(The following story by Alana Semuels appeared on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website on February 1.)
PITTSBURGH, Pa. — From distilled alcohol for hard liquor to fertilizer for greener lawns, trains carrying hazardous materials move through Allegheny County and Pittsburgh on a daily basis, often passing unnoticed but for the placards on their sides.
While millions of tank cars containing these chemicals arrive at their destinations without incident, an accident like the one in East Deer yesterday has the potential to turn trains into lethal instruments.
A train carrying hazardous material crashed in South Carolina last month and released a deadly cloud of chlorine, killing nine. A derailment in Texas last year caused a chlorine cloud that killed three.
Those crashes and the potential for utilizing trains as weapons of mass destruction in the post-9/11 world are prompting some to call for measures to protect cities better. Others maintain that the potential for disaster is small.
In 2002, Pennsylvania ranked 10th in the United States in hazardous material originating here and being transported by rail, with 28,135 carloads. It ranked 12th in hazardous material terminating here by rail.
“We have a large amount of hazardous materials moving through Allegheny County on a daily basis, in planes, trains, