May 25, 2015
Twice a day, two million gallons of crude oil fracked from the Bakken in North Dakota are transported through Saugerties, the Town of Ulster, the city of Kingston, and the Town of Esopus in a 100-car train. The highly volatile crude oil—it resembles light beer, as opposed to the thick, sticky substance of conventional oil—has become one of the top five commodities transported nationwide, and the volume shipped on both tanker railcars and barges traveling down from Albany to the refineries of New Jersey is continually increasing.
Besides the “unit trains,” the tanker shipments of crude oil “could be mixed in with other stuff,” said City of Kingston Deputy Fire Chief Tom Chase. “There could be barrels of the product in box cars we don’t know about.” The crude oil trains pass within close proximity to housing, numerous businesses, schools, a hospital, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection office building, and heavily trafficked roads, and it is the responsibility of the Kingston Fire Department to keep people safe in the event of a derailment.
“We have a hazardous situation in Kingston, with the trains passing through the center of the city, over a 80- to 100-foot rail trestle, through a tunnel, and over two bridges, on Broadway and West O’Reilly,” said Chase. “The tracks make an S curve through the city, which is the sharpest curve between Cornwall and Saugerties.” Although the trains “have slowed down a great deal on those curves,” Chase said the amount of chemicals in the crude, which includes methane, benzene, toluene, xylene, sulfuric acid, and other toxic gases, poses such a risk that if a derailment resulting in a leakage should occur, “there’s not much you can do except get away. The flammability of this stuff is greater than gasoline.”
While Chase and two other members of his 12-man department have taking special training classes offered by CSX geared to putting out a fire caused by a crude oil derailment, the enormity of the risk and the lack of needed resources means that the Kingston and Town of Ulster fire departments, in conjunction with the state, county, and local police departments, are developing evacuation plans for an area extending half a mile in each direction from the tracks.
“We’re making plans with bus companies and getting commitments for different kinds of lodging,” Chase said. Possible providers are Tech City, the Hudson Valley Mall, neighborhood centers, skating rinks, and the Armory. Up to 3,000 people might have to be evacuated, “depending on the time of day.”
In the last two years, special training related to crude oil transport has been offered by the railway to prepare first responders. Last year, CSX sent its haz mat “Safety Train” to the Town of Ulster rail yard to teach local fire departments about the crude oil tankers and how to respond to a derailment or leak. In addition, three members of the Kingston Fire Department, including Chase, attended CSX’s specialized Crude By Rail Emergency Response training center in Pueblo, Colorado. Practicing on a derailment of 16 cars filled with liquid propane, “we learned what we can and can’t do,” Chase said. “We can do a lot, but you have to have the resources.”
One is a foam “blanket,” which placed on the derailed car would prevent the toxic gases from escaping and triggering a fire. The Kingston Fire Department is slated to receive a foam tanker, one of 15 provided by the state, in the fall. Without the foam, the city would have to wait three hours to receive foam from Albany in case of a derailment, according to Chase. The other resource that’s most needed is thousands of gallons of water. To prevent the kind of chain reaction that resulted in the catastrophic explosion and fire that leveled the downtown of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in July 2013, killing 47 people, firemen would need to pump 38,000 gallons of water on a damaged tanker and adjacent cars to cool them down, and “that number could continue,” said Chase.
The department also is equipped with devices to measure the release of toxic gases. “Even if you don’t have a fire, you have a situation where you might want to do an evacuation for health reasons,” Chase said.
So far, one derailment involving a crude oil train occurred in Town of Ulster, but it only involved a locomotive, traveling at very slow speed, according to sources. Rob Doolittle, director of communications for CSX, based in Washington, D.C., said the railway spends over $1 billion annually on maintenance of the tracks and infrastructure. It employs approximately 400 track inspectors, each of whom is responsible for 50 to 60 miles of track.
“Tracks are inspected visually as often as three times per week and are inspected using sophisticated ultrasound equipment to identify internal defects in the rails on a cycle that ranges from 31 to 123 days, depending on the volume of freight carried on a particular line,” Doolittle wrote in an e-mail. “Tracks are also inspected several times annually using a ‘geometry car,’ which measures certain geometric characteristics of the tracks, such as position, curvature, alignment, and smoothness of the rails.”
