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Collection: Oil Rail Car Safety Standards

Tesoro’s New Oil Train Cars: Too Few and Still Too Dangerous

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One of the biggest players in oil by rail is trying to build more capacity in Washington State. Tesoro, an oil company with a checkered past, already receives loaded crude oil trains at its Anacortes refinery. Now the firm aims to build North America’s largest oil train unloading facility on the banks of the Columbia … Read more

Why New Improved Oil Trains Are Not Nearly Good Enough

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Last February to much fanfare, the oil company Tesoro—a firm with big plans for oil trains in the Northwest—announced that it would voluntarily replace older tank cars with newer models.  In the technical parlance of the rail industry, the firm meant that they would upgrade or replace the legacy DOT-111 tank cars to be compliant with the CPC-1232 standard.

The idea sounded promising at first blush, but a closer inspection reveals that Tesoro’s move was more about posturing than public safety. The upgraded standards the company is trumpeting are far from safe enough—a reality that was shortly made clear by a massive oil train fire in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia involving these same tank cars just two months after Tesoro’s announcement. As the flaming oil wreckage in the James River demonstrated, Tesoro’s proposal was little more than a cheapskate’s way of continuing business as usual despite powerful evidence that much more is needed.

To see why the standard favored by Tesoro isn’t good enough, here’s a look at the details.

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Canada vs. the USA on Oil Train Standards

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With what passes for chest-beating in the world of railway regulation, US politicians this summer claimed that the Transportation Department’s newly proposed crude oil, ethanol, and flammable materials train rules made the US Number One when it comes to tank car regulation—and that we are doing better than Canada. In his reading of a July … Read more

Proposed Oil Train Rules: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

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On July 23, the federal regulatory agencies in charge of oil trains released the details of a rulemaking proposal to improve the safety of moving large quantities of flammable materials by rail, particularly crude oil and ethanol. Oil trains have been the subject of increasing worry after five separate derailments in the past year unleashed towering infernos. The recent announcement opened up a sixty-day comment period after which the US Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) will issue a set of final rules.

In our judgment most media coverage of the proposed regulations has been rather credulous, overlooking several important dimensions and ignoring some glaring flaws. (One counterexample is Joel Connelly’s coverage at Seattle P-I.) So to correct the record, here is Sightline’s take on the good, the bad, and the ugly in the new proposed tank car standards.

The Good

  • The proposed rules have been released sooner than expected. Many industry observers speculated that this rulemaking process, which started in September 2013, would drag on much longer.
  • The draft rules are fairly comprehensive, addressing many of the unique safety issues of unit trains carrying oil or ethanol, including questions about how oil producers classify their crude, how train braking systems operate, how emergency responders are to be notified, emergency response planning, rail routing, and train speeds. Among the most closely watched issues are rules that will set standards for new-built and retrofitted tank cars.
  • PHMSA concurrently released a report summarizing an analysis of Bakken crude oil. Unsurprisingly, the federal data show that crude oil from the Bakken region in North Dakota tends to be more volatile and flammable than other crude oils. The new findings contradict recent assertions by the American Petroleum Institute that, based on their private studies, Bakken oil is no different from other flammable liquids commonly shipped in DOT-111s and that therefore there is no need to change tank car standards, which incidentally would increase their costs.
  • The feds propose to create a new improved tank car classification, DOT-117, for transporting Class 3 flammable liquids in unit trains.

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Industry To Feds: We Will Keep Using Old Unsafe Tank Cars For Three More Years, or Longer If We Feel Like It

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This is the kind of oil industry-friendly approach to regulation that should make you want to bang your head on your desk. Bloomberg has the story:

The oil industry and the railroads that haul its crude have offered U.S. regulators a joint plan to phase out a type of older tank car tied to a spate of fiery accidents… The parties agreed to scrap a fleet of thousands of DOT-111s within three years if manufacturers agree they can replace or retrofit the tank cars in that period. [emphasis added]

What happened here is that the American Petroleum Institute and the Association of American Railroads met privately with federal regulators to offer this proposal in lieu of more stringent safety rules, such as those recommended by the National Transportation Safety Board.

Keep in mind that the DOT-111 tank cars in question are notoriously and obviously unsafe. Four times in the last year they have derailed and unleashed towering infernos, killing 47 people in one case. Yet the industry wants to keep them rolling on a daily basis through the heart of big cities, past major league baseball games, schools, cruise ship terminals, you name it. Even though these shipments expose taxpayers to enormous liability risks because the industry is radically under-insured against catastrophic accidents.

And even though these shipments are so dangerous that the slow federal regulatory response earned the ire of the top US transportation safety official who called it, “a tombstone mentality” and said, “we don’t need a higher body count before they move forward.”

