Despite Fears, Number of Oil Trains Increasing at Port of Tacoma
The Union Pacific oil train that derailed June 3 in Mosier, Oregon, rolled into the Port of Tacoma on June 19 with little notice, despite the intense scrutiny its wreck, spill and fire attracted to the expanding practice of shipping crude oil by rail through the Columbia River gorge and the greater Pacific Northwest.
For Tacoma Rail, it was almost just another routine arrival in a series of hundreds of oil trains the city-owned utility has steered through Tideflats rail yards to the U.S. Oil refinery in the port. The difference: This time, only 90 full oil tankers out of the train’s original 96 27,000-gallon cars got to Tacoma, in two parts, because of the wreck.
But in the wake of the Mosier wreck, environmental and other agencies are calling for the industry to change, though it is unclear how that would affect the burgeoning oil-train business in the Tideflats.
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If it seems as if Tacoma is seeing more oil trains every year, that’s because it is.
Tacoma Rail records show the line has hauled 417 oil trains across city rails since April 2013, with no derailments or fires. Each year has brought more trains — the line handled 82 oil trains in 2013, 128 in 2014 and 132 in 2015.
The 75 oil trains Tacoma Rail hauled in the first five months of 2016 were a 31% increase over the January-to-May total of 57 in 2015.
On June 16, the Oregon Department of Transportation made public a June 8 letter it sent to the Federal Rail Administration calling for a moratorium on oil trains. A preliminary report faulted broken, and relatively new, track bolts for the wreck, and Oregon transportation officials wrote that the broken bolts might have been “insufficient for these types of loads.”
Tom Fuller, the department’s director of communications, told the Associated Press that if the fasteners failed to anchor the rails to the rail ties, the parallel rails could be pushed farther apart and cause a derailment. Oil’s movement inside the tanker cars as the train rolled could mean additional stress through track curves, he said.
“Our concern right now is if Union Pacific or ODOT weren’t able to determine that these bolts were broken, how do we know there aren’t more of these bolts broken in other places?” Fuller said.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has not called for a moratorium, but he sent a letter June 16 to U.S. Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx asking for a series of safety improvements to oil-by-rail transportation. Federal law updates in 2015, Inslee wrote, “simply did not go far enough in addressing the safety risks” of oil trains.
He asked for improvements, including: updated tank cars, a lower speed limit than the 50 mph at which oil trains can roll in some areas and restrictions on storing full crude oil cars “unattended for weeks or months on unused track.” One set of oil cars, he wrote, in Snohomish County sits unattended within 1,200 feet of an elementary school.
Federal regulators also say safety improvements are needed.
Even the 2011 safety improvements to the kind of oil cars used by U.S. Oil at the Port of Tacoma aren't up to what the National Transportation Safety Board wants to see, spokesman Eric Weiss said. The updated car, he said, “does not perform much better” under stress than the decades-older models it was supposed to improve on.
“The top fittings break,” he said. “The bottom flow opening opens automatically on rollover. Basically, we want to make them safe from a puncture release and then a pool fire that then burns the next car.”
The cars the agency wants to see offer better fire protection and stronger fittings that won’t break, he said.
