(The following story by Art Hovey appeared on the Columbus Telegraph website on September 19.)
COLUMBUS, Neb. — As Nebraska asserts itself as an ethanol power, there are no underground pipelines to carry hundreds of millions of gallons per year of finished product to California and other major fuel markets.
Ethanol can’t be sent through existing petroleum pipes because it corrodes their inner surfaces. And burying new pipes to carry ethanol alone would be hugely expensive.
That means that for now, and perhaps for a long time, the Nebraska operations of BNSF Railway and Union Pacific have another significant source of freight revenue to go with coal, grain and cargo containers.
It also means the railroads will be pulling many more tank cars filled with a highly flammable, hazardous material through the state’s cities and towns.
With those sorts of concerns in mind, BNSF was among the hosts for a seven-city training tour for emergency responders that pulled into Lincoln for Thursday and Friday sessions along the tracks just west of the Haymarket.
Tony Bacino, a safety consultant based in Pueblo, Colo., was among those trying to build ethanol safety awareness through a program called TRANSCAER, or Transportation Community Awareness and Emergency Response.
“It’s projected that, by the end of the year, ethanol will probably be the No. 1 hazardous material transported by rail,” Bacino said.
Besides Lincoln Fire and Rescue, Friday’s audience included emergency teams from surrounding towns including Adams, Beatrice, Hickman, Malcolm, Milford and Seward, and others from as far away as Ponca and Winnebago.
Boyd Andrew, general manager of the Nebraska division for BNSF, said railroads are the safest means of carrying the ethanol load.
“We actually maintain that we have the safest accident rate, the lowest accident rate of any (transportation) entity in the country,” Andrew said Friday.
Brock Lowman, the railroad’s manager of hazardous materials programs, said tank cars are made to withstand various types of wrecks.
“They’re battleships,” he said.
Steve Forsberg reinforced the message from BNSF headquarters in Kansas City, Kan.
“You always want to have a healthy level of concern any time anybody is handling any type of hazardous material,” Forsberg said, “including in your own home.
“But the reality is that railroads have just a fraction of any kind of incidents in handling any kind of hazardous materials that the trucking industry has on the nation’s highways.”
The railroad record, however, is not unblemished.
n A September 2005 derailment in Hutchinson, Kan., spilled about 30,000 gallons of ethanol from a tanker car being pulled by a Kansas and Oklahoma Railroad engine and forced the evacuation of about 50 homes.
n In June 2006, a Montana Rail Link mishap at Missoula, Mont., resulted in a 12,000-gallon leak from a derailed car with a broken safety valve.
n In a more serious incident in New Brighton, Pa., last October, 23 cars from a Norfolk Southern train derailed, touched off an explosion, and created what the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette described as “a colossal fireball.” Although there were no deaths or serious injuries, hundreds of people were evacuated and more than 100,000 gallons of ethanol had to be off-loaded and removed from a dangerous setting.
Also among the hosts for the Friday portion of TRANSCAER were the Nebraska Emergency Management Agency, the Nebraska Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency.
During the hands-on portion of the training, the learning group climbed to the top of a tanker car and also examined it from the inside.
During the sit-down portion of a four-hour presentation, they were reminded that a film-forming foam, not water, is the right way to deal with an ethanol fire.
When it comes to ethanol, said Bacino, “the most important thing to know about it is that it’s the only motor fuel used that’s water soluble.”
That means attacking an ethanol fire with water tends to spread the fire rather than put it out.
Scott Petersen, part of the staff at the State Fire Marshal’s Office and also fire chief in Beaver Crossing, said even fire trucks from smaller departments typically carry 30 to 40 gallons of the proper foam, “which can cover a lot of area.”
Still, pipelines have their virtues, Petersen said, including “a lot more safety to carry product in large volumes.”
Contacted at the Nebraska Ethanol Office, Steve Sorum said discussions about building ethanol pipelines seem to be gathering steam.
“There are several companies taking about various proposals that would do just that,” he said.
But the current reality is that two 90-car trains, each carrying about 2.5 million gallons of ethanol, pass through Lincoln every week headed for California. For the past 18 months, and not quite once a week, a similar train has been coming through headed for Chicago.
Nebraska uses only about 50 million gallons of ethanol per year, said Sorum, but about 950 million gallons leaves the state in a 12-month period.
“And virtually all of that 950 million leaves the state on trains.”
By the end of next year, Nebraska ethanol production is expected to double to 2 billion gallons a year.
While BNSF’s Forsberg described railroads as the safest form of surface transportation, he acknowledged that more ethanol trains create more potential for a serious incident.
“That’s why we conduct exercises like this, so that, in the rare occasion that there would be an incident – an unfortunate incident that none of us wants to happen – that not only our people, but also emergency responders know how to deal with it.”