National Transportation Safety Board officials at the scene of the Casselton, North Dakota,
derailment and explosion in January 2014. One of the burned out cars is in the background.
Randal Palmer
reports:
The proposed standards call for a hull thickness of 9/16 inch, up from the current 7/16 inch or half inch, depending on car type. It also makes thermal protection jackets and increased shields at each end of the cars mandatory.
Older DOT-111 cars are being replaced in Canada by CPC-1232 cars, but even these will have to be phased out by 2023 or 2025, depending on whether they are jacketed or not, under the proposed standards. [...]
Canada, which moved ahead of the United States in ruling DOT-111 cars cannot carry crude as of May 2017, signaled it was prepared to move faster than its neighbor on the latest standards.
The problem is that the rail network between Canada and the U.S. is well-integrated and different standards could cause shipping delays as well as other expensive problems.
Tank cars have been under scrutiny because of the 2013 derailment of a train carrying volatile crude oil from the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota and Montana. Some of the cars exploded and burned in the Quebec town of Lac Megantic, killing 47 and destroying more than 30 buildings, half the downtown center. The rest of the buildings have to be demolished because of petroleum contamination. Since then, there have been four more destructive derailments, including one in Ontario and one in West Virginia this year.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has predicted an average of 10 derailments a year for the next decade. In a worst-case scenario, DOT reported, as many as 200 people could be killed when tank cars rupture with fiery results. As a consequence, there's been a push from safety advocates and DOT to reduce urban speeds for oil trains, install electronically controlled brakes that stop all rail cars simultaneously instead of sequentially and upgrade tank cars. But industry is—surprise! surprise!—resisting.
Tank cars in the latest derailments and fires had been upgraded to a new voluntary industry standard. Obviously, not good enough. But, as the Associated Press noted:
... the oil and rail industries want thinner tank walls—half an inch thick, instead of the 9/16ths-inch that regulators propose. The thicker the shell, the less oil a tank car can hold, and with about a half-million carloads of crude hauled by rail in the U.S. and Canada last year, the cost difference could add up.
The railroad association and officials from CSX, Norfolk Southern and Burlington Northern-Santa Fe argued against requiring the electronically controlled [brakes] in a meeting with White House officials last week, according to a document posted online by the government. They say the government has underestimated the cost of equipping tank cars with the brakes and overestimated the safety benefits. Railroads complain that electronically controlled brakes would cost them $12 billion to $21 billion.
Profit over people. Every time.