(Bloomberg News circulated the following on September 5.)
NORFOLK, Va. — As the U.S. Congress pushes the use of ethanol to counter high gasoline prices, a city 10 miles from the Capitol in Washington is pushing back.
Residents of Alexandria, Virginia, are up in arms because Norfolk Southern Corp. built an ethanol-transfer station near their neighborhood, where the flammable fuel is unloaded from rail cars to trucks. The dispute reached a flashpoint in late July, when a fire broke out on tracks near the facility, 600 feet (183 meters) from an elementary school and $800,000 townhouses.
“There is genuine anger and fear,” said Ingrid Sanden, 32, whose daughter is a kindergartner at the school. “This isn’t Monopoly we’re playing. These are our children, our families, and our homes we’re talking about.”
The blaze, extinguished by firefighters before it posed a threat, has galvanized the 8,000 people who live within a half- mile of the station. They’ve staged protests and are pressing the city to shut it down. Alexandria has sued Norfolk Southern to try to do so. The company has countersued to retain the right to operate the facility.
The dispute in Alexandria, a city of 125,000 across the Potomac River from Washington, may be a bellwether of conflicts to come as Norfolk Southern and other rail companies open ethanol transfer sites in cities from Baltimore to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Uphill Fight
Because century-old federal laws give railroads wide latitude to operate without interference by local governments, communities face an uphill fight in trying to block the facilities, said Charles Nottingham, chairman of the U.S. Surface Transportation Board, which regulates the industry.
“We are going to be seeing more ethanol moving through communities, not less,” Nottingham said at a July hearing requested by Alexandria on its dispute.
Allegations of secrecy in Norfolk Southern’s setting up of the transfer station are intensifying the fight. Residents including Sanden, City Councilman Rob Krupicka and Mayor Bill Euille say they didn’t know about the ethanol site until it began operating in April.
The Norfolk, Virginia-based carrier, the country’s fourth- largest railroad, says it told the mayor of the plans in June 2006, and kept city officials updated, believing the information was being shared with the public.
“We have not made any attempt to hide what we are doing,” said company spokesman Robin Chapman.
A month after the site opened, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the railroad was to blame for a 2006 derailment that caused an ethanol fire and two-day evacuation in New Brighton, Pennsylvania. Norfolk Southern is appealing the finding that it failed to follow track-inspection rules.
Congress Pays Attention
The Alexandria case has caught the attention of Congress, which in 2005 almost tripled the mandate for biofuel output to 11 billion gallons (42 billion liters) by next year. Representative James Moran, a Virginia Democrat whose district includes the rail yard, is drafting legislation that would force transportation companies to hold hearings before they begin such operations.
Alexandria Fire Chief Adam Thiel says his department was among those unaware of plans for the facility, and didn’t have the equipment to respond to ethanol fires. The fuel ignites more easily than gasoline and burns more intensely.
`Zero Readiness’
“We had zero readiness,” Thiel said. The department has since obtained the necessary equipment, paid for by Norfolk Southern.
Sanden says she and her neighbors didn’t know about the site until May, when she contacted the city to ask why fuel-tank cars were suddenly lining up at the rail yard.
The answer stunned her. She grew up in Luverne, Minnesota, about 10 miles from Iowa, a major ethanol producer, and remembers reading about ethanol fires at storage facilities in that state.
“I knew immediately it was a flammable liquid,” said Sanden, whose daughter, Maddy, started kindergarten in July at Samuel Tucker elementary school, near the ethanol site. “My initial reaction was, `What the hell is the city doing?”’
Councilman Krupicka says the council wasn’t told about the transfer station either, though he says city hall employees were. “There were terrible communications about this facility by city staff and Norfolk Southern,” he says.
Kim Canter, whose son also attends kindergarten at Samuel Tucker school, says she was “horrified” when she learned about the facility. “The fact that it ran for two months without any kind of firefighting or safety equipment is unbelievable,” she said.
Evacuation Plan
The city has developed an evacuation plan for residents near the site. Norfolk Southern has “put in place systems and procedures” to address the risk of fire or explosion, the company said in documents filed with the Surface Transportation Board.
The city is acting “in the heat of political passions” that “unnecessarily inflame fear,” the company said in the documents.
Mayor Euille says he told the company when it approached him in 2006 that it would have to apply for a special permit for the site and that there would have to be at least two public hearings on the request.
He says the company told him it had the right to open the facility on its own property if it wanted to. “That was the first and last and only meeting that I participated in,” Euille said.