverter.com/energy,-work,-and-heat/megajoules-to-tons-of-tnt).
Or 1 Litte Boy = 66.944x10^12 J
or 1 Little Boy = 11.11 Tanker Cars of Crude Oil
The old DOT-111 standard for tank cars was horribly inadequate. They have adopted a new DOT-111 standard for new cars being built but they have not required the companies that own the older tank cars to upgrade. Most of the tank cars being used in the US are not owned by the railroads but by the companies doing the shipping. If the NTSB and DOT would come out with an emergency order to use only new-standard DOT-111 tank cars or use DOT-112 tank cars, the problem would be largely fixed. The old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are easily punctured in a derailment and cause horrific fires while new-standard DOT-111 tank cars and DOT-112 tank cars do not. Obviously, companies do not want to spend a lot of money to upgrade but that is not even the reason for the foot-dragging which is related to the huge increase in crude oil shipments requiring tank cars for which only the old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are available. There needs to be a crash program to upgrade and retrofit. This isn't rocket science. What is missing is not 'national will' or even 'money' but 'leadership' from the NTSB and DOT, the very people who are wringing their hands and saying nothing can be done.
We live near a big oil refinery in Delaware City, where huge mile-long oil trains arrive all the time. They pass on a track that's about a mile from us. A big house fire happened between us and the tracks about a month ago... we were ready to bug out.
Make the companies (and executives) legally liable when disasters happen because of defective equipment or not enough security measures.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
If the problem is one car ruptures and sets the whole train on fire,
then group the oil cars in clumps separated by non-oil cars.
The groups should be small enough to that they do not overwhelm the local fire responders.
New, fancy oil cars may be better than what they are doing now, but simply not having too much fuel in one clump seems better, simpler, cheaper, ...
http://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/Are-Fracking-Fluids-to-Blame-for-Rail-Car-Explosions.html
I cannot help but believe that these "accidents" are a way to get people to see that the pipeline is a better option. Not buying it.
Then one tanker car ~= 6 Great Pyramids!
There was a similar incident in Viareggio 5 years ago: a train carrying LPG derailed and crashed into a platform in the center of town during the night. The resulting explosion killed 32 people and destroyed a whole block of houses. In this case it was LPG, not crude oil, so I guess a tiny leak would have been enough to cause problems. You would have to make the tanks extremely strong to prevent that. And there is even other dangerous goods, there were some nasty accidents with trains carrying chlorine, which doesn't need fire to kill people.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Feds are boosting prices of crude by throttling.
I live a couple hours from Lynchburg, and one of those rail lines passes through my town. The problem is these railways were laid down in the late 1800s, and either the rail lines were specifically routed through cities, or towns were literally built on or moved to be on the rail lines. So it is a conundrum that in areas like this, the rails pass through every small town along the way, yet they are now beginning to haul more dangerous cargo, like oil. The funny thing is we no longer have passenger service, mail, etc, so it's just that the trains go through town for no good reason at all. There's no way, in this area of the Appalachians, that it would be feasible or perhaps even possible, to lay down new lines that do not go through towns. The routes are already where they have to be because of the geography of the mountain ranges. Often the rail lines follow rivers (like the New River), because as the oldest river in the world, it has already carved a relatively level grade through the mountains, and thus the rail line follows it for a hundred miles or more.
So trying to make the actual shipping containers as safe as possible is the only real option available if they want to ship oil via rail in this part of the country.
Better known as 318230.
How about elected lawmakers make the laws instead of the DOT?
That may be true, but the rate at which all that energy is released does matter. The crude burned for many hours, whereas Little Boy was done in a few minutes, with most of the energy probably released in a few seconds. I'll bet a decent-sized forest fire probably releases a comparable amount of energy, but over a much more prolonged period of time. That's the difference between a bomb and a fire, be it crude oil or something else.
It's still pretty cool to see the comparison. Thanks.
