Safety Agencies Seek to Increase Budgets to Hire Inspectors for Oil Transport
The three agencies that oversee truck, railroad and pipeline safety are asking to hire more inspectors to address concerns generated by the nation’s energy boom.
“This crude is moving by rail, it’s moving by trucks, it’s moving by pipeline,” said Sarah Feinberg, acting administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration.
FRA is asking for 45 new staff positions dedicated to safety issues along crude oil train routes, she told the House appropriations subcommittee on transportation March 25.
Bakken crude shipments reached about 408,000 tank carloads in 2014, up from 300,000 in 2013, Feinberg said in written testimony submitted to the panel.
Meanwhile, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration wants 11 new full-time inspectors, said agency leader Scott Darling. “Those FTEs would be used to oversee the vehicles that are working in the oil fields,” he said.
FMCSA inspections, set up as “strike force” events around oil fields, are being held in cooperation with FRA and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and are turning up brake and tire problems that put trucks out of service, Darling said.
PHMSA is asking for 16 new safety inspectors. Acting Administrator Timothy Butters said that PHMSA is working closely with FMCSA and FRA “because they have the boots on the ground in terms of enforcement with regard to the carriers.”
Butters also said PHMSA is exploring the feasibility of “stabilizing” crude, meaning processing the oil to lower its flammability.
Lawmakers spent much of the hearing pressing Feinberg. Over the past two years, several oil trains have derailed and exploded or spilled oil. The latest incident was in February in Mount Carbon, West Virginia, where dozens of tank cars derailed and 19 caught fire.
Rep. Evan Jenkins (R-W.Va.) said it was “simply unacceptable” that FRA has spent four years writing a rule (still not finalized) to require older tank cars to be replaced with stronger models.
“I think, from the public’s perspective, four years ought to be long enough, and I share the public’s attitude on that,” Jenkins said.
Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, chairman of the Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies, asked Feinberg about positive train control, an emergency braking and crash avoidance system that the federal government has mandated for rail carriers.
“We both know that a full positive train control will not be implemented by Dec. 31,” Diaz-Balart said, pressing his case that the systems are too complicated and expensive for the railroads to install by that date.
He asked why FRA has not pushed the deadline back. Feinberg said FRA is exploring ways to work with the rail carriers on possible extensions of the deadline.
FMCSA’s Darling also was called on to defend the agency’s controversial 34-hour restart rule, instituted in 2013. Congress since then has suspended it, pending a field study on its safety and economic effects.
“If the rule was based on flawed data to begin with, wouldn’t you think it would be rechecked and looked at?” Rep. David Joyce (R-Ohio) asked Darling.
The original data on driver fatigue were “good,” Darling said, and the new study will be “naturalistic” and track two comparison groups of drivers.
