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An oil-train derailment near Mount Carbon, W. Va., last week
in which probers say the train adhered to the speed limit and the cars that
ruptured were of a newer design the industry has touted as safer. AP
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The Philadelphia region's petroleum refineries, many of
which faced closure four years ago, have experienced an economic revival,
thanks to the arrival of a virtual pipeline of domestic crude oil by rail.
But the same petroleum from North Dakota's Bakken oil
field has been implicated in a succession of dramatic North American rail
accidents in the last two years, most recently Monday in West Virginia. Video
images of orange fireballs erupting from crumpled tank cars near the village of
Mount Carbon last week reignited concerns that the same thing could happen
here.
Two major freight carriers, CSX and Norfolk Southern, now
move 45 to 80 oil trains through Philadelphia each week, Samantha Phillips, the
city's director of emergency management, said.
More than 700,000 people in the region - including
400,000 in Philadelphia - live within a half-mile of the rail lines that carry
crude oil, according to an Inquirer analysis. Federal emergency-response
guidelines recommend a half-mile evacuation zone if a tank car containing crude
oil catches fire.
"We could be evacuating a lot of people, I don't
dismiss that," Phillips said. But she added: "I don't think the
strategy of scaring the crap out of people is a really effective way of
promoting city preparedness."
Phillips and other local officials say they are facing
increasing pressure from the public to halt what activists derisively call
"bomb trains."
But local officials can do little to regulate the
railroads, which fall under federal jurisdiction.
"Somebody has to put some energy toward what's the
safest way to operate, but that's not a local government issue," Phillips
said. "We are in the consequence-management space when it comes to this
effort."
She and Michael Resnick, the Philadelphia public safety
director, said the city had elaborate emergency plans in place to respond to a
disaster involving crude oil or any other hazardous materials. Some of the information,
such as evacuation routes, is available on the city's website.
The city has declined to disclose specific details of its
plans to activist groups, which accuse it of having no plans.
"That's one of our challenges - striking the balance
between sharing information so the public can be prepared and not sharing
information because we do live in this post-9/11 world," Phillips said.
"We want the city to be more public," said Mary
Donahue, a clean-water activist whose right-to-know request last year for the
city's emergency plans was rejected. The state Office of Open Records largely
upheld the city's decision.
"It's very secretive and closed off, which shows
that there's something there they don't want the public to know about,"
Donahue said.
'Frustrating'
City officials say they also declined to disclose the
schedules of the oil trains on public-security grounds.
"There are organizations or individuals bent on
doing something, and you're giving them targets," said Resnick, the public
safety director. "So you're telling them, 'There's a train filled with
crude oil coming through this intersection at this hour, go have at it.' "
Activists are largely left to fight in a political arena,
mounting pressure on federal officials to speed up adoption of new standards
for more puncture-resistant tank cars for crude oil and ethanol.
Last year, City Council conducted a hearing on oil trains
after a CSX train derailed on a Schuylkill bridge, leaving several oil cars
tilted precariously over the river. Just last month, a second CSX oil train
left the tracks in a rail yard near 11th Street south of I-95. Neither accident
caused a rupture or spill.
Council took no action until after last week's West
Virginia accident, when Councilman Kenyatta Johnson introduced a resolution
urging new federal regulations for railcars. It also calls for the city to plan
emergency-response workshops for communities along the tracks.
"It is very frustrating, because on a local level we
have very limited powers to regulate the railways," Johnson said.
"The federal government needs to step up. The Department of Transportation
needs to do more to hold these railroads more accountable."
Since last year's bridge accident, CSX says it has
stepped up training exercises with first responders and opened its SecureNOW
computer system to Philadelphia officials to identify the location of all
hazardous materials on its trains. City officials, including Johnson, praised
the company for its communications.
Though the Corbett administration resisted calls last
year to take a harder stand on oil trains, Gov. Wolf is considering a more
aggressive approach.
