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Why dedicate an entire website to Toxic Train derailments?
For the victims.
Hot Zone News, April 18th, 2009
ACCERT Editorial: A Tough Trip Through Paradise
Whitefish residents worry about BNSF offers Sunday, April 12, 2009, Missoulian
WHITEFISH - The Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad company has been quietly knocking on doors in a trendy Whitefish neighborhood, offering to buy homes and businesses that aren't for sale, while hinting that the ground beneath might be contaminated.
“They're creating a lot of fear, but not providing many answers,” said Henry Roberts, whose Internet business owns a building in the neighborhood. “The guy shows up with an offer, suggests there may be something toxic underground, but then won't admit anything, won't say anything specific.”
The immediate problem, Roberts said, isn't pollution. “The problem is secrecy.”
It's no secret that BNSF owns a whole lot of toxic liability around the state. Nearly two dozen BNSF sites are on Montana's priority cleanup list, poisoned by spilled diesel fuel and chemical solvents.
Historically, the emphasis has been on the diesel, but in recent years neighborhoods have found volatile organic compounds - trichloroethylene, dichloroethylene, vinyl chloride - in their soils. Those chemicals can taint groundwater, and vapors from the chlorides can poison the homes and businesses above.
Problem is, “we have no budget and no staffing to do the tests ourselves,” said Mary Ann Dunwell, spokesperson for the state Department of Environmental Quality. Her agency, she said, relies on the railroaders themselves to do the testing, which often focuses on company property and has not always proved sufficient for off-site neighbors.
It's long been known that the Whitefish railyard is contaminated - diesel in the aquifer, chlorinated solvents in the groundwater, metals in the soil - but according to DEQ project manager Kate Fry, “there's nothing to suggest there's any contamination in the neighborhood BNSF wants to buy, according to the data we have.”
Except, of course, the suggestions recently made by the company to local landowners.
The data DEQ relies upon was collected by the company, Fry said, just as it was in Havre, where diesel contamination was discovered in 1985 at a BNSF fueling facility. There, neighbors initiated their own off-site tests and found a plume of contamination that BNSF had failed to locate. They sued, and the company began buying and razing dozens of houses.
Yet despite that history and BNSF's hints to Whitefish landowners, “we cannot require them to do additional testing without a strong suspicion of contamination,” Fry said, something based in science.
But any scientific evaluation would have to be conducted by the neighbors, because BNSF cannot be compelled, and DEQ, as Fry said, “has neither the staff nor the resources, and that kind of testing costs a lot of money. Right now, we have no way of knowing the whole story.”
In February, a state court ordered BNSF to pay the cleanup bills on a site near Kalispell, even though the company does not currently own the property.
And in 2007, the state Supreme Court cleared the way for Montana residents to sue BNSF for cleanup, and not just to the “health-based” threshold that DEQ uses but to the land's “original state.” That same ruling allows residents to capture the full cleanup cost, which often is well beyond the value of the property.
“The railroad's financial exposure,” DEQ attorney Bill Kirley said, “increased substantially with that ruling.”
“Burlington Northern could be on the hook for a million-dollar cleanup on a $100,000 property,” added Whitefish City Attorney John Phelps. “If I were them, I'd be buying properties, too.”
CN plans oil sands 'pipeline on rail' April 9th, 2009, Financial Post.com
Canadian National Railway Co. has developed a
transformative strategy it calls the "Pipeline on Rail" that can move
oil-sands production quickly and cheaply to markets in North America or
Asia.
Currently, pipelines charge $17.95 per barrel to ship oil from Alberta to the U. S. Gulf Coast. Estimates are that the increase in pipeline capacity to four million barrels a day from the oil sands to the Gulf of Mexico would cost about $25-billion to build and take years to complete.CN could gear up its capacity to ship by rail up to four million barrels a day of oil at less cost and more quickly, bypassing the need to finance huge pipelines. By the end of this year, the company will be shipping 10,000 barrels daily from producers whose reserves are now stranded.
"Not enough pipeline capacity exists today to move bitumen [gooey oil-sands production], diluted bitumen [called dilbit] or synthetic crude," Jim Foote, CN's executive vice-president of sales and marketing, said in an interview this week. "We can get their products today to market using the concept of a pipeline on rail and move it directly either into the U. S. or to the West Coast [for shipment to Asia], which creates the flexibility. It means smaller producers are not just tied to a refinery down in Texas."
Lack of training blamed for Prince George train fire Tuesday, March 31, 2009 The Canadian Press
A CN Rail train crash and
explosion in Prince George
during the summer of 2007 was caused by improperly trained management
staff and rail cars that were too heavy, according to a report by the
Transportation Safety Board.
The report, issued on Tuesday, found that managers operating a remote control switching system on Aug. 4, 2007 weren't properly trained for the duties they were performing.
It also concluded the tonnage of the cars being moved exceeded the capacity of the brakes on the locomotives.
As a result, the CN supervisor lost control over the 53-car, remote-controlled train, which struck another train pulling cars loaded with gasoline and caused a derailment, explosion and fire, the report concluded.
No one was hurt, but 172,000 litres of gasoline and diesel were spilled, most of which burned in the fire.
Mar 20, 2009 BISMARCK, N.D The unofficial spokesman for people affected by a train derailment and chemical spill in North Dakota seven years ago has settled a lawsuit with Canadian Pacific Railway.
Other cases appear headed for trial next year in Minneapolis, barring intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The lingering lawsuits were not part of a class-action case that ended in late 2007 when a federal judge in Bismarck approved a US$7 million settlement involving more than 3,000 victims of the wreck.
That settlement resolved the majority of cases but did not include hundreds of people who had filed individual lawsuits or who opted out of the class-action case to move forward in the courts on their own. Most of those people settled with the railway company earlier.
Tom Lundeen, the lead plaintiff in a group of cases that eventually ended up in the 8th U.S. Circuit of Appeals, said his family settled with Canadian Pacific late last month.
He said the railway made an unexpected offer last December and his family decided that after so many years of battling, "enough was enough."
Lundeen did not give details of the offer but said it was one "we felt satisfied with."
"I guess the railroad wanted to be done with us just as much as we wanted to be done with the railroad," he said.
Plaquemine Train Derailment March 9th, 2009, KLFY TV
State police say crews have completed rebuilding
the train trestle and have issued a shelter in place for a nearby
hotel and businesses in the immediate area as a safety precaution.
Saturday morning a 57 car train headed through Iberville Parish went off the tracks. Five of its cars derailed near bayou Plaquemine. Officials say one car started leaking molten sulfur into the bayou.
Sunday, officials say they continue to perform air quality monitoring. Part of Highway 1 also remains closed.
The shelter and road closure will continue as crews remove the molten sulfur tank car from the train trestle.
More Hot Zone News in the Archives 2008....
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