SMART Union
A CSX Corp. train carrying crude oil derailed and burst into flames in downtown Lynchburg, Va., on Wednesday (April 30), spilling oil into the James River and forcing hundreds to evacuate.
CSX said 15 cars on a train traveling from Chicago to Virginia derailed at 2:30 p.m. EDT. Fire erupted on three cars, the company said. Photos and video from the scene showed high flames and a plume of black smoke. It was the second oil-train accident this year for CSX.
Read the complete story at Reuters.
BISMARCK, N.D. – Oil drillers targeting the rich Bakken shale formation in western North Dakota and eastern Montana have produced 1 billion barrels of crude, data from the two states show.
Drillers first targeted the Bakken in Montana in 2000 and moved into North Dakota about five years later using advanced horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing techniques to recover oil trapped in a thin layer of dense rock nearly two miles beneath the surface.
Read the complete Associated Press story at Yahoo News.
New rules on moving hazardous materials like crude oil on U.S. railroads could settle a dispute between the energy industry and rail companies that boils down to a fraction of an inch of steel in the frame of each tank car.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx wrote Thursday in a blog post that his agency would send its proposals to the White House for review next week. The proposal will include “options for enhancing tank car standards,” he said.
Read the complete story at Reuters.
Jodi Ross, town manager in Westford, Mass., did not expect she would be threatened with arrest after she and her fire chief went onto the railroad tracks to find out why a train carrying liquid petroleum gas derailed on a bridge in February.
But as they reached the accident site northwest of Boston, a manager for Pan Am Railways called the police, claiming she was trespassing on rail property. The cars were eventually put back on the tracks safely, but the incident underlined a reality for local officials dealing with railroads.
Read the complete story at The New York Times.
WASHINGTON – U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx on Wednesday asked oil-by-rail leaders to create a tank car fit to carry the kinds of fuel involved in recent fiery derailments even as he dodged lawmaker questions about when such a plan would be ready.
Rail shipments of oil have been on the rise in regions that lack sufficient pipelines such as North Dakota’s Bakken energy patch, where production is nearing 1 million barrels per day and roughly 72 percent of that fuel moves on the tracks.
Read the complete story at Inforum.com.
A push by Warren Buffett’s railroad to boost oil-shipment safety is meeting resistance from Hess Corp. and other companies that say the plan would mean a surge in costs and force them to scrap thousands of tank cars.
A series of accidents including a Quebec crash that killed 47 spurred Buffett’s BNSF Railway Co. along with Union Pacific Corp. to back new standards requiring older cars to be modified or junked. Shippers and railcar lessors balk at the potential cost of more than $5 billion and say carriers’ operating errors are to blame for fiery derailments like BNSF’s in December.
Read the complete story at Bloomberg Businessweek.
The National Transportation Safety Board will hold a two-day public forum next month on the safety of moving crude oil and ethanol by rail, the agency said Thursday.
The NTSB has been warning for years that a common type of railroad tank car, known as the DOT-111, was not suitable for transporting flammable liquids and cited its tendency to puncture or rupture easily in derailments.
Read the complete story at The Modesto Bee.
TORONTO — The crude oil that exploded during a fatal derailment in Quebec last year that killed 47 people had characteristics similar to that of unleaded gasoline, a highly flammable liquid, Canada’s transportation safety agency said Thursday.
The Transportation Safety Board said in a newly released report that the crude tested by Canada’s transportation agency had a low flash point, which refers to the temperature at which the crude gives off enough vapor to ignite in air.
Read the complete story at The Bismarck Tribune.
Warren Buffett, the Omaha billionaire who four years ago bought the nation’s second-biggest railroad, said Monday that rail tank cars need to be upgraded to safely transport the surging production of oil from North Dakota and Texas.
“It’s fair to say that we’ve found in [the] last year or so that it’s more dangerous to move certain types of crude than was thought previously,” Buffett said in an interview on CNBC. “There’s no question about it.”
Read the complete story at the Star Tribune.
WASHINGTON – Rail tank cars being used to ship crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken region are an “unacceptable public risk,” and even cars voluntarily upgraded by the industry may not be sufficient, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board said Wednesday.
The cars, known as DOT-111s, were involved in derailments of oil trains in Casselton, N.D., and Lac-Megantic, Quebec, just across the U.S. border, NTSB member Robert Sumwalt told a House Transportation subcommittee hearing.
Read Joan Lowy’s complete Associated Press article at the Huffington Post.