Transport Canada already has a 'Final Notice' order out for DOT 111 tank cars: their walls are too thin and prone to rupture during a derialment. Bakken crude also has other problems: it tends to have higher amounts of natural gas than other oil formations. As a result, moving Baaken crude in a tank car is like having an aerosol can shaken for 1500 miles: when it tips its much more prone to explode rather than just burn. I know where I live there are a *lot* of oil trains moving around (and also in Canada, a record grain harvest last year is sitting in bins and in the fields because the rail companies are hauling oil instead: to the point that the Canadian Government (a pretty pro-business, conservative bunch) imposed a $100,000/day fine on the railways if they did not move at least 1,000,000 tons of grain per week. And really its quite silly to 1) have starving people in the world 2) a record grain harvest and 3) bulk carriers leaving seaports empty because there is no grain for them to sail with. ...Pipelines would be better... Was someone complaining about pipelines? We know people die when trains derail. How many die when pipelines derail?
So what you're saying is Bush was right all along, Iraq really did have WMDs!
I stole this Sig
That may be true, but the rate at which all that energy is released does matter. The crude burned for many hours, whereas Little Boy was done in a few minutes, with most of the energy probably released in a few seconds.
Actually the primary in Little Boy was done in a mere 30 nanoseconds or so. After that it was all energy distribution, mostly as gamma & x-rays, and the resulting secondary effects... like the atmosphere becoming opaque to x-rays, followed by crazy fluid flow mechanical effects, and finally a thermal pulse resulting from the Compton scattering. But that's after the surrounding air finds it's electrons again...
First before I address the big stupidity, let me address the small stupidity. The feds actually go through with this whats going to happen? State emergency departments are going to get large data dumps from oil transporters. "8:00am 1 million gallons from A to B. 8:07pm 458000gallons from C to D. ...."
As for the real idiots, do you really think that if the US went 0% of reliance on oil for energy that would stop oil usage in the US. Think again. Is that keyboard you are typing on all metal or wood? Including the keycaps. Is the controller not embedded in "IC epoxy". The chair you are sitting on made from wood or metal? Any synthetic fibers in the clothes you are wearing? Guess what those are all made from crude oil.
Here is the link to the safety order at the DOT PHMSA website http://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/Details/L05223.
So EMA will know it's an oil explosion and not the start of WW III. That sure fixes the problem!!! In no way, shape, or form, was this immediate knee-jerk feel-good media-soundbyte produced spin control that actually does nothing in terms of real safety. Gosh, just love it when politics takes precedence over real substance - reminds me of the final years of the Soviet Union.
What is missing is not 'national will' or even 'money' but 'leadership' from the NTSB and DOT, the very people who are wringing their hands and saying nothing can be done.
Who do you think controls these agencies? Lobbying, revolving doors, straight-up corruption.
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"Amtrak's passenger services are sparse compared with Europe's. But America's freight railways are one of the unsung transport successes of the past 30 years. They are universally recognised in the industry as the best in the world."
http://www.economist.com/node/...
From Das Wikipedia [1]
Freight is awesome in the US simply because the deregulated rail ownership allows for companies to prioritize freight, even over passengers.
[1] http://wikitravel.org/en/Rail_...
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Train safety is much better than a pipeline, I heard recenty on the radio that pipelines had 5 or 10 times more loss than trains.
Rick B.
Many old railroad rights of way traverse residential areas because they were used for passenger and freight transport.
Pipeline can spill, but is less likely than a rail crash to have a catastrophic outcome. Derail a train and you may lose the entire trainload.
Break a pipeline and you can shut it off from a distance.
This is one of the dumbest comments I have EVER read on Slashdot. A rail accident is trivial next to a pipeline accident? Tell that to 28 people in Lac Megantic, you insufferable anu5.
You mean to tell me that oil trains aren't reported to emergency officials already? That just seems like common sense. I find it hard to believe that the thousands of people involved in this process aren't already yelling about how there needs to be information passed to governing bodies about the fact that rails are carrying huge amounts of chemicals and oil. Any type of hazardous material should be reported before the train leaves. A truck carrying oil or fuel needs to register its cargo and get a permit to haul it. A ship or airplane same thing. Pipelines declare their cargoes before being built. Am I to understand that for hundreds of years now trains have gotten free reign and can transport anything they want without telling state officials? How fucking stupid are we????
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.