Fire Fighters send letter to Gov. Inslee

	Affiliated with: AFL-CIO International  Association  of Fire Fighters Washington State Labor Council
June 8, 2016 The Honorable Jay Inslee Washington  State Governor P.O. Box 40002 Olympia, WA 98504 Dear Governor  Inslee: Last Friday's oil train derailment and fire in Mosier, Oregon, is a stark reminder that first responders, rail workers, communities, waterways and pristine lands remain in harm's way from Bakken oil train traffic through  our  state. The account given by firefighters of the Mosier response and by others who have responded to similar incidents across North America make it clear these fires are exceedingly difficult to extinguish, even under unusually ideal circumstances.  What happened  in Mosier could have just as easily happened in a population  center like Spokane or Seattle, resulting in even greater  tragedy. You know our position on these matters. In June 2014, delegates at our statewide convention called for an immediate halt to the movement of Bakken crude by rail until there has been a determination that it is safe to transport. Clearly, given the Mosier incident, there has been no such determination. The upcoming summer fire season is shaping up to be another dry and dangerous one. Resources will be stretched thin, and evidence keeps growing that there is no safe way to transport Bakken crude. A derailment  and fire in dry wildfire  fuels with high winds could easily overwhelm  available personnel and equipment in many parts of our state and grow into a conflagration of immense proportions. We urge you to make a request similar to Oregon Governor Brown's by asking the U.S. Department of Transportation to use its authority to prohibit rail transport of Bakken crude through our state until there has been a full investigation into the cause of the Mosier oil train derailment. In addition, please consider the use of your executive authority to reject plans  for oil terminals    now under review and ask your legal staff to investigate the proclamation of a state of emergency under RCW 43.06.220(l)(i), allowing you to prohibit the continued rail transportation of this dangerous fuel. We appreciate the efforts you have made to date on this subject and stand ready to meet with you, as do other members of our Solidarity Roundtable on Oil, to work toward solutions to this on-going  environmental  and community crisis. Sincerely, Dennis  Lawson, President. Washington  State Council of Fire Fighters opeiu8/aflcio/dag
Dennis J. Lawson, President • Greg B. Markley, Secretary-Treasurer 1069 Adams Street Southeast, Olympia, WA 98501 • 1-800-572-5762 • (360) 943-3030 Fax (360) 943-2333 • E-mail: wscff@wscff.org • Website: www.wscff.org

Vancouver firefighters oppose oil terminal at port- media links

 

 The Port of Vancouver, looking east from Terminal 5

Incredible testimony from the firefighter union at the Port of Vancouver. The ILWU president also testified against oil in front of a packed house opposed to oil.

Vancouver firefighters oppose oil terminal at port

KOIN-  Port of Vancouver terminal would be nation's largest oil-by-rail terminal

Firefighters: Oil train terminal would put too many lives at risk KGW - video

Vancouver firefighters union opposes oil terminal at port

The Columbian- It cites threats to public safety posed by project proposed at Port of  Vancouver

All stories mentioned the impending release of the DEIS on the 24th of November.

Hazardous materials on trains: little known, safety prep spotty

Lynchburg Train Derailment

Large U.S. Cities Prep for Oil Train Disaster

By MICHAEL RUBINKAM and GEOFF MULVIHILL | September 4, 2015  Claims Journal

 

They rumble past schools, homes and businesses in dozens of cities around the country – 100-car trains loaded with crude oil from the Upper Midwest.

While railroads have long carried hazardous materials through congested urban areas, cities are now scrambling to formulate emergency plans and to train firefighters amid the latest safety threat: a fiftyfold increase in crude shipments that critics say has put millions of people living or working near the tracks at heightened risk of derailment, fire and explosion.....

.... The AP surveyed emergency management departments in Chicago; Philadelphia; Seattle; Cleveland; Minneapolis; Milwaukee; Pittsburgh; New Orleans; Sacramento, California; Newark, New Jersey; and Buffalo, New York. The responses show emergency planning remains a work in progress even as crude has become one of the nation’s most common hazardous materials transported by rail. Railroads carried some 500,000 carloads last year, up from 9,500 in 2008.

