(The following column by Jack Welch appeared at RedOrbit.com on February 11.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Crescent Hill is, by all accounts, a picturesque neighborhood. With its Victorian houses, locally owned shops and restaurants, and old Main Street feel, it’s like a small town in the middle of a large city. Longtime Louisville mayor Jerry Abramson is a resident. And part of the charm, for locals and the East End suburbanites who venture in for a taste of urban hubbub, is the rail line running alongside Frankfort Avenue, whose freight trains imbue a sense of authentic Americana to the whole experience of being there.
It must be blissful ignorance – or denial – that allows them to appreciate the presence of a diesel-fueled behemoth that most likely includes tank cars containing chemicals that are toxic or corrosive or flammable enough to be labeled “hazardous materials,” or hazmat for short – from chlorine to anhydrous ammonia to sulfuric acid. Safely contained and delivered, they are harmless. Allowed to escape in a densely populated area during transport, whether by accident or post-9/1 1 sabotage, the result could be catastrophic.
It was a year ago, on Jan. 16, that 25 cars of an 80-car CSX Transportation train heading north toward Louisville derailed near the Bullitt County town of Brooks, including several tank cars carrying such hazardous chemicals as butadiene, methylethyl ketone and cyclohexane (whose straight-chain cousin, hexane, caused Old Louisville’s 1981 sewer explosions). Fourteen cars, including four containing the three toxic inhalants mentioned above, went up in flames and thick black smoke, and 500 people living within a one- mile radius of the conflagration had to be evacuated – though no one died, thanks much to the dissipating power of the wind that day. Had the accident happened in any of a dozen concentrated Louisville neighborhoods intersected by freight rail lines, with many homes within 60 feet of the tracks, the human toll would surely have been considerable.
The cause of the derailment, CSX found, was a broken wheel bolt, although the official cause is yet to be determined by the National Transportation Safety Board, according to Zoneton Fire Department assistant chief Kevin Moulpon, who noted that “all the wrecked cars are still in a fenced-in area on the other side of the street from where the incident happened.” One of the derailed cars, Moulpon said, was an empty chlorine tank car. Chlorine, officials from the Federal Railroad Administration, Association of American Railroads and American Chemistry Council all agree, is one of the most lethal chemicals in existence; as a military weapon, heavier-than-air chlorine gas killed thousands of soldiers in their trenches in World War I. Its primary use is in the production of the hard-plastic building material polyvinyl chloride, or PVC – molded into plumbing and sewer pipes, house siding, even window and door casings. Mixed with hazmat softeners called phthalates, PVC yields garden hoses, foam insulation, charge cards and iPods. So, dangerous as chlorine is – it and fertilizer/explosive anhydrous ammonia account for 70 percent of rail-shipped toxic inhalants – the chemical supplies a large component of our consumer economy, as does butadiene, used to make everything from golf-club heads and football helmets to LEGOs and tattoo inks.
(Historically, chlorine has also been used by the Louisville Water Co. to purify drinking water and by the Metropolitan Sewer District to disinfect sewage pipes. In 1999, recognizing the posed danger, MSD switched from ordering chlorine by the 90-ton tanker to using a diluted form of sodium hypochlorite akin to household bleach, and the water company is finalizing designs for its own chlorine-generation facility, slated to be completed by the end of 2009, ending its need for chlorine deliveries by rail.)
Although Federal Railroad Administration statistics show that the number of train accidents and derailments has decreased over each of the past three years and that the year-by-year percentages of accidental hazmat releases are miniscule – in 2005, for instance, 99.997 percent of rail hazmat shipments reached their destinations without a release – the statistics also show that 2,000 or more train derailments (of all kinds, not just hazmat) do occur nationwide each year. So the risk of serious incidents is substantial.
A few examples from 2007: In August, a runaway tank car holding 34,500 gallons of chlorine rolled off a siding track just south of Las Vegas and, at speeds up to 50 mph, traveled 20 miles through the city before slowing down on an incline north of town. In September, a derailment on the outskirts of Eunice, La., forced the evacuation of 2,500 people and left 30 cars carrying such hazardous chemicals as dichloropropane, methyl chloride, toluene diisocyanate, hexane, acrylic acid and phenol in a precarious pile as two cars of plastics burned. In October, 13 cars holding either liquefied petroleum gas or ethanol ignited near the town of Paintsville, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 1,000 residents. Also in October, several thousand gallons of toxic-vapor-producing hydrochloric acid spilled from a derailed tanker outside Clara City, Minn., driving 400 people from their homes.
