[A] recent controversy over the parking of apparently empty tank cars on a Vermont Railway siding in Charlotte has triggered questions about the possible transport by rail through Vermont of a potentially dangerous type of crude oil. Citizens and environmental groups are worried an accident could be devastating, like the explosion in Lac Mégantic, Que., in 2013 that killed 47 people.
Crude oil has only been transported on limited occasions in Vermont, experts say.
The controversy heated up in July when some Charlotte residents told the Burlington Free Press they were uncertain about the contents of tank cars parked on side tracks near their homes. The article quoted Chris Herrick, director of the Vermont Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security (DEMHS) who was then the state’s hazmat chief, as saying that the railcars in question contained “no hazardous materials,” but many citizens remained worried. An email sent last month by an environmentalist with 350 Vermont warned “the railroad that passes [through] Charlotte carries oil and propane and is slated to carry more freight, faster. … Can you imagine an oil train derailment in Burlington? Scary!”
The crude oil of interest originates in the so-called Bakken formation in North Dakota. Bakken crude differs from other varieties: it is said to be highly explosive because of either its chemical composition or the compounds utilized in the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, process used in extracting it. Derailments and spills, sometimes accompanied by massive explosions, have occurred in places from Alabama to Montana, as well as Lac Mégantic.
Rail advocates dismiss opposition to the transport of crude-by-rail as fear-mongering.
Christopher Parker, president of the Vermont Rail Action Network (VRAN), says crude shipments are “a byproduct of our petroleum economy.”
“I wish that I could live with enough environmental integrity that I didn’t drive, but I still drive, so I can’t complain that we use petroleum as the backbone of our life in America,” Parker said.
Rail activist Carl Fowler, of Williston, says the alternative to rail transport of fuel, in the absence of un-built pipelines, “is thousands of trucks added onto the highways carrying hydro-carbons every day.”
Fowler characterized the controversy over the empty tank cars in Charlotte as “hysteria.” “If you buy a house in view of the tracks you have little cause to complain that they are being used,” he wrote.
The Charlotte activist who signed the 350 Vermont email did not respond to requests for an interview, but Maeve McBride, a representative of the group, said “we need to transition off of fossil fuels as quickly as possible.”
Answers not impossible to get
Crude by rail trains have only passed through Vermont twice in the recent past. Those shipments both traversed only a small corner of the state, in Pownal, where the Pan American Southern rail line knifes through the town on its way from Petersburg, N.Y., to Williamstown, Mass. Those trains, the first in March 2014 and the second last February, delivered crude to an Irving Oil refinery in St. John, New Brunswick, according to Chop Hardenbergh, who edits the online trade journal Atlantic Northeast Rails and Ports.
Vermont emergency management spokesman Mark Bosma confirmed that his agency had been notified of a CBR movement, in accordance with federal rules, in February. At that time, “weather conditions forced a train from New York to use a 6.3-mile section of track that crosses through southwestern Vermont,” he stated, referring to the Pownal route. The March 2014 shipment predated the federal requirement that obliges railroads to inform state emergency managers of crude by rail traffic.
Information on crude by rail transport may be more readily available in the wake of a recent state court decision in Baltimore, which ordered the State of Maryland to release information provided to its emergency managers by CSX and Norfolk Southern, two of the nation’s largest railroads, on crude shipments in that state. Major railroads have in the past sought to keep that information private, arguing that it would furnish business intelligence to competitors.
“The rail industry needs to come out and clearly explain that empty tank cars are not bombs,” Fowler said, referring to the situation in Charlotte.
Selden Houghton, Vermont Rail System (VRS) assistant vice president, said his company was not transporting any crude, and had not in the past. VRS operations encompass 323 of the 578 miles of active rail lines in the state, including the Charlotte track. Genesee & Wyoming, which operates more than 222 miles in Vermont, likewise has not handled crude in the Green Mountain State, according to spokesman Mike Williams. At Pan American Southern – the only other railroad that essentially crosses the state – executive vice president Cindy Scarano said it had not handled any crude on its line since the February shipment, and wasn’t anticipating any further CBR haulage.
“There is going to be no more [trans-Vermont routing] for a long time, if ever,” Hardenbergh predicted, noting that the St. John refinery has stopped buying the Bakken product because the global decline in petroleum prices has made crude from overseas the product of choice for the giant facility. Other refineries have made the same decision, contributing to a 16 percent drop in crude by rail carloads handled by U.S. railroads between 2014’s third quarter and 2015’s second quarter, according to the trade journal Railway Age.
“With production slowing down, pipeline capacity is catching up, and by 2017 there should be enough pipelines to carry all North Dakota’s crude to market,” industry analyst Rusty Braziel told the magazine.
Rail plan a focal point
Planned improvements to the state’s rail network has begun to trigger public interest in freight train cargo and has given worried citizens in Charlotte reason to ask: Just what is in those tank cars.
Advocates like Fowler don’t want to forego improvements to the state’s rail network, because the alternative is shifting freight traffic to the state’s highways. They cite a Congressional Research Service finding that spills from trucks carrying petroleum products exceed those from rail vehicles by a factor of seven, as measured in barrels of oil per billion ton-miles of transport.
Others say that safety trumps everything else.
“We definitely want to make sure that trains that are carrying oil are moving at safe speeds and on safe lines, and that the cars are as safe as possible – and none of that is the case nationally,” said Jim Murphy, Montpelier-based senior counsel for the National Wildlife Federation.
While there are no crude by rail trains traveling through Vermont now, Murphy says activists’ concerns are not overblown.
“Markets can change fast,” he said. “We certainly don’t want to expose ourselves to a rapid market change that could result in Vermont or a portion of Vermont becoming an avenue for frequent [crude-]oil-by-rail traffic. It only takes one accident, as we learned with Lac Mégantic, to seriously decimate a community.”
Mollie Matteson, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity in Richmond, says residents “have very little influence” on what materials travel by rail.
“They’re regulated by the federal government, and they run close to towns and schools, but those entities have … almost no ability to find out what’s in the trains that run by them,” Matteson said.
The complexities of following crude by rail shipments are daunting. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the nation has 137 oil refineries. The major U.S. railroads originated 493,046 carloads of crude oil in 2013, according to the American Association of Railroads. Tens of thousands of miles of track are capable of handling the traffic.
Petitions to VTrans
A group representing Charlotte residents, Citizens for Responsible Railroads, submitted a petition with 95 signatures to the Vermont Agency of Transportation demanding that the the state stop the practice of “storing hazmat freight tankers on side rails near homes, businesses, farmland and wetlands.”
In early September the Toxics Action Center, based in Boston but with an office in Montpelier, circulated a blast email warning that “improved rail infrastructure will … bring the same kind of dangers that we’ve seen across the country in places where tankers carrying hazardous fuels and chemicals have exploded and destroyed lives, towns, and habitats.” The email furnished a message text for submission to VTrans.
VTrans rail program director Dan Delabruere said the agency would “take all [the expressions of concern] into account and see how that fits into our plan,” he said. “There’s actually comments both pro and con on this exact same subject” of crude oil shipments, and whether they should go by rail or other means. “We’ve gotten an equal number of both.”
The comment period for the plan closed Sept. 15. VTrans hopes to have the plan finalized by the end of the year, Delabruere said.
Charlotte fire chief Chris Davis said in an interview he is very concerned about how the rail plan could affect public safety. In the event of a freight related spill or fire in the town, Davis said he would have to close the fire station, library, town office, post office, a Velco substation and the health clinic.
“The rail plan didn’t put in any money for secure rail yards that aren’t in proximity to a downtown village,” Davis said. “The plan is missing a lot, and safety is its seventh priority, and not the first priority, as it should be,” he added, alluding to a ranked list of items that the plan addresses as “freight rail issues.”
The draft plan includes $6.823 million for yard improvements, but no money has been earmarked for improving rail yard security.