“There could be a huge loss of life if we have a derailment, spill and fire next to a heavily populated area or event,” said Wayne Senter, executive director of the Washington state association of fire chiefs. “That’s what keeps us up at night.”....   more here

Bill aims to upgrade safety for materials sent by rail

Nick Blizzard | The Dayton Daily News    Sept 4, 2015

MIAMISBURG — Chemical toxins such as chlorine gas, radioactive material or explosive crude oil hauled in puncture-prone train cars pass through the region virtually every day, yet authorities — including first-responders — are given little information about what deadly loads are in their midst.

Usually, these materials travel without incident, but when they do not — when an accidental spill occurs — the impact can be deadly, destructive and expensive.

Crude oil trains are derailing and leaking hazardous material in dramatically increasing numbers across the United States, rising from just a single serious incident in 2005 to 47 last year....

..... “It’s actually shocking what comes through the county every day on trains,” said Jeff Galloway, director of the Butler County Emergency Management Agency. “We have every chemical: hydrogen fluoride or chlorine or propane or methane, you name it. In 2012 there were over 23,000 rail cars of hazardous materials and products that flowed through Butler County.”...

... The 5,320 serious hazardous materials incidents since 2005 are a subset of the more than 157,000 hazardous materials incidents reported by carriers to USDOT and analyzed by this newspaper. Serious incidents are defined by the USDOT as hazardous material releases that: cause deaths or major injuries, the evacuation of 25 or more persons, closure of a major roadway, contain certain radioactive materials or severe marine pollutants, alter aircraft operations or contain more than 119 gallons or 882 pounds of a hazardous material....

.... U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and a spokeswoman for U.S. House Speaker John Boehner, R-West Chester Twp., all said more must be done at the federal level to improve the safety in the transport of hazardous materials.....   more here

 

16-car train derails on CSX rail line in eastern Indiana

September 3, 2015    SF Gate

PARKER CITY, Ind. (AP) — Eastern Indiana officials say a 16-car train that derailed near a high school closed a county road for several hours......... Hendrickson says the derailed cars were empty coal cars.....     more here

 

Rail 'safety' planning: common good, common sense in short supply

Train derailment sends crude oil cars into Kanawha River; explosions erupt, Feb 2015.

Mock derailment tests emergency response

LaCrosseTribune.com   By Chris Hubbuch   June 10, 2015

[Scenario:] .... a freight train hauling 2.7 million gallons of crude oil derails as it crosses Pammel Creek on the South Side of La Crosse, spilling about 100,000 gallons of the volatile cargo.

Traffic comes to a halt as motorists stop to gawk at the overturned tankers beneath the overpass. Firefighters struggle to get through the bottleneck.

Within minutes, the pool of oil ignites, searing the skin of everyone within 50 yards and sending a plume of toxic smoke into the air. Shortly after firefighters arrive, a tank car explodes in a fireball that can be seen for miles, killing a dozen people — including five firefighters — and injuring another 60.

That was the fictitious scenario posed to dozens of emergency responders Wednesday at an Onalaska conference center....

....The scenario outlined damages far beyond the loss of life:

• 86 nearby homes are damaged; 22 are uninhabitable, displacing 39 residents.
• The Mormon Coulee overpass is destroyed, hindering access for first responders and snarling traffic for months.
• Some 75,000 gallons of oil spills into the Mississippi River, spreading over 64 miles to Guttenberg, Iowa.

And the economic effects are lasting, with homes near the blast zone losing value a year after the derailment and businesses losing sales. As a result, the nearby Walmart hires about 100 fewer workers during the holiday season, according to the scenario.

Participants on Wednesday discussed emergency response; today they will meet to look at recovery.

“That’s where the long tail is,” Satula said. “Recovery takes a long time.”.....  “no kind of training is really going to prepare a fire department … for the kind of catastrophic event we’re going through today.”.........more here

[Ed note: no one discussed liability. ]  

House Republicans' Safety Plan for Amtrak: Videotape the Next Derailment Rather Than Prevent It

By Tim Starks      The New Republic    

.....Tuesday, the GOP-controlled House passed a transportation spending bill that provides $9 million for inward-facing cameras in all cabs to record engineers on the job. The funding was added without objection from anyone in either party.

The cameras might have bipartisan support, but what they won’t do is prevent the next train accident. They are only useful when a crash has already happened. “Inward-facing cameras are very important for determining the reason for a crash afterwards,” Tho “Bella” Dinh-Zarr, the vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told a Senate committee Wednesday. And in the meantime, for all the Republican protests that money for rail safety wasn’t an issue in the May derailment, the House’s spending bill denies funding that very well could avert the next disaster.....    more here