The U.S. railroad industry, several environmental groups and two Chicago suburbs are challenging the federal government’s recently unveiled regulations intended to enhance the safety of milelong trains carrying volatile crude oil, dozens of which pass through the metro area each week.
The organizations, along with the city of Aurora and the village of Barrington, contend that the regulations announced May 1 by the U.S. Department of Transportation are inadequate and contain a gaping loophole that will allow unsafe tank cars to continue hauling hazardous materials for years to come on the nation’s rails.
In addition, the regulations fail to strengthen the “thermal protection” standards for new and retrofitted tank cars. As a result, firefighters responding to the kinds of fiery derailments like those that occurred March 5 near Galena and June 19, 2009, in Cherry Valley, near Rockford, have little time to prevent tank cars with volatile contents from exploding, critics say.
The regulations call for a three- to five-year phaseout of older-model tank cars that the National Transportation Safety Board and other experts have declared unsafe. The cars must be retrofitted or replaced with new ones that have stronger shells and valves, and protective shields to better withstand a collision or derailment.
The Association of American Railroads has filed an appeal with the Transportation Department, contending that its rule “does not sufficiently advance safety and fails to fully address ongoing concerns of the freight rail industry and the general public.”
The new regulations apply only to “high-hazard flammable trains,” defined as a continuous group of 20 or more tank cars loaded with a flammable liquid, or 35 or more tank cars loaded with a flammable liquid dispersed through a train.
Critics contend that this creates a technicality that allows the older-model tank cars, known as DOT-111s, to continue to be used, albeit not on the milelong “unit” trains with hundreds of tank cars that have become common in the Chicago area and elsewhere.
These trains, like rolling pipelines, haul millions of gallons of highly flammable crude oil daily from North Dakota’s Bakken shale fields to refineries, generally on the East Coast, passing through Chicago, the nation’s rail hub.
The government also ordered that tank cars on these long trains be equipped with an electronically controlled pneumatic brake system intended to cut the time and distance needed to stop and prevent an accordion-style pileup of the cars.
In its nearly 200-page appeal, the railroad association said there is no safety justification for the brake system, which it called “unproven technology that will not prevent derailments and will not provide meaningful overall safety benefits that our industry and the general public want.”
The association also contends that the thermal protection standard for new and retrofitted tank cars is insufficient. The standard requires that tank cars need only withstand being engulfed in a pool of burning liquid for 100 minutes without exploding.
The group and other experts have urged that the U.S. require a tougher standard of survivability, up to 800 minutes, or more than 13 hours, to give first responders more time to react to an incident.
Richard Streeter, the Washington, D.C.-based attorney for Barrington and Aurora, filed a lawsuit June 24 challenging the regulations in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Although DOT-111 tank cars have been deemed unsafe, the Transportation Department’s decision fails to remove them completely from service and has satisfied neither the railroad industry nor those calling for safer crude oil shipments, Streeter said.
“Nobody likes the (department’s) final result,” Streeter said. “They tried to play Solomon with their decision, but they didn’t slice the baby correctly.”
A coalition of eight conservation organizations and citizen groups also takes issue with allowing older model tank cars to continue hauling hazardous material, said Patti Goldman, an attorney for Earthjustice, one of the groups.
“Trains can have 34 cars of old DOT-111s, unimproved, carrying hazmat forever,” Goldman said. “There’s no phaseout for that.”
A spokeswoman for the Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration defended the regulations, saying that more than 3,200 public comments from more than 180,000 individuals were considered during the rule-making process.
“The … rule is an important safety regulation that, along with enhanced tank car standards, braking improvements and stronger operational controls, will make it safer to transport crude and other flammable liquids by rail,” Artealia Gillard said.
The environmental groups have also filed an appeal asking the Transportation Department to formalize its 2014 emergency order requiring railroads to notify each state’s emergency response commission of the movements of trains that carry a million gallons or more of crude oil, about 70 tank cars. The appeal also asks the U.S. to expand those provisions to cover all hazardous flammable liquids, not just Bakken crude oil.
The railroad industry has responded by announcing that it has voluntarily developed a smartphone app that allows first responders to identify the hazardous material contained in a tank car.
Two major railroads, the BNSF Railway and the Union Pacific, demonstrated the app and other track inspection and safety equipment for first responders and local officials at recent events in Chicago.
Using the app, firefighters arriving at the scene of an incident can punch in the identification number on a tank car and be told what material is being shipped and the recommended response for fighting a spill or a fire, BNSF officials said.
First responders have complained that federal rules mandate only that a paper manifest of a train’s cargo be kept with the engineer. But that engineer could be a mile down the track from a derailed car or could be the victim of an incident.
Glen Lyman, deputy district chief for the Chicago Fire Department, said he has used the app twice to identify hazardous materials involved in train incidents.
“This (app) enables us to get that information about hazardous material in a timely manner,” Lyman said. “Everything that goes through the city is a concern to us.”
Twitter @richwronski
