Nothing to see here.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) has 700 hazardous-spill reporting violations
over the past five months.
In a report released Thursday, Washington’s Utilities and Transportation Commission (UTC) revealed that out of 16 reportable spills that BNSF had in Washington from November 2014 through February, BNSF was late or absent in reporting all but two of them—so late and so absent that those 14 incidents snowballed into 700 individual violations, worth up to $1,000 in fines apiece. [Emphasis added]
The disregard for regulations and protocol is especially troublesome as the number of crude oil imports through Washington state has risen dramatically over the last decade.
Historically, about 90 percent of Washington’s imported crude oil has come in via boat, mostly from Alaska. But in the past decade Alaskan imports have slumped, while the quantity of crude shipped by train (and pipeline) has ballooned, largely thanks to drilling in North Dakota’s Bakken formation. This swell of new crude from the Midwest “has strained the capacity of existing oil-pipeline infrastructure,” the state Department of Ecology wrote last year, “and caused a sudden shift in the supply chain to transport by rail.”
[...]
Of all the crude oil imported into Washington, the percentage borne on railroads has jumped from zero in 2011 to six percent in 2012 and more than eight percent in 2013. Last year, an average of 19 oil trains trundled through Washington every week, carrying 57 million gallons of crude spread throughout 1,900 tanker cars. The Department of Ecology estimates that, depending on how many of five currently proposed oil-transport facilities are built and how much oil Oregon and California want to import, the number of trains could triple in five years and sextuple in 20.
Unless BNSF is going to take the law seriously, this will mean more
lawsuits for BNSF, as well as
more oil-train derailments, explosions, pollution–damage.
...a U.S. Department of Transportation report last July predicts that over the next decade there will be an average of 10 derailments a year of trains hauling crude oil or ethanol. Damage from these over the next two decades could be as high as $4.5 billion. But if a derailment occurs in one of the densely populated cities through which these trains routinely travel, it could kill as many as 200 people and cause $6 billion in damages.
For its part, BNSF officials say they thought they were
"complying in good faith", and etc...
“I don’t think you could say that [BNSF] didn’t know” it was violating reporting requirements, says UTC spokesperson Amanda Maxwell. She points out that the UTC started working with BNSF in September—before any of the 14 incidents—to bring their reporting system into compliance with state regulations.
The devil is in the details here: While BNSF did properly file federally mandated spill reports (copies of which are sent to the UTC), the window for submitting those reports is 30 days. By contrast, Washington law requires that hazardous spills be reported via telephone to the state’s Emergency Operations Center within 30 minutes (since cleanup can be time-sensitive). According to the UTC report, BNSF failed that requirement 14 out of 16 times between November 1 and February 24; and since each day that passes counts as a separate violation, those 14 missed reports turned into 700 violations.
There are inherent safety issues with the railways. As Eric de Place from
Sightline Institute so eloquently
puts it:
“To me, that is batshit crazy,” de Place says. “I can’t imagine a clearer signal from the private marketplace that something is fundamentally unsound” than commercial insurers refusing to insure it.