These measures exceed the federal regulations, he said. Trains carrying 20 or more tank cars of crude oil are required to move at slower speeds, and “a special risk-management software accounts for 27 different factors in determining the safest, most secure route for crude oil trains and trains carrying other hazardous materials,” he wrote.
The railway’s Selkirk office, which oversees the Hudson Valley, employs a “certified engineer who at least once a year inspects the rail trestles,” he said. The Federal Railroad Administration oversees all these safety measures and can audit the CSX records to ensure compliance. CSX also has stepped up its outreach crude oil safety program to first responders and community officials across the country. Besides the Safety Train and the preparedness training in Colorado, the railway also has developed a course in Atlanta for firefighters free of charge. (CSX and federal grants funded the Colorado training for the Kingston Fire Department.)
Doolittle said that Deputy Chief Chase is a registered user of the CSC Operation Respond system, which means he could access information about the contents of the rail cars through an app on his mobile phone. Chase said he “hadn’t pursued that option” because the trains are constantly “taking on and dropping off product” so he’s not sure the app would be “100 percent accurate.” “The only thing that’s accurate is the papers carried on the trains,” he said. The exterior of each car also has signage identifying its contents.
Previous derailments resulting in explosions and fires have highlighted the lack of safety features of the standard DOT-111 tankers. They are owned by the shippers or rail customers, not the railway, which has been lobbying for safer tank cars. According to the American Association of Railroads, about 100,000 DOT-111 tank cars are used to move crude oil in the U.S. New federal standards for tank cars moving crude oil were issued at the end of 2013, and since then, 28,500 higher-grade CPC 1232 tank cars have been deployed. The CPC 1232 tankers have thicker shells and the ends are reinforced with steel shields.
Environmental groups, including most recently Riverkeeper, have sued the U.S. Department of Transportation in federal court over its new safety standards, which they claim fail to protect people or the environment. According to Riverkeeper, which filed suit in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City on May 15, the standards allow the substandard DOT-111 tank cars to remain in service for up to 10 years; roll back public notification requirements about crude-oil transports to communities and first responders; allow retrofitting of tank cars that has a less protective design than the new cars; and has implemented speed limits only for “high threat urban areas”—which refers to the threat of terrorism, not the threat to the public from the crude oil shipments. In New York State, only New York City and Buffalo are designated as high threat urban areas.
“The National Transportation Safety Board has found that the DOT-111 tank cars are prone to puncture on impact,” reports Riverkeeper in a press release. Plus, “recent derailments and explosions have made clear that the CPC-1232s are not significantly safer. The NTSB has called for a ban on shipping hazardous fuels in these cars as well.”
Leah Rae, staff writer and media specialist at Riverkeeper, said the organization is concerned about the condition of the rail trestle over the Rondout Creek. “The public should know there’s no routine third-party inspection of the bridges,” she said. “Do barge owners get to inspect their own barges? No. Given the consequences, [the lack of oversight of the railway is] alarming.”
She noted that another loophole in the new DOT safety standards is that the rules only apply to crude-oil transport in blocks of 20 tank cars or more or 35 or more cars dispersed throughout the train. Riverkeeper is also concerned about the threat to the river from the transport of crude oil on barges. The river is a source of drinking water for many communities and supports a complex ecosystem, including species with already dwindling numbers, such as shad. “The first oil tanker to go down the Hudson ran aground,” she said. While only the outer hull of the double-hulled craft was pierced, “the threat of a spill was made abundantly clear by that incident.” Lack of preparedness for a spill, especially on the upper Hudson, is a big concern.
The newest threat is the possible transport of oil extracted from the Canadian tar sands, which “sinks. In a moving waterway like the Hudson, it mixes into the water column, and you wouldn’t be able to find it, much less take it out of the river.”
A Massachusetts-based company is proposing to build facilities at the Port at Albany that would expedite the transport of Canadian tar sands crude on barges down the Hudson. After reviewing 19,000 comments submitted during the public comment period, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation just issued a notice that it is requiring further environmental review, based in part on the high level of hydrogen sulfide and other sulfur compounds in the tar sands oil.