Railroads Feel Pressure On Hazardous Chemical Shipments

A massive fire sparked by the derailment of a train carrying crude oil is still burning in the eastern Quebec town of Lac-Megantic Saturday, July 6, 2013. (Surete du Quebec)

After recent high-profile accidents involving tank cars carrying tight oil, communities want to know what is going through their towns:

Local and state officials complain that they receive very little information about when hazardous materials are shipped through their communities or how railroads pick their routes. Federal interstate commerce rules give them little say in the matter and railroads are exempted from federal “right to know” regulations on hazardous material sites.
Under pressure to act, the Transportation Department said in February that railroads had agreed to apply the same routing rules to oil trains that they already apply to other hazardous materials, such as explosives, radioactive materials and poisonous substances like chlorine.
This voluntary agreement, which takes effect in July, was among commitments that also included lowering speed limits to 40 miles per hour when traveling in large metropolitan areas, and providing $5 million to develop training programs for emergency responders.
Still, the railroads remain particularly secretive about how they determine the precise routing of their hazardous cargo. The rules that apply to that cargo, which came into effect in 2008 during the Bush administration, give railroads a lot of leeway.
The problem has taken on a new urgency since federal regulators warned earlier this year that crude oil from the Bakken region in North Dakota, which is mainly transported by rail, can explode in an accident, like it did near Casselton, N.D., in December. Last July, 47 people were killed in Canada, about 10 miles from the border with the United States, when a runaway train carrying Bakken oil derailed and blew up.

I've watched the trains going by my house, and the tank cars of propane, sulfuric acid, molten sulfur, benzene, ethanol and other chemicals are a bit intimidating.  I kind of wonder if someday one of those trains will derail and blow up or fill the area with toxic gas.  Not much I can do about it, though.