The call from many urban citizens organizations around the country, especially since 9/11 added terrorist sabotage to their fears, has been for a ban of hazmat shipments through their respective municipalities. Just after two Norfolk Southern trains collided in January 2005 outside Graniteville, S.C. – an accident that resulted in the derailment of three locomotives and 17 freight cars, including a chlorine tank car that ruptured and released 90 tons of chlorine gas, killing nine people and injuring more than 250 – the city of Washington, D.C., noting that the Graniteville release could have killed thousands in an urban setting, banned the transport of recognized hazardous materials within 2.2 miles of the U.S. Capitol building. That same year Baltimore, Cleveland, Boston and Chicago introduced similar legislation requiring that railroads reroute their hazmat shipments around the cities. When she was made aware of those measures in 2006, said Louisville Third District Councilwoman Mary Woolridge, “I asked the county attorney’s officeif they would look into some legislation to that effect. I told them to look at some of the other ordinances that have been sponsored in other cities. I don’t know what has taken them forever, but no one has gotten back to me with any kind of information.”
That may be because CSX, which owns the tracks that run within and around Washington, immediately took the city to court, with the full backing of the U.S. Department of Justice, over the unconstitutionality of a local government overriding federal jurisdiction, given that the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) gives railroads their legal marching orders. Although CSX is voluntarily running its hazmat materials around Washington while the case and its appeals drag on, the regulatory efforts of the other four cities either failed to be acted upon or are sitting in legislative limbo.
Meanwhile, the FRA is attempting to allay some of the nation’s hazmat nervousness by, among other measures, adding two new automated track-inspection vehicles to its fleet, accelerating a program to improve tank-car design for safety and durability, seeking congressional authority to regulate the number of railroad employee work hours, and preparing a newly worded regulatory statement on hazmat train routing. “The railroads would be required,” said spokesperson Steve Kulm, “to select the route that poses the least safety and security risk to that hazmat. And there’s at least 27 criteria to use to analyze what would be the most safe and most secure commercially viable route.” For a city such as Louisville, the words “commercially viable” tend to negate any reassurance in the rest of the language. After all, Rubbertown alone has about a dozen hazmat-using customers (that’s where at least some of the butadiene in the Bullitt County wreck was headed), and there are others in other parts of the city. You can’t very well go around Louisville when you have deliveries to make inside.
Plus, there are no Louisville rail bypasses – just a limited number of lines (eight) entering or leaving the city via tracks owned by biggies CSX and Norfolk Southern and the smaller-fry Paducah & Louisville, Louisville & Indiana and R.J. Corman Railroad Group, handling dozens of trains a day. “We can’t think of this as a highway system,” said Scott Jensen, spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, a trade association representing North American chemical companies. “Each railroad owns its own tracks” as well as the locomotives pulling a train, while the cars are owned or leased by manufacturer/suppliers. So the idea of ironing out and building a bypass-trackage system is next to inconceivable. The long and short:
At least for Louisville, the safest, most secure commercially viable hazmat route is likely to remain the same route it is now.
Which makes preparing for hazmat-transport emergencies of paramount importance. The city’s Emergency Management Agency (EMA), as well as MetroSafe (911), is headed by former Louisville Police Chief Doug Hamilton, the point person in a local network that involves the city’s 19 fire districts, six EMS districts and eight police divisions. Should a 911 call come in from someone who has witnessed a derailment or smelled a peculiar odor near a tanker car marked with a hazmat placard (all chemical cars are assigned four- digit contents numbers and warning signs issued by the Department of Transportation), EMA notifies fire, police and EMS and sends a specially trained fire hazmat unit to the site. “Our shop never closes,” said Hamilton. “We have a hazmat unit on duty at all times – 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. We as a community can grab hold of an incident and begin to manage it many times within four to six minutes.”
