A train enters a depot along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe rail line outside of Williston, North Dakota,
in March 2013. The cars of another BNSF oil train derailed and burned Thursday near a northern
Illinois town on the Iowa border.
Six cars of a 105-car train carrying crude oil
derailed near Galena, Illinois, Thursday. Two cars caught fire and burned throughout the night. The train was carrying gassy oil from the Bakken Shale formation of North Dakota where an economic boom in the production of oil pried from rock by hydraulic fracking has boosted domestic oil production to levels not seen since 1970. In 2008, oil by rail barely made a statistical blip, with 9,500 carloads moved. In 2014, the number exceeded 500,000 rail cars of crude.
The derailment took place near the Iowa border where the Galena and Mississippi rivers come together. Galena was once the home of Ulysses S. Grant and is today a tourist destination of about 3,200 residents. Authorities urged people up to a mile away to evacuate, but only one family did. No injuries were reported.
The carrier, Burlington Northern Santa Fe, issued a statement:
At this time, we do not know the cause of the derailment. In addition to the railroad employees currently on the scene, additional BNSF personnel arrived soon after the event occurred to be part of the response. BNSF is working with local responders and has notified the Federal Railroad Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board of the incident. BNSF also promptly notified various local and state officials from Illinois and Iowa. [...]
We are grateful for the efforts of the first responders at this incident and sincerely regret the inconvenience this event has caused to the community.
Oil from the Bakken
is particularly volatile, and several derailments, explosions and fires have occurred in the past three years as ever more amounts of crude have been carried by rail. An accident Feb. 17 in West Virginia derailed 26 rail cars: 19 of them burned, some for days, and more than 100 people were evacuated.
The U.S. Department of Transportation predicted in July that there would be an average of 10 such derailments a year for the next 10 years. It estimated there would be 15 oil train derailments in 2015.
Read about safety below the fold.
Oil train protest by the Bomb Train Notice Squad in Milwaukee, WI, July 12, 2014.
Previous derailments have brought attention to the tank cars that carry the crude oil. The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration last summer issued a rulemaking proposal to make it safer to carry oil (and other flammables) by rail.
The rule, which is supposed to be finalized May 12, includes lowered urban speed limits, braking controls and testing of mined gases and liquids. It would also require, within two years, the phase-out or retrofit of more than 100,000 DOT-111 tank cars used to ship the category of flammable liquids that includes most Bakken crude oil. The oil industry says tanks cars can't be built fast enough to meet that requirement and want 10 years to make the switch. But tank car manufacturers say they have a capacity of about 33,000 tank cars a year.
But better tank cars may not help that much. In both the West Virginia derailment and the Illinois derailment the tank cars that burned were the upgraded kind, indicating that they don't make safe containers for the volatile crude.
Patrick Rucker reports:
The Obama administration weighed national standards to control explosive gas in oil trains last year but rejected the move, deciding instead to leave new rules to North Dakota, where much of the fuel originates.
Current and former administration officials told Reuters they were unsure if they had the power to force the energy industry to drain volatile gas from crude oil originating in North Dakota's fields.
Instead, the administration decided to leave it up to North Dakota regulators to enforce a new rule that would remove the explosive gases. That rule takes effect next month. But state regulators there have a cozy relationship with oil producers. They typically issue minor fines for large oil spills. As a consequence:
...a growing number of safety advocates say relying on North Dakota is not insufficient to regulate a product that is hauled thousands of miles of track and across many state lines.
"These trains are going all across the country so it absolutely has to be the feds who are in charge," said Karen Darch, mayor of Barrington, Illinois, where several oil and ethanol trains pass through her town weekly.
It's only a matter of time before one of these trains goes off the rails in a densely populated area and kills lots of people. DOT's study indicated that, in a worst-case scenario, the death toll could be as high as 200.
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(jpmassar has a discussion on the derailment and explosion in his post here.)