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Lawsuit Filed Over Fracked Oil Trains In The Bay Area After KPIX 5 Report
March 28, 2014 12:02 AM
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Bakken, Bakken Crude, Bakken Shale, Christin Ayers, Fracked Oil, Fracking, Kinder Morgan, KPIX 5 Investigates, Oil, Richmond
 Christin Ayers
Christin Ayers is a general assignment reporter for KPIX 5 Eyewitness...
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RICHMOND (KPIX 5) — Two weeks ago, KPIX 5 discovered trains carrying explosive fracked crude oil have been rolling into the Bay Area under everyone’s radar. On Thursday, four environmental groups have filed a lawsuit over it, calling the crude by rail terminal illegal.
Earthjustice attorney Suma Peesapati had no idea the long trains were coming into the Bay Area until she saw KPIX 5’s story.
“I was flabbergasted,” Peesapati said. “This just happened under the cover of night.”
Read More:
Read The Legal Complaint (.pdf)
Read Request For Preliminary Injunction (.pdf)
Trains Carrying Fracked Oil Spotted In Bay Area
California May Not Be Prepared For Disasters Involving Fracked Oil Trains
Explosion Survivor Warns Of Fracked Oil Trains
Fracked crude oil from the Bakken shale fields of North Dakota can result in deadly explosions in a derailment. Yet we discovered the energy company Kinder Morgan started bringing 100-car trains loaded with the oil right into the heart of Richmond six months ago, all without having to go through any environmental review.
“We can’t hold up their permit because there is public opposition. As long as somebody doesn’t increase their emissions, we give them a permit,” Jim Karas of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District told KPIX 5.
Karas said since the rail yard was previously unloading ethanol trains, switching to fracked crude oil was no big deal. “Very small deal, very well controlled, very few emissions,” he said.
According to permit documents obtained by KPIX 5, Kinder Morgan claimed the operation “will not increase emissions beyond currently permitted levels”, and requested that the air district treat it “as an alteration, not a modification”.
“This hardly a minor alteration. I mean this fundamentally changes the nature of the operation and the environmental impacts,” said Peesapati.
Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of 4 environmental groups: Communities for a Better Environment, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, the Sierra Club, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The complaint claims the Air District’s “clandestine approval” of the project “ignores the well-known and potentially catastrophic risk to public health and safety.”
“These trains are rolling and they pose an immediate threat to the local community,” said Peesapati.
“It’s really a slap in the face against the people of Richmond,” said Andres Soto with Communities for a Better Environment. He hopes the courts will take action quickly. And not just because of the danger of explosions.
“There’s a number of chemicals that are constituents in this crude oil that are carcinogenic,” he said.
Adding to the risk, Soto said the tanker trucks that deliver the crude to local refineries. “It’s going to take three trucks to unload one train car and that is an extreme expansion of the number of trips by diesel trucks on our city streets and on our state highways.”
KPIX 5 reached out to Kinder Morgan and the Air District Thursday night. Both said they don’t comment on pending litigation. The lawsuit calls on the Air District to pull Kinder Morgan’s permit, and asks the judge to issue an injunction that would shut down the terminal until a full environmental impact report is completed.
Fri, 2014-03-28 06:26Justin Mikulka
Feds Weaken New Oil-By-Rail Safety Regulations Days After Announcing Them
Nine days after announcing new regulations designed to improve oil-by-rail safety, the Department of Transportation quietly weakened the rules for testing rail cars and exempted shippers of bitumen from having to meet the new regulations.
The department had been under pressure from industry since announcing new regulations in response to a round of testing on shipments of Bakken crude oil that found companies had classified crudes as less hazardous than they were in 11 of 18 rail cars.
The tanker cars that exploded in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in July of 2013 were also carrying Bakken crude that was misclassified. The result of these errors is that first responders can arrive at a scene and expect a crude oil fire and instead find a “river of napalm”, as they did in Lac-Megantic.
In a Feb. 25 press release, Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said all of the right things:
“Today we are raising the bar for shipping crude oil on behalf of the families and communities along rail lines nationwide —if you intend to move crude oil by rail, then you must test and classify the material appropriately.”
The industry quickly responded with a letter to Foxx letting him know that keeping families and communities safe might require them to shut down oil-by-rail shipping, which would “have an immediate and significant negative economic impact on the nation”.
Apparently this got Foxx’s attention. And the Department of Transportation did the industry’s bidding and relaxed the regulations. This time there was no press release or PR blitz touting the change.
Some details from the amended regulations, dated March 6. How often are companies required to test the Bakken crude in rail cars?
This Amended Order does not specify how often testing should or must be performed, nor does it require testing to be performed for each and every shipment.
What does it specify?
For purposes of this Amended Order, testing must have been conducted within the reasonable, recent past
There is no definition of reasonable and recent past. I guess the lawyers will debate that after the next accident.
But the Department of Transportation wasn’t done just yet. The initial order had tar sands producers quite concerned. According to this article in Hydrocarbon Processing:
Shippers of bitumen, a thick, tarlike substance found in oil sands, were particularly at risk from the Feb. 25 order. They would no longer have been able to export product in older cars known as AAR-211s, companies including Strobel Starostka Transfer Canada said.
Not to worry: the amended rule gives the shipper of bitumen a pass by not classifying it as a flammable crude oil, allowing the substance to be transported in older rail cars.
However, bitumen diluted with condensate may be classified as a flammable oil and fall under the new rules, a spokeswoman for the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration told Hydrocarbon Processing.
So what are the industry’s thoughts on the new amended regulations? The president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers said in a statement that the revisions were a “judicious response.”
According to the same article in Hydrocarbon Processing, tar sands oil (aka bitumen) is currently being shipped out at a rate of 200,000 barrels per day. Peters & Co, an investment bank, is forecasting that will increase to 500,000 barrels per day by the end of this year. With the industry currently being “desperate to get anything to move crude oil” and there being a two- to three-year backlog on orders for new rail cars, being able to move bitumen in older cars is a huge boon to the industry.
We all know there are issues with the current cars being used to transport crude by rail. The majority of cars are prone to rupture if there is an accident. As these cars travel over and along many waterways in the U.S. and Canada, not to mention through the centers of many towns and cities, this is a serious environmental risk.
In a final nod to let the industry self-regulate, the Department of Transportation says testing isn’t required if the companies moving crude oil are familiar with crude oil. If you were a lawyer, how hard would it be to argue that a company with a long history of moving crude oil by rail was “familiar” with moving crude oil by rail? But that is what the new regulations say.
“It says that if the shipper is familiar with the material they’re transporting, then those tests are not necessary,” Rich Moskowitz, general counsel for the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, said.
When the train full of Bakken crude crashed and exploded in Cassleton, N.D., the fire chief who led the response said, “We had no idea it was this volatile.”
Casselton Mayor Ed McConnell summed up the situation: “So all we can do is hold their feet to the fire and make sure that they’re doing their inspections”
Unfortunately there is no way for communities across the country to make sure “they” are doing their inspections. And unlike the first responders dealing with these incidents, the bureaucrats and politicians in D.C. won’t have their feet anywhere near the next oil-by-rail fire.
Photo: Oil train, Essex MT, by Roy Luck via Flickr
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