New U.S. Study Says Wetlines Incidents Led to 13 Deaths Over 10-Year Period

This story appears in the Oct. 5 print edition of Transport Topics.

Damaged or ruptured tank-truck wetlines resulted in 13 fatalities and seven injuries over the past 10 years, according to a new analysis by federal regulators.

The analysis examined data from 184 accidents over that time span.

The new data, disclosed in a letter last month to the House Transportation Committee, indicated that there had been more wetlines-related deaths than were reported earlier this year by a Transportation Department official.

Rep. James Oberstar (D-Minn.), the committee’s chairman, said the new information underscored the need for legislation “to prohibit the continued use of wetlines” and “highlights the committee’s concerns with PHMSA’s data collection and analysis.”

The new analysis by the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration followed a May 14 hearing, in which Cynthia Doug-lass, acting deputy administrator of PHMSA, testified that no wetlines incident-related fatalities or in-juries had occurred in the past six years and only seven fatalities and two minor injuries since 1990.

Douglass said in the hearing that the tank-truck industry’s laudable safety record was the reason her agency had not yet acted on a 1998 recommendation by the National Transportation Safety Board that tank trucks be required to purge their wetlines after loading and unloading hazardous fluids.

In its letter to Oberstar, obtained by Transport Topics, PHMSA said it had reviewed 6,800 incidents involving cargo tanks transporting flammable or combustible liquids that occurred from 1999 to 2009.

The agency said that six of the 13 fatalities and all seven injuries it had uncovered were “directly attributable to the wetlines release.”

It said seven of the 13 fatalities were not caused by fire but rather from “blunt-force trauma or some other event that would have occurred whether or not the wetline was damaged.”

PHMSA has been under increasing pressure from House Democrats who argued the agency has become “cozy” with the industries it regulates.

The transportation committee is considering legislation that would require PHMSA to issue a rule requiring retrofits to purge wetlines.

“Last spring, PHMSA reported there were two wetlines incidents,” Oberstar told Transport Topics. “A more thorough PHMSA review of their own data proved that their initial report was significantly flawed. If PHMSA doesn’t know what types of incidents are occurring, how do they know what priorities to focus on?”

At a Sept. 10 hearing, John Porcari, recently confirmed as deputy secretary of transportation, vowed to improve PHMSA’s information technology systems and to “re-establish a safety culture” at the agency.

Patricia Klinger, a PHMSA spokeswoman, said the agency has begun an effort to upgrade and modernize its information technology.

“At the last hearing, we upfront acknowledged that we were concerned about the quality of our data and that we were going to undertake a through analysis of the data,” Klinger told TT. “We put together a team and over the summer, we reevaluated all that data” on wetlines.

She said PHMSA might issue a new rule on wetlines.

”We are committed to looking at how the wetlines are regulated and moving forward,” Klinger said. “We are looking at how we use our data, how it’s put into the computer and making sure that it’s consistent and that there is the appropriate follow-up, as well.”

John Conley, president of the National Tank Truck Carriers, said that the committee’s concerns over the safety of wetlines was unfounded but that he did not intend to dispute PHMSA’s new numbers.

“For the first time, everybody’s using the same numbers and the same definitions,” Conley said. “That’s certainly a positive development, but I don’t think it changes at all the basic arguments that we’ve been making.”

He said the industry has an excellent safety record — hazardous materials carriers make about 50,000 deliveries a day — and that requiring the costly and dangerous-to-install retrofits to purge wetlines is a “cure that continues to be worse than the assumed disease.”

Conley said the House bill under consideration does not offer any solution options other than a retrofit to purge fluids from wetlines.

“I truly believe that the danger of bringing thousands of cargo tanks into shops to be retrofitted far exceeds the potential for saving lives on the highway,” Conley said.