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CIT Group, Not CSX, Owner of Lynchburg Oil Tank Cars

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Media accounts of the Lynchburg oil train fire are routinely misreporting that the tank cars belong to the CSX railroad. In fact, CSX does not own the tank cars. As we pointed out in our train spotting piece, their true ownership is revealed by the markings on their sides, CBTX or CTCX, that are clearly … Read more

New “Safer” Tank Cars Were Involved in Lynchburg, VA, Oil Train Fire

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Update 5/19/2014: USDOT Secretary Anthony Foxx has now confirmed that the tank car that exploded and leaked oil into the James River was built to the newer CPC-1232 standard. But he didn’t say exactly how the tank car was breached, or if damage to the CPC-1232’s bottom outlet valve contributed to the fire. We expect to see this information when the NTSB comes out with their preliminary report in a few weeks.

Update 5/9/14: Preliminary reporting and statements by the NTSB confirm our findings here. At least 14 of the 17 derailed cars appear to be the newer CPC-1232 model; the other three have not yet been determined. (This article at Reuters says 10 of 13 were the newer model.)

 

In the wake of several high-profile oil train explosions, the industry has tried to assuage public fears by pointing out that it is building newer, and allegedly safer, models to haul crude oil. But yesterday, the alarming derailment and inferno in Lynchburg, Virginia clearly involved the newer-standard tank cars.

Take a close look at this footage from a drone posted by East Coast Drone:

Or take a look at the AP photo posted by Think Progress of the derailment. (Or glance at the dozens of high-quality images of the train derailment on the AP website.) Many of the tank cars, including at least one in the river, have a half-height head shield, which indicates that these were built to the standard, known as CPC-1232, adopted by the industry for tank cars ordered after October 2011.

Here are some of the questions we will be following as the investigation progresses:

** Was this unit train made up solely of the newer CPC-1232 tank cars? Tesoro and a few other oil-by-rail operators have said they can make oil-by-rail safe by requiring tank cars serving their facility to be newer-model.

** Were legacy tank cars mixed in with CPC-1232 tank cars, and did the older tank cars explode? In the drone video starting at 1:21 it looks like a number of the tank cars may not have the half height head shield, which would suggest they are the older legacy version, but it is difficult to tell from the video angle and resolution. (Notably, the industry has essentially told the federal government that it does not intend to phase out any of the older and notoriously unsafe models in the next few years.)

It remains to be seen whether the fire resulted from the newer cars, the older ones (if there were any), or from a combination of them. Either way, it’s a serious problem. If the train was composed solely of new-model tank cars, the Lynchburg accident may be evidence that crude oil trains are inherently unsafe regardless of the tank car models in use.

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Industry to Feds: “We Will Not Remove Any Unsafe Oil Rail Cars from Service”

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“We will not remove any unsafe oil rail cars from service.” That was the upshot of oil industry testimony at a recent rail safety hearing before the US Senate. To be fair, that isn’t a direct quote. But it is a direct consequence of the math. Under questioning from Senators about the wisdom of continuing … Read more

No Margin for Error

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[prettyquote]“Clearly, the heads and shells of DOT-111 tank cars…can almost always be expected to breach in derailments that involve pileups or multiple car-to-car impacts.” — National Transportation Safety Board, June 19, 2009.[/prettyquote]

Much of the oil traveling by train to the profusion of new oil-by-rail terminals is shipped in what one Chicago-area leader called the “Ford Pinto of railroad cars.” These are the soda-can shaped tank cars, DOT-111s, built to standards in effect as recently as 2011 that have a “high incidence of failure during accidents.” If used to ship crude oil, their design flaws pretty much guarantee that a serious train derailment will lead to oil spills or massive explosions.

One summer night in 2013, a rail accident involving DOT-111s resulted in a catastrophic explosion that killed 47 people in a small town in Quebec. In the months that followed, DOT-111s carrying oil unleashed towering explosions in Alabama, North Dakota, and New Brunswick.

These mishaps were not accidents, so much as they were the logical consequence of a sea change in the way that we transport crude oil. A few years ago, a sudden oil boom from shale geologies, such as the Bakken formation of western North Dakota, caught almost everyone by surprise. With few good options for moving the abundant new found oil to market, companies turned to railroads in a big way: shipments of crude oil by rail spiked, and then spiked again.

Yet shippers are moving oil largely in the old DOT-111 tank cars that for more than 20 years we’ve known are unsafe. In fact, since 1991, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has issued several crash investigation and safety recommendation reports involving tank cars documenting the inadequacies of the DOT-111 standard.

Things came to a head after a high profile collision in 2009 when a slow moving train composed of DOT-111 cars hauling ethanol derailed at a road-crossing in Cherry Valley, Illinois. The resulting fireball fatally burned a passenger and seriously injured three others in vehicles waiting at the crossing. Local officials had to evacuate residents within a half-mile of the incident.

A tank car carrying ethanol involved in the Cherry Valley derailment showing head (tank car end ) failure lying next to burned automobile. Arrow points to head failure. (Credit: NTSB)
A tank car carrying ethanol involved in the Cherry Valley derailment showing head (tank car end ) failure lying next to burned automobile. Arrow points to head failure. (Credit: NTSB)

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