To meet chemical-escape challenges, the Urban Service District of the Louisville Metro Fire Department has close to 100 hazmat technicians working in platooned four- to eight-technician teams that respond from three city stations. The other 18 Jefferson County fire districts field a combined three additional 24-hour teams. Hamilton said that when a 911 hazmat-suspected call comes in, he allots about a minute to rudimentary information gathering – to ascertain what amount of danger exists; another minute to “knockout,” which means getting personnel assembled and on the road; and four minutes to have the first-response team on the scene, where a more in-depth assessment of the incident’s severity can be made. Should the level of danger warrant it, there are 120 warning sirens in Jefferson County at the ready. “We have the ability to sound one of them, all of them, quadrants of them,” Hamilton said, as well as issue instructions on 1610-AM, the EMA’s dedicated radio band. There would be local commercial TV and radio warning interruptions as well.
“You still have to plan that not everybody is paying attention,” he said. Not only would emergency vehicles “run up and down the streets with their sirens going, but firefighters would be going house-to-house.” In most instances involving a hazmat chemical- vapor release, especially with any kind of wind, people would be instructed to “shelter in place,” meaning they should go inside and stay put, close all doors and windows and plug any cracks, and shut off their air-conditioning or heating systems, which pull in outside air, until informed of an all-clear. More serious situations might call for area evacuations until the danger is over.
When 10 cars of a Norfolk Southern train – including four tank cars containing the skin, eye and mucous-membrane irritant phenol – derailed in Jeffersontown last June, “we got a lucky break,” Hamilton said. The accident happened behind a large building and alongside an overpass, away from residential areas, so pretty much all the first-responders had to do was shut down the overpass and remove some people from the immediate area until the extent of any leakage could be assessed. All of the zigzagged phenol cars remained intact. Still, it drew quite a governmental (and media) response.
“A lot of times when you get into an incident that involves rail cars or something significant,” said Urban Service District Fire Chief Gregory Frederick, “there are probably anywhere from 15 to 30 agencies involved in the response – Health Department, Coast Guard, MSD, state fire marshal – there’s a huge list of people that we notify automatically when we declare an incident.” Frederick, like Hamilton and other hazmat responders, carries and refers to a Department of Transportation Emergency Response Guidebook, with thousands of chemicals and information about them inside. Plus, Frederick said, “We have access to just about every kind of database there is on chemicals.”
Still, warning systems and hazmat knowledge notwithstanding, Louisvillians such as Chickasaw neighborhood resident Eboni Cochran, who lives a few blocks’ distance from a railroad switching yard, feels little but cold comfort about the hazmat-through-town situation. “If a resident does not know that an odor could mean there’s a chemical leak in one of a train’s cars,” said the REACT (Rubbertown Emergency Action) board member, “then it’s of no use if there’s some procedure out there to react to it; we need something proactive.”
For its part, CSX Transportation has initiated an effort to open new communication lines between its Network Operations Workstation (NOW) system, which keeps track of hazmat cars on trains and where on the trains they’re located, and emergency responders. This past August, CSX chose Kentucky to be the third state, along with New York and New Jersey, to take part in a pilot program that allows the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security, and by extension Louisville’s EMA, to tap into NOW computers, making hazmat information available before a train enters a city. “Before, officials had to call us to get access to that information,” said CSX spokesperson Derrick Francis. “Now they have access to that information themselves. It’s real-time information.”
Not that prior knowledge of train contents actually lightens the EMA’s load, given that there are eight incoming spokes of rail traffic, most headed for city switching yards. “There are so many rail shipments that go through here every day,” said Frederick, “that, number one, they would be difficult to keep up with, but number two, it would almost desensitize your (alertness). You’d be getting these reports several times a day saying there’s going to be, say, 300 rail cars carrying dangerous cargo. After awhile it just becomes a mundane thing.”
The CSX pilot program does signify, however – in a post-9/11 climate in which the federal Department of Homeland Security once tried to have hazmat warning placards and identification numbers removed from rail cars – that the rail carrier, although it will continue to move dangerous cargo through city neighborhoods, recognizes its duty to emergency service agencies to at least be on the same safety page.