"Gov. Wolf takes very seriously the danger oil
trains pose, and he has already begun working to review the policies in place
to better protect the safety of the public," said Jeffrey Sheridan, Wolf's
spokesman. He said Wolf called his senior staff and cabinet together at the
state's Emergency Operations Center on his second Friday in office to run
through an exercise related to an oil-train derailment.
"The governor is committed to pushing for greater
safety measures and increased inspections while improving preparedness,"
Sheridan said.
The West Virginia accident is still under investigation.
The train that wrecked was operating well under the
50-m.p.h. speed limit, according to federal investigators. CSX, operator of the
train, said the track had been inspected three days before the accident. And
the tank cars that ruptured and exploded were a newer design that the industry
has touted as safer.
The accident underscores the particular volatility of
Bakken crude, a light grade of petroleum that contains significant gassy
compounds such as propane and butane.
In December, North Dakota officials adopted regulations
that require the more than 1.1 million barrels of oil produced each day to be
processed to reduce explosive vapors.
The new regulations go into effect April 1. Some critics
say the measures still allow dangerously high volatility.
"They will have almost no impact," said Matt
Krogh, a campaign director for Forest Ethics, a West Coast environmental group
that has been fighting oil and coal trains.
The growth in rail shipments of oil, from 9,500 carloads
in 2008 to about 500,000 carloads last year, has led to more accidents, the
worst of which occurred when an unattended train derailed in July 2013 in
Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people in the community.
North Dakota crude makes its way to Philadelphia on
dedicated "unit trains" that contain 100 or more railcars. Each train
typically contains about 70,000 barrels, or nearly three million gallons, of
petroleum.
On their five-day journey to the East Coast, the trains
are handed off in Chicago to CSX or Norfolk Southern, the two carriers that
serve Philadelphia.
Norfolk Southern's main oil route to the Mid-Atlantic
heads through Cleveland and Pittsburgh. At Harrisburg, most traffic heads to
Delaware and then approaches the city from the south, through Delaware County.
Norfolk Southern also runs a secondary route from Harrisburg into Philadelphia
along the Schuylkill.
CSX, which city officials say handles the bulk of the
local oil-train traffic, routes most of its Philadelphia trains through New
York state to Albany. There, the trains head south through Trenton and
Northeast Philadelphia to East Falls, where the tracks follow the Schuylkill
into Center City.
'Amazing . . . to see'
The operator of any particular oil train is not always
immediately clear. CSX and Norfolk Southern sometimes share each other's
locomotives and run on each other's track, or on track owned by a third party,
such as Conrail.
If there is an incident, city officials say, they call
CSX first since it handles most of the oil traffic. (Crude-oil tankers can be
identified by red hazardous-material placards bearing the number 1267.)
The largest crude-oil buyer in the region is Philadelphia
Energy Solutions, which operates the refining complex in South Philadelphia
formerly run by Sunoco.
In the last two years, PES has built the largest
railcar-unloading facility on the East Coast, which can receive four unit
trains a day - 280,000 barrels, or more than 80 percent of its refining
capacity.
Philip Rinaldi, the refinery's chief executive, boasts
that the complex has been saved by cheap domestic oil, which displaced costlier
imported crude that made the Sunoco refinery and others uncompetitive.
"We're now the single largest buyer of crude from
the Bakken in North Dakota," Rinaldi told a conference at Drexel
University in December. "We bring in nearly six miles of train a day for
unloading at our facility. It's an amazing kind of thing to see."
A fact of life
Some critics call for oil trains to be routed through
unpopulated areas. But the only rail routes into the PES refinery complex skirt
Center City and densely populated areas of South Philadelphia.
For Philadelphia safety officials, oil trains are a fact
of modern life in an industrial city. Compared with some other chemicals and
fuel that move through the city - ethanol, ammonia, and hydrofluoric acid -
Bakken crude oil is not the worst.
"As far as releases into the atmosphere and the
waterways, crude is frankly less of a concern than some of the other substances
that are in the city," said Phillips, the emergency-management director.
Yet with miles of black tank cars snaking through the
region each day, the city faces few more visible threats than the oil trains.
An interactive map with a closer look at the oil-train
routes is at www.philly.com/oiltrain.
Source: Philly.com
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