Retrofit rail tanker, agency urges

Car too leak-prone in accidents, U.S. safety board says

Wrecked tanker cars and debris from a runaway train sit in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, after the train derailed, igniting rail cars carrying crude oil on July 6. The catastrophe, in which dozens were killed, has renewed calls to retrofit a certain type of rail tanker.

Wrecked tanker cars and debris from a runaway train sit in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, after the train derailed, igniting rail cars carrying crude oil on July 6. The catastrophe, in which dozens were killed, has renewed calls to retrofit a certain type of rail tanker.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

WASHINGTON - Warnings from U.S. and Canadian regulators that the most widely used type of rail tanker is prone to rupturing during derailments have taken on renewed importance after a runaway train that included those type of tankers filled with crude oil crashed July 6 in a small Canadian town, killing dozens and destroying 30 buildings.

The rail car, made by several manufacturers and known as a DOT-111, ruptures more often in derailments than other models, investigators have said. The rail industry has opposed regulations proposed by agencies such as the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board that would require retrofitting to make leaks and fires less likely.

“During a number of accident investigations over a period of years, the NTSB has noted that DOT-111 tank cars have a high incidence of tank failures during accidents,”safety board Chairman Deborah Hersman said in a 2012 letter recommending tougher standards for the tankers.

The train in the July 6 accident was hauling more than 70 carloads of crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in New Brunswick. It crashed and burst into flames near the center of Lac-Megantic, in southeastern Quebec, forcing the evacuation of 2,000 people, police said.

As of Friday morning, 24 people were confirmed dead and two dozen people were missing in the town 155 miles east of Montreal and 10 miles from the U.S. border in Maine.

According to a safety board report last year, DOT-111s make up about 69 percent of the U.S. rail-car fleet. Those tankers were part of the train in the derailment, Canadian Transportation Safety Board lead investigator Donald Ross told The Associated Press last week.

Canadian Transport Minister Denis Lebel told reporters that the kind of cars involved in the accident make up 70 percent of the Canadian fleet. He said the train, operated by Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., had been inspected the day before the accident and was found to be in good working order.

Keith Stewart, climate and energy campaign coordinator for the environmental group Greenpeace Canada in Toronto, said the accident would probably show that government regulations haven’t kept pace with the expansion of oil and gas development in North America.

“Up until now, the Canadian government has treated spills from pipelines and rails as a public-relations problem, and they need to start treating it as a safety problem,” Stewart said in an interview.

A U.S. safety board investigation into a June 2009 freight-train derailment in Cherry Valley, Ill., that killed one person concluded that flaws in the DOT-111 design probably worsened the spill. It noted that other models of tank cars designed to carry pressurized cargo have thicker shells and protected fittings and were less likely to leak in accidents.

“Of the 15 derailed DOT-111 tank cars that piled up in this accident, 13 cars lost product from head and shell breaches or through damaged valves and fittings, or a combination of the two,” the agency wrote in its recommendations. “This represents an overall failure rate of 87 percent and illustrates the continued inability of DOT-111 tank cars to withstand the forces of accidents.”

The agency recommended thicker shells and other modifications to strengthen the railcars.

If retrofits couldn’t be done, the agency suggested phasing out DOT-111 use for transporting hazardous materials. It has cited other accidents in which the performance of the tankers was called into question, including a 1992 derailment in Superior, Wis.; a 2003 wreck in Tamaroa, Ill.; and a 2006 accident in New Brighton, Pa.

The safety board can only recommend changes to regulations to other agencies, such as the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. The pipeline agency, part of the Transportation Department, said it was still reviewing the safety board recommendations on tank cars.

“We need to review these regulations and maybe increase them,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., said in an interview in Washington. “This ought to be a wake-up call.”

One of the tank-car manufacturers, American Railcar Industries Inc. of St. Charles, Mo., builds DOT-111 cars as well as hoppers and other freight cars.

The company has Arkansas manufacturing facilities in Paragould and Marmaduke. A company website says that a “comprehensive selection of DOT general service and pressure tank cars” are built at the Marmaduke plant. In its financial report for the fourth quarter of 2012, the company reported strong demand for tank cars, which helped boost its order backlog to more than 7,000 rail cars as of Dec. 31.

A company spokesman didn’t respond to requests for an interview about DOT-111 tankers.

The Paragould Regional Chamber of Commerce website lists American Railcars as a “major employer” with between 1,300 and 1,500 employees working at the two plants. The Paragould chamber contracts with Marmaduke to provide business development services.

In 2011, the Association of American Railroads told the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration that it supported updated rules for new tank cars, though it wanted existing ones to be exempt.

Patti Reilly, a spokesman for the railroad association,said the group worked with tank-car manufacturers on safety improvements to models built after October 2011 that will reduce the probability of a spill during a derailment by 50 percent.

It could cost more than $1 billion to make some safety improvements to existing cars, according to the group.

By comparison, from 2004 through 2008, “derailments resulted in one fatality and 11 injuries, the release of approximately 925,000 gallons of these hazardous materials, and cleanup costs totaling approximately $63 million,” the group said in a March 2011 filing with the pipeline safety agency.

Richard Streeter, an attorney representing the Village of Barrington, Ill., said the rail group is overestimating the cost of upgrades. Canadian National Railway runs through the heart of Barrington, which filed a separate petition with the U.S. Transportation Department last year asking that new and existing tank cars be built to higher standards.

“We took the position that the new rules should also require retrofitting,” Streeter said in an interview. “Canadian National is building up the transportation of ethanol and crude oil, hauling it out of Canada. Guess where they’re going through. It’s kind of a scary proposition.”

The debate comes as U.S. oil companies are relying more on rail lines to ship crude from places including North Dakota, where pipeline construction hasn’t kept pace with production. It wasn’t until 2008 that producers in North Dakota began shipping crude via railroads. Now as much as 675,000 barrels of oila day leaves the state by rail, according to Justin Kringstad, director of the North Dakota Pipeline Authority, which oversees pipeline development in the state.

Rail carries about 75 percent of the oil from North Dakota, now the second biggest producer in the United States behind Texas, with pipelines accounting for the rest. The Keystone XL pipeline proposed by TransCanada Corp. could carry as much as 100,000 barrels of oil a day from the state’s Bakken formation.

Montreal, Maine & Atlantic said in a statement last week that the train, which was parked outside the town, was shut down by someone after the engineer left for the evening.

This “may have resulted in the release of air brakes on the locomotive that was holding the train in place,” the company, a short-line carrier owned by closely held Rail World Inc. of Chicago, said.

“Until we know what happened it’s hard to say with certainty that there is a regulatory lapse,” Christine Tezak, managing director of Clear-View Energy Partners LLC, said in an interview. “When you look at the phenomenal exponential growth of oil volumes moved by rail up until [July 6], the record was fantastic.”

A spokesman from the Railway Association of Canada, an industry group representing 50 rail businesses including Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway, didn’t return a call seeking comment.

Information for this report was contributed by Mike Lee,Thomas Black and Gerrit De Vynck of Bloomberg News and by Arkansas Democrat-Gazette staff.

Business, Pages 61 on 07/14/2013