Vol. 79/No. 19 May 25, 2015
The latest derailment near Heimdal, North Dakota, located about 115 miles northeast of Bismarck, was on a train run by BNSF Railway Co. Ten tanker cars caught fire, emitting plumes of thick black smoke. Townspeople and nearby farmers had to be evacuated.
“This derailment, along with most of the other derailments, can be attributed to lack of maintenance because of the carriers’ obsession with doing more with less,” Jeff Kurtz, a retired BNSF locomotive engineer from Fort Madison, Iowa, told the Militant May 10. “The length and weight of these trains,” he said, “will magnify any mistakes that are made and contribute to the degradation of the rails and roadbeds.”
Kurtz is a member of Railroad Workers United, which helped lead a successful campaign to defeat the BNSF bosses’ demand for a one-man crew on their freight trains in contract talks last year.
Since 2009, crude oil shipments by rail have increased more than 4,000 percent to 434,000 carloads in 2014. Many are transported on mile-long trains filled with more than 3 million gallons of oil, passing over farmlands and through urban centers such as Chicago and Minneapolis.
For the first time since the government began keeping such records, the majority of crude oil delivered to East Coast refineries in February was transported by rail instead of by ship.
“I have real safety concerns for my fellow crew members and the generally 200 or more passengers on my daily run,” said Amtrak worker Jack Krueger, a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers who runs trains between Lincoln, Nebraska, and Ottumwa, Iowa. “I meet six or more oil trains. With the increasing number of derailments, all oil and other hazard material trains should take a siding or be stopped on the other track when a passenger train has a meet with them.”
Gov’t regulations postpone changes
The growing outcry over derailments and tank car explosions led the Department of Transportation to issue new rules May 1 that would require rail companies to upgrade or replace existing tank cars and install new braking systems. Deadlines to implement these regulations are between two to 10 years away.The government says that tank cars built after Oct. 1, 2015, must have thicker steel walls and thermal “blankets” to reduce the risk of explosion. The generation of “upgraded” tankers built since 2011 — which were involved in all five major oil-car fires this year — don’t have to meet the new standards until at least 2020.
The rules require installation of electronically controlled brakes that stop cars simultaneously rather than sequentially, saying that would prevent “accordion-like” pileups in derailments, but not until January 2021, at the earliest.
The new rules are “very expensive,” Norfolk Southern Corp. Chief Executive Charles Moorman told the Wall Street Journal May 5. “At a certain point, the economics are such that you can’t justify shipping the oil.”
“By claiming the problems are caused by not having electric brakes or using a different type of tank car,” said Kurtz, “the rail carriers and the Federal Railroad Administration know that they can put off doing something essentially forever. But if you do something about the length and weight of the train, you can do that in the next five minutes.”
“The lengthy time to retrofit cars reflects a desire to push profits before safety,” said Iowa-based locomotive engineer and Railroad Workers United member Ross Grooters. “Shorter trains and better maintained track would employ more workers and help increase safety of oil by rail.”
Joe Swanson in Lincoln, Nebraska, contributed to this article.
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