The Ticking Rail Car: First Responders Are Preparing for the Worst

Emergency Management Magazine: The Ticking Rail Car

April 11, 2015     Roger Straw     Benicia Independent

           Repost from Emergency Management Magazine 
[Editor:  An excellent online comment appears following this article: "Wultcom" writes, "As always it is heartening to see how first responders rise to the occasion to protect us all.  If only such heroism rubbed off just a little on the railroad industry.  The creation of courses for first responders is praiseworthy. But it does create a false sense of security, for when Bakken crude explodes, the force of the fire is too great to allow firefighters to get anywhere near it.  The first duty of government is to protect citizens, not shareholders.  The rail industry takes advantage of lax regulators, pro-business governments, frail labor unions, and our desire for oil independence to roll the dice on safety.  They run 150 ton tank cars on 8000 foot trains with skeletal crews, well dictated by the profit motive.  An alliance of railway workers, environmentalists, and blast zone citizens can force a safer method of transporting crude oil."  - RS]

 

CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil are in flames after derailing in downtown Lynchburg, Va

The Ticking Rail Car: First Responders Are Preparing for the Worst

Railways are now carrying highly explosive Bakken crude oil, making emergency managers’ jobs even tougher.

 

By Jim McKay | April 10, 2015     Emergency Management Magazine

Emergency managers have been asked in recent years to do a lot more with fewer resources. That job got even tougher with the advent of oil shipments from the Bakken shale region of North Dakota via rail around the country.

Bakken is obtained by hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling, which has increased since 2000 and can be highly explosive. And there have been several train derailments recently, including one in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in July 2013 that killed 47 people.

In the U.S., a train carrying Bakken crude oil derailed in West Virginia on Feb. 16, 2015, sending orange flames skyward for days. There have been other derailments, and there’s concern of a scene like the one in Quebec happening in a major U.S. city, including those in Pennsylvania. A report by PublicSource said 1.5 million people are potentially at risk if a train carrying crude oil derails and catches fire there.

Emergency managers are concerned and doing what they can to mitigate a derailment and possible explosion in their backyards. There’s training available but questions remain: Do emergency managers have all the information they need? Can one locale handle an explosion caused by a 30,000-gallon oil tanker incident?

“From a people standpoint, the worst-case scenario is if you have one or more of these cars breach and start on fire,” said Rick Edinger, assistant chief of the Chesterfield County, Va., Fire and EMS Department and a hazardous materials expert. “There’s an ongoing debate about how volatile crude oil is. The feds and industry are coming to realize now that it really depends on where the oil comes from.”.....

.... The biggest concern for many is that one or more cars loaded with crude breach can start a fire. “Once you get past anything the size of a 9,000-gallon oil tanker, very few departments have the resources or capability to mitigate anything bigger,” Edinger said. “If you’re talking about a 30,000-tank car incident, even that would be beyond the capabilities of most departments in the initial stages, anyway.”....     more here