The wheels of government move slowly, as is being shown in implementing legislation passed this year intended to give communities in Washington state advance notice when trains with oil tanker cars are moving through town.
The new state law makes a number of improvements with the goal of addressing the jump in shipments of crude oil by train. Among the provisions, the law requires the state to hire more track inspectors, require Burlington Northern Santa Fe and other carriers to develop contingency plans for oil spill response and show they are financially able to pay the costs in the event of a significant accident and assist emergency responders in getting equipment necessary to respond to a rail accidents.
The new law also requires that BNSF and others notify the state Department of Ecology seven days in advance of oil rail shipments, allowing the state to notify the communities along the route. But as Herald Writer Jerry Cornfield reported last week, it could take the Ecology Department between eight months or as long as until June 2017 to write the draft rule, accept public comments and hold hearings before putting the final rule into effect.
The notice will have to indicate the route, its departure and scheduled arrival and the type, amount and origin of the crude. But there’s some question about how specific the notification will have to be about origin.
It’s not a minor issue, as recent oil train disasters in the U.S. and Canada involving highly volatile crude from the Bakken region in the north central U.S. show the differences in crude.
BNSF says its concern regarding the public notice is that oil companies not have to share proprietary information, but including information about where the crude comes from and its potential volatility would seem to be information that the state and emergency responders should have available to them.
Also not yet at full speed is the effort by oil companies, leasing companies and railroads to upgrade their fleets of oil tank cars. That’s not to say there has been no progress. Tesoro, which operates a refinery near Anacortes in Skagit County and is a partner in a proposed rail-to-marine oil terminal in Vancouver on the Columbia River, earlier this spring announced it had added 210 tank cars to its fleet that meet or exceeded new federal standards. The new cars, dubbed DOT-120, feature improvements over the older DOT-111 and the newer CPC-1232 cars, including tank shells that are 9/16ths of an inch thick and thicker at the heads, full-height shields at the tank heads, insulation, high-flow pressure relief valves and are tested to a pressure of 200 pounds per square inch.
In announcing the new cars in May, Tesoro didn’t say what percentage of its fleet the new cars represented. But there are an estimated 400,000 oil rail cars in operation in the U.S., according to investigative reporter Marcus Stern.
The purpose of the new state law and the new tank cars is to increase public safety and protections for our environment. The sooner the law and more of the new cars can get on track, the better.
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