(The following article by Carl Prine was posted on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review website on February 24.)
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — In the wake of the Madrid, Spain, train bombings in March, rail giant CSX quietly began diverting locomotives hauling potentially catastrophic amounts of deadly gases around the U.S. capital.
The bustling railyards in and around Pittsburgh, linchpin of the railroad’s mainline through the Ohio River Valley, began receiving increased shipments of chlorine gas, anhydrous ammonia and other lethal chemicals that, if released, could kill, injure or displace tens of thousands of people.
Citing security concerns, CSX officials won’t say exactly how much hazardous material is now trundling down the tracks in Western Pennsylvania, much less how many chemical tankers they’ve added to the region’s rails. But they warn that they might have to make the increased flow of “hazmat” through Pittsburgh permanent because Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams recently signed legislation barring trains and trucks from transporting deadly chemicals through the district.
Although three years in the making, the mayor’s signature came shortly after train derailments in South Carolina and Pennsylvania. A Jan. 6 accident near Graniteville, S.C., spewed 90 tons of chlorine gas into the air, killing nine people, injuring 200 and forcing the evacuation of 5,400 others. Three weeks later, a railcar slid into the Allegheny River, releasing deadly hydrogen fluoride and forcing the evacuation of 200 East Deer residents for nearly a week.
Pittsburgh City Council this morning is scheduled to begin hearings into how safe local residents are from rail chemical spills. Council wants to know if there’s enough money in the budget to train, equip and deploy first responders faced with a catastrophic release of toxic materials. They want to see how county, state, federal and corporate clean up crews will respond to an emergency, and how rail companies secure trains from terrorists.
Some lawmakers, such as City Councilman Doug Shields, of Squirrel Hill, believe it’s time to investigate Washington’s decision. If the nation’s capital can reroute hazmat to Pittsburgh, why can’t the Iron City divert it around Shadyside, Oakland, Bloomfield and Hazelwood?
“You’ve got all kinds of things going through here. Benzene. Inorganic compounds. Flammable materials. All kinds of stuff that can, with very little effort, be released. Now, all of a sudden, what do we do? That’s got a lot of people scratching their heads right now. How can we construct new rail corridors? How can we safely ship this stuff?” Shields said.
A study commissioned by the Washington, D.C., council found that one ruptured chlorine tank car could injure or kill 100,000 citizens in a half-hour. On any given day, 82 tankers of chlorine gas and other lethal airborne toxics move along the nation’s tracks, according to the Federal Rail Administration.
To forestall the ordinance, the White House offered Washington $7 million to “harden” the capital’s open tracks with barbed wire, blast fences and detection devices. But four years after 9/11, Washington’s mayor banned all rail hazmat through town unless there was no other way to ship it.
“We’re not talking about diverting hazmat from around every city,” said Fred Millar, a consultant who helped draft the Washington, D.C., ordinance. “We’re not talking about 1,000 cities. We’re talking about the 30 or 40 largest cities, the ones most likely to be terrorist targets and the ones most likely to have what are really weapons of mass destruction prepositioned for the terrorists right in the middle of heavily populated areas. Hazmat on the tracks is now the highest threat to citizens, which is why it makes no sense to let it into your city. It’s safer for everyone if it’s out in the country.”
CSX has been joined by the White House, other rail carriers and the nation’s largest chemical plants in asking the federal Surface Transportation Board to overrule the Washington, D.C., ordinance. The major rail carriers fear other cities will follow the same path, setting up insurmountable obstacles for railroads.
“We’re very concerned about a patchwork of these restrictions becoming a reality,” said CSX spokeswoman Jane Covington. “We want people to understand that the safest way to ship these materials is by taking them on the most direct route. If you start long detours, the material must travel longer distances or it will have to go by truck. Every study shows that rail is 16 times safer than trucks, so it’s a real safety issue when you take this off the trains.”
According to the Federal Rail Administration, 106 people died last year because of hazmat spills from trucks, compared to only six from rail accidents. Over the past five years, Pennsylvania averaged 22 rail hazmat crashes annually. Nearly 70 percent of those mishaps occurred in railyards, and seven people have been injured since 2000.
About half of the state’s hazmat accidents, however, occur in Allegheny, Beaver, Butler, Blair, Fayette, Somerset, Westmoreland and Washington counties — claiming 146 railcars and locomotives to derailments across the region.
“These shipments are essential to our economy,” said Tom White, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads trade organization. “As a country, we move chlorine by rail. That provides the purification chemicals for half of our country’s water supplies. We use chlorine to manufacture the Kevlar vests our troops need in Iraq. These shipments have to go through.”
To rail experts, diverting more than 1.7 million tankers thousands of miles off the straightest routes, coupling and decoupling at bustling railyards along their way, threatens to increase the annual accident toll.
But that’s not what Pittsburgh’s council wants to do. They just want to ask some tough questions, and go from there.
“We’re not at the point where we’re really talking about what D.C. did,” said City Councilman Jim Motznik, of Brookline. “I think council needs to know what we should be doing to prepare for the worst. I think we have a responsibility, as a city, to do that. We saw what just happened out in (East Deer), and we need to think about what would have happened had that been in the city.”