Thousands of gallons of oil spilled in Mississippi River

A crew works on a damaged barge along the shore of the Mississippi River  in Columbus, Ky.

Thousands of gallons of oil spilled in Mississippi River

09/03/2015  By BRUCE SCHREINER and ADRIAN SAINZ  Fire Engineering

COLUMBUS, Ky. (AP) — Part of the Mississippi River was closed as crews investigated an oil spill caused by the collision of two tow boats, the U.S. Coast Guard said Thursday.

The collision Wednesday evening near Columbus, Kentucky, damaged at least one barge carrying clarified slurry oil. The cargo tank was ruptured, causing thousands of gallons of oil to spill into the river, the Coast Guard said.

No injuries were reported.

The river is closed from mile markers 938 to 922, Petty Officer Lora Ratliff said.

The barge was carrying approximately 1 million gallons, but the breach was only in one area, affecting just one of its six tanks, Ratliff said. That tank holds 250,000 gallons, and Lt. Takila Powell said a little more than 120,000 gallons spilled into the river.

The Coast Guard said it was working with the barge owner, Inland Marine Services, and an oil spill response organization. Inland Marine Services referred calls to its public relations person, Patrick Crowley, who did not return repeated calls seeking comment.

Both tow boat operators had been interviewed by Coast Guard investigators and underwent drug and alcohol testing, but results aren't back yet, Powell said.

It wasn't known how long the river would be closed.

"We are working diligently to try to restore our marine transportation system," Powell said. "We understand that it is vital."

The Coast Guard determined five barges were damaged in the collision, but nothing other than the oil leaked into the river, Powell said.....

....Some oil was recovered from the surface during cleanup operations Thursday, Powell said, but she didn't know how much.

Powell said the oil is thick and has to be heated to be transferred or moved.

"How this type of product typically would react is that when it reaches the water that is of a lower temperature, it would solidify and sink," she said Thursday. "But one of the things that we will be doing tomorrow is trying to determine where that oil has migrated to, to try to determine whether or not it has moved down the river or if it's still in the vicinity of where the collision occurred."

The collision happened in the middle of the river channel near Columbus, Kentucky, late Wednesday, the Coast Guard said. The cause was under investigation. The closure stretched 17 miles south to the city of Hickman.....  more here

 

Oil train derails, catches fire in North Dakota, town evacuated

Smoke and fire coming from an oil train that derailed Wednesday, May 6, 2015 in Heimdal, North Dakota.(Curt Bemson)

Oil train derails, catches fire in central North Dakota, prompting evacuation of small town

by: BLAKE NICHOLSON and MATT BROWN    AP        May 6, 2015

BISMARCK, N.D. — An oil train derailed and caught fire early Wednesday in a rural area of central North Dakota, prompting the evacuation of a nearby town where about three dozen people live.

No injuries were reported in the accident, which happened about 7:30 a.m. near Heimdal, about 115 miles northeast of Bismarck. The residents who left were staying with family and friends, Wells County Emergency Manager Tammy Roehrich said.

Ten tanker cars on the BNSF Railway train caught fire, creating thick black smoke, state Emergency Services spokeswoman Cecily Fong said.

"The engine and cars that aren't burning have been decoupled and moved to safety," she said.

Firefighters from four area communities responded to the fire, and regional hazardous materials teams from Grand Forks and Devils Lake were sent to the scene, Fong said. A team of 10 investigators from the Federal Railroad Administration was expected to arrive on the scene by mid-day Wednesday, said spokesman Kevin Thompson.

The Environmental Protection Agency was sending someone to the site to gauge any contamination to waterways in the vicinity of the derailment, spokesman Rich Mylott said. The rail line through Heimdal runs next to an intermittent waterway known as the Big Slough, which drains into the James River about 15 miles downstream near Bremen, North Dakota.

It was unclear how many cars were part of the train or how many derailed. There was no immediate word on the cause of the wreck or on the source of the oil the train was carrying. A statement from BNSF did not cite the source, and officials did not immediately return calls from The Associated Press......    more here

and a great summary of oil train explosions since Lac Megantic: from Sightline

Oil Train Explosions: A Timeline in Pictures

Ten explosions in two years, and no end in sight.

