On July 6th, 2013, one year ago today, a train carrying oil derailed in the sleepy Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, resulting in an explosion so wild and so hot it leveled several city blocks and incinerated the bodies of many of its 47 victims. The accident put the tiny town on the international media circuit and dragged a new social concern with it: oil trains.

Whether you call them oil trains, tanker trains or bomb trains, chances are you didn’t call them anything at all before this day last year.

Before the tragedy of Lac-Mégantic, several smaller tanker train accidents across North America had already raised alarm over the danger of transporting oil and other fuels by rail in small communities with tracks often running through city centres and residential areas.

In the wake of Lac-Mégantic, however, critics, environmental organizations, journalists and concerned communities began tracking the growing movement of volatile oil shipments across the continent.

Keeping pace with oil transport

Overall shipments of oil by rail have increased by 28,000 per cent since 2009.

In 2012 nearly 40,000 barrels of oil were shipped to the U.S. each day, although surging oil production in the Bakken Shale has simultaneously led to an increase of oil by rail shipments of crude north of the border.

In 2013 oil train accidents resulted in more than 1.15 million gallons of spilled oil. This represents a 50-fold increase over the yearly average between 1975 and 2012.

According to some, the surge in rail transport of petroleum products has outpaced regulatory oversight. Lax oversight may have contributed to the devastation at Lac-Mégantic, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA).

In an October 2013 report, author Bruce Campbell, the CCPA’s executive director, wrote, “In my view, the evidence points to a fundamentally flawed regulatory system, cost-cutting corporate behaviour that jeopardized public safety and the environment, and responsibility extending to the highest levels of corporate management and government policy making.”

According to Transport Safety Board of Canada data, accidents involving dangerous goods have increased since last year.

Screen grab of TSB Canada data complied by CTV News. 

Poor tank design, poorer response plan

According to CN Rail chief executive Claude Monegau, poor tank car design was “one of the most important systematic issues” leading to the tragedy in Lac-Mégantic. Earlier this year a Canadian government-commissioned rail safety group said more needed to be done to ensure the safety of oil tanker cars carrying crude through communities.

Since then the government has implemented a plan to upgrade or retire generic oil tanker cars, known as DOT-111s. In February there were roughly 228,000 DOT-111 cars in operation across North American and 92,000 of those were carrying flammable liquids.

Civil engineering expert and professor Roza Galvez-Cloutier, who examined the derailment in Lac-Mégantic, recently said no appropriate plans or equipment are in place to prevent a similar situation from recurring in Canada.

“There was an evident lack of preparation at all levels,” Galvez-Cloutier said recently in a Science Media Centre of Canada webinar reviewing the events at Lac-Mégantic. “Prevention measures, preparedness and emergency plans need to urgently be updated.”

“I think there was a panic and there was a lack of co-ordination,” she said.

At the time of the incident, firefighters were cooling oil tankers without having subdued the fire, Galvez-Cloutier recounted, adding the emergency response personnel did not know what the composition of the burning oil was.

Had they known, it’s likely they would have responded more appropriately to the fire, she said, using foam suppressants, for example.

“I know that Ultramar brought in, as a last resort, some foam to assist, but this was based on their goodwill, not a pre-planned emergency measure,” she said.

Grassroots groups respond

The increase in oil tanker accidents led a coalition of environmental organizations to create an ‘Oil by Rail Week of Action’ between July 6 and 13.

The coalition includes ForestEthics, Oil Change International, 350.org and the Sierra Club.

On Monday the groups plan to launch a ‘blast zone’ website which will make communities along oil tanker routes searchable by address.

Eddie Scher, spokesperson for ForestEthics, said the website brings together rail industry data and Google maps to make evacuations zones visible.

“It allows you to plug in your address and see where you sit in relation to this Google map blast zone,” Scher told DeSmog by phone.

“And what you find, which isn’t that surprising, is that these trains — mile long trains carrying 3 million gallons of oil — go right through the centre of almost very major city in U.S.”

“Our rail system was designed to carry goods, not carry hazardous materials through city centres,” he said.

Major cities including L.A., Oakland and Chicago have oil trains running through them.

The database, which is searchable for both U.S. and Canadian addresses, is designed to bring information about oil train transport to the public, something Scher says should already be available to the communities along rail transport lines.

“It’s pretty outrageous that we’re the ones to have to do this. We’re happy that emergency responders have this information but everyone should know what’s going on.”

“We’re working on the numbers right now, but it’s easy to say with the information we have that 10 of millions of Americans live in that blast zone,” he said.

“The amount of the populations that is threatened is huge. What we’re really trying to do is to let folks see what is going on.“

Image Credit: Transportation Safety Board via flickr.

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A freight train operated by Canada Pacific Railway Ltd. (CP) derailed yesterday morning and caused an oil spill outside Jansen, Saskatchewan, a small town about 150 km southeast of Saskatoon. CTV News reports that one of the cars leaked an estimated 575 barrels (more than 91,000 litres) of crude oil. Tank cars typically carry about 600 barrels of oil. No one is reported to have been hurt.

Environmental damage from the spill has apparently been contained by digging a berm around the leaked oil. CP has said that the oil was Western Canadian crude, not oil from the Albertan tar sands.

Guy Dixon and Nathan Vanderklippe write in the Globe and Mail, that the oil spill comes after Prime Minister Stephen Harper called oil transport by rail “more environmentally challenging” than pipelines, as part of his speech promoting Keystone XL in New York last week. Harper’s dubious point handily distracts from the fact that any mode of oil transport can and will lead to environmentally damaging oil spills, a consequence that will only become more common if Canada opens up the Albertan tar sands to further exploitation.

CP has refrained from attacking pipelines in turn. The Globe and Mail quotes CP spokesman Ed Greenberg as saying that both “pipelines and the rail industry are highly regulated, and both industries have programs and established standards, which work to make our systems secure and safe.”

Similarly, Michael Bourque, president and chief executive of the Railway Association of Canada, has remarked that rail is “very safe for moving oil. We move a lot of hazardous materials, and we have a really, really good safety record for moving all kinds of products.”

The US rail industry has been less friendly when reacting to the potential competition from pipelines. Dixon and Vanderklippe quote Holly Arthur, a spokesperson for the Association of American Railroads, who reminds the public that “Railroads are required to report anything, from a thimble-full to a spill. Pipelines are not required to report anything under five gallons.” Ms. Arthur adds that “[of] rail-spill incidents, 94 per cent are under five gallons.”

As Dixon and Vanderklippe note, “Oil-bearing trains have largely escaped activist notice, in part because climate-motivated opponents have taken aim at pipelines, which they see as enabling new oil sands expansion.”

But the rail industry could soon face greater scrutiny by environmental activists, with oil volumes on railroads increasing rapidly. CTV News reports that CP Rail has been increasing crude shipments as oil production from the tar sands rises. Canadian National Rail also expects to double its business this year, after transporting more than 30,000 carloads of crude to markets around North America in 2012.

Regardless of which mode of transport one argues for, the fact is that both lead to oil spills. As CTV News observes, the Jansen incident is one of several recent oil spills caused by rail accidents. In April, a derailment near White River, Ontario, caused about 63,000 litres of light crude oil to spill. In March, a CP train derailed in Minnesota, leaking about 76,000 litres, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. And in January, a collision caused a Canadian National train to spill about 1,000 litres near Paynton, Saskatchewan.

While the Harper government argues in favour of pipelines instead of rail transport, its agenda is being served by both industries, which continue to service Canadian oil. One hopes that the Jansen spill keeps the spotlight on the hazards of long-term dependence on oil, instead of distracting from the issue of impending pipelines.

Image Credit: Neal Jennings / Flickr

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