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Collection: Oil Train Explosions and Derailments

Exploding Death Trains in Our Midst: Should We Worry?

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It’s been scarcely three months since an oil train in Quebec exploded catastrophically, killing 47 people and leveling several blocks of a town. Then, last weekend, another oil-bearing train derailed resulting in another huge explosion:

Residents for miles around saw and heard a “large fireball” shortly after 1 a.m., [fire chief] Phelan said. “There’s been no explosion or similar event like that since.”

As before, local emergency responders were unable to put out the fire because it was simply too dangerous:

Fire officials say they have little choice but to let the fuel burn itself off, resulting in a dark, billowing cloud of smoke that remained hanging over Gainford throughout the day.

“…it’s safer just to let it flare until the product is consumed,” said Phalen, estimating the time required for burn-off to be between 24 and 72 hours.

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What Caused the Lac-Mégantic Oil Train To Explode?

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Canadian PM Stephen Harper survey the damage Lac-Mégantic the day after the explosion. Photo credit Stephen Harper, cc.
Canadian PM Stephen Harper survey the damage Lac-Mégantic the day after the explosion. Photo credit Stephen Harper, cc.
Canadian PM Stephen Harper surveys the damage in Lac-Mégantic the day after the explosion. Photo credit Stephen Harper, cc.

Last week saw a profusion of head-scratching news stories about July’s catastrophic oil train explosion in Quebec after the Transportation Safety Board of Canada announced that the tanker cars had been mislabeled. It turns out that although the rail cars were correctly classified as containing a “dangerous good,” a label that applies to all types of crude oil, they were incorrectly designated as PG III, the least dangerous sub-category, when they should have been labeled as the more dangerous PG II. (PG I is the most dangerous type.)

Mislabeling is a problem, to be sure, but it’s hardly the main issue. What none of the media accounts properly explained was why the crude oil—which does not normally explode—was so dangerous to begin with.

What we can learn from digging into initial reports from Canadian safety investigators is that the train was bearing crude oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, the same type of oil that is scaling up for massive increases in rail shipping in the Northwest. It’s also clear that the oil had a relatively low flash point for crude, which means that it would have ignited at lower temperatures. But at this point, we don’t know a lot more about the evidently deadly composition of the product.

Some experts speculate that the culprit may be hydrogen sulfide, a colorless, flammable, and extremely hazardous gas that is sometimes associated with Bakken oil. According to the oil industry, hydrogen sulfide is explosive when mixed with air, and it can cause severe corrosion to oil transport equipment, including pipelines.

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Huge Oil Train Explosion

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Editor’s note: this blog post was updated on October 1, 2013.

One hopes the grim news from Quebec is not a preview for the Northwest. Early yesterday morning an oil train in the province derailed, causing an explosion with deadly results:

Four of the cars – which each carried 30,000 gallons of North Dakotan crude oil – caught fire and blew up in a fireball that mushroomed many hundreds of feet into the air. It destroyed dozens of buildings, many of them totally flattened…

Lapointe said it was hard to calculate the number of possible victims because the area was still too dangerous for police to examine properly.

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Moving oil by rail has become increasingly common over the last couple of years, and the Northwest is poised to become a major center of oil-by-rail shipments.

As Sightline documented in our recent report, The Northwest’s Pipeline on Rails, oil trains are already arriving several times a week at three locations in the region, while eight other sites are planning to build facilities to enable oil-by-rail deliveries. If all of the projects were built and operated at capacity, they would move nearly 800,000 barrels of crude oil per day on the Northwest’s rail system. Sightline estimates that would require 11 loaded oil trains per day.

Media outlets are reporting that the train in Quebec was carrying crude oil from North Dakota, which is almost certainly the same Bakken Formation oil destined for Northwest refineries and port terminals. The cause of the explosion is not yet clear, but most coverage suggests that the train had been parked for the night and was without a driver when it began moving.

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