Eric de Place and Keiko Budech     May 6, 2015  Sightline

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

NPR: A Hard Look At The Risks Of Transporting Oil On Rail Tanker Cars

Marcus Stern has spent the past year investigating the practice. Recent accidents in Canada and U.S. show that the cars aren't built for carrying so much oil, he says, and tracks are deteriorating.

Feb 25, 2015  Copyright © 2015 NPR.    For personal, noncommercial use only. Audio at site


DAVE DAVIES, HOST:  This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. Earlier this month, a train carrying crude oil derailed in West Virginia, sending 27 cars off the track, spilling oil across the landscape and into a nearby creek, and causing explosions and fires that burned for days. And it isn’t the only such accident in recent years.

(SOUNDBITE OF EXPLOSION)

UNIDENTIFIED OPERATOR: Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #1: Oh, it just blew up. A train blew up. You need fire and ambulance – everything – right away.

DAVIES: That’s a 911 call from a derailment and explosion near Casselton, N.D., in December of 2013. Five months before that, a tank car derailment in Canada sparked fires that killed 47 people.

Our guest, investigative reporter Marcus Stern, has spent the past year looking into the risks of transporting oil on rail tanker cars, a practice which has expanded dramatically in the past eight years. His stories focus in particular on how regulators have responded, or failed to, following the tragedy in Canada. Marcus Stern won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his investigation of San Diego Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham. His reporting on the risks of rail transportation of crude oil was a joint effort of the environmental website InsideClimate News and The Weather Channel.  [Editor: See BOOM: North America’s Explosive Oil-by-Rail Problem]

Well, Marcus Stern, welcome to FRESH AIR. Let’s begin with this horrific accident that happened in the Canadian town of Lac-Megantic – or at least that’s how it’s pronounced in this country. I’m sure the French pronunciation’s different. This was July of 2013. Tell us what happened.

MARCUS STERN: There was a train that was hauling crude oil – about 2.6 million gallons – and it had a little bit of a mechanical problem. And so the railroad instructed the lone conductor – the lone crewmember -to leave it overnight with the engines running unattended. And he called a cab and went into town, into Lac-Megantic, to get sleep and spend the night at a hotel. And in the middle of the night, the brakes failed on the locomotives. And there were several locomotives. And it started down a long incline. And by the time it reached Lac-Megantic, seven miles down the hill, it was doing 60 miles an hour. It hit a curve there. It derailed and several of the railcars exploded. Fireballs went shooting several-hundred feet into the air. And a tide of flaming oil flowed in every direction, including the direction of a nearby bar/restaurant that was full of patrons. It was one o’clock in the morning on a Saturday night – a beautiful July night. And it immediately engulfed the bar/restaurant in flames. And 47 people were killed. The remains of five people – no remains were found of five of the people.

DAVIES: Because the heat was so intense?

STERN: Yes, it just vaporized these people.

DAVIES: Now, this accident was in Canada. But we’re seeing a lot more rail traffic of tanker cars in the United States. And I guess this oil actually had come from the United States. Why are we seeing so much more tanker traffic and crude oil being carried on railroads?

STERN: What happened is in 2005, roughly, there were advance – new developments in fracking technology that allowed the producers to pull light crude oil from about two miles beneath the ground in North Dakota. And suddenly that was available to them. And they could start pulling it out. They were pulling out hundreds of thousands of gallons of barrels a day. The problem is that, you know, while they suddenly became – you know, had this huge resource, and they now were Texas. They were Texas without pipelines. They had all the oil production of Texas – not quite as much, but they’re now number two to Texas – but they didn’t have any of the infrastructure in place. And so the – very cleverly, they turned to the rails because the rails were sitting sort of idle and not used very much except for by grain farmers. And also, you had refineries on the East Coast that were actually getting ready to shut down because they couldn’t compete with the Gulf Coast refineries that were using domestic crude oil because the East Coast refineries were using oil purchased on the world market at a higher price. So by pulling it out of the ground, putting it on the rails, and sending it to the East Coast refineries, it created a renaissance – an industrial renaissance, if you will – worth tens of billions of dollars, perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. So it was a huge, big, good business story until the trains started to blow up.

DAVIES: So the fast solution to a lack of pipelines to get the crude to refineries was to put it on tanker cars. Give us a sense of how dramatically the rise is in, you know, crude oil being shipped by tanker car.