Oil Train Rules
A line of oil tanker cars sit on the BNSF railroad tracks in Harvey, N.D.
(Tom Stromme | Associated Press)
Although state governments don't have a lot of say in regulating the Bakken oil trains that traverse their cities and countrysides -- railroad safety is mostly a federal responsibility -- Pennsylvania is speaking up on the issue.
has come up with 27 recommendations to help prevent the type of catastrophic oil train explosions that occurred in Quebec and West Virginia in the last two years.
, director of the University of Delaware's Railroad Engineering and Safety Program, has two parts -- what Norfolk Southern and CSX, the state's primary rail haulers, can do, and what the state can do.
This isn't someone else's problem. Earlier this year the PennEnvironment Research & Policy Center released a report entitled
which found that more than 86,000 residents in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton live in a potential evacuation zone for an oil train crash. A few thousand residents in Warren and Hunterdon counties live near the same tracks, over which trains transport oil from North Dakota to refineries in Philadelphia and Linden, N.J. Because of its concentration of volatile hydrocarbons, Bakken oil is a higher risk to ignite and explode, requiring emergency workers to be prepared for a hazmat and fire-containment response.
While some groups want to steer these trains away from populated areas or
, that's not going to happen. So what more can the railroads do?
Zarembski says they should reduce the maximum speed of oil trains in urban areas (cities of more than 100,000) from 40 to 35 mph. That's too limited in one respect -- all the people living in the Bethlehem-Easton-Phillipsburg area, many of them close to Norfolk Southern lines, wouldn't be affected because they fall beneath the population guideline.
The report asks railroads to adopt new technologies to monitor trains and track conditions, and install electronically controlled pneumatic brakes. The response from the railroads is that they're already following federal regulations, including efforts to strengthen rail cars. Both CSX and Norfolk Southern balked at the 35 mph limit.
The report urges the state to do more, too: Improve its role in track inspections, fill a vacant inspector position, get local officials more involved, and inspect oil train routes at least once a year.
We're not railroad safety experts, but it's clear that 60 to 70 oil trains crossing Pennsylvania and New Jersey each week demand more than an ounce of prevention and preparedness. To their credit, first responders in Allentown, Bethlehem and Easton are learning how to deal with an oil train explosion and fire. Yet responding after the fact isn't the goal here -- some derailments and fires have been so intense that there's no option but to let them burn out. While Pennsylvania and New Jersey have avoided any disastrous derailments, the incidence of accidents involving oil trains -- more than 100 in the U.S. last year -- suggests this is probably a matter of "when" rather than "if."