Without tougher oil train rules, Houston is at risk
Proposed safety act needs to be passed to forestall next derailment, tragedy
Living in Houston is like sitting atop a ticking time bomb. Every week, up to 200 oil trains filled with highly combustible crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region pass through the city, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety. All it takes is a drive along the local train tracks to see the danger these trains pose.
Tracks come within 100 feet or less of soccer and baseball stadiums, playgrounds and residential backyards, schools and universities, churches and synagogues, courthouses and community centers, as well as high-rise office buildings and condominiums, and they cross high-traffic streets and thoroughfares multiple times.
As documented in a U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) report, an oil train derailment in a major population center like Houston could cost billions of dollars in property damage and injure or kill thousands of people.
Over the past several months, oil companies — including Shell, Marathon and ConocoPhillips — have quietly deposited tens of millions of dollars into a $345 million fund for victims of the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster.
In that tragedy, a train loaded with 72 cars of volatile oil from North Dakota’s Bakken derailed in the Canadian province of Quebec, killing 47 people in the fiery aftermath. Since then, the U.S. has averaged about 130 oil train incidents per year. These types of disasters are exactly why more than four out of five voters in both parties support stronger standards and safeguards.
The reason for Big Oil’s discreet settlement is the tacit acknowledgement that fracked oil’s greater volatility increases the danger of transporting oil by rail, by turning otherwise benign derailments into devastating firebombs. But one wouldn’t know that by reading the DOT’s recent rule that attempts to address the oil-trains crisis.
The DOT’s rule fails to establish a federal volatility standard to ensure that transported oil is safe. It also allows oil to be carried in unsafe, accident-prone train cars for another five years before those cars must be replaced, and it fails to require advance notice to communities about the movement of oil trains through their neighborhoods.
That could change with the passage of the federal Crude-by-Rail Safety Act (S. 859), which aggressively fills in the DOT’s regulatory gaps. Four elements are necessary to address the crude rail crisis: safer cars, safer crude compositions, more secure operations and more inspections. The Crude-by-Rail Safety Act addresses all four, while the DOT’s rule falls short on all of them.
The proposed legislation sets a federal safety standard for the more volatile tar sands and shale crude oil. It requires rail cars to be protected by steel shells that are more puncture-resistant as well as thermal jackets that increase fire resistance. In addition, it immediately halts the transport of oil in any rail car that hasn’t been reinforced — a big difference from the DOT rule, which allows a grace period of up to five years for older, unsafe rail cars to continue to transport oil.
The bill also mandates more safety inspections of rail carriers and oil producers, heftier penalties for noncompliance and improved spill response plans, and requires that state and local authorities be notified before oil trains move through their communities.
While it’s clear the proposed rail safety measure is a stronger, more sensible approach than the Obama administration’s weaker standard, even the administration’s feeble rule was too much for Big Oil. Shortly after the DOT rule was unveiled, the American Petroleum Institute sued to block it, claiming the rule will unduly burden one of the wealthiest sectors in the U.S. economy.
Instead of waiting for the next oil train disaster, let’s put the Crude-by-Rail Safety Act on the express train to keep Houston — as well as big cities and small towns throughout the U.S. — from becoming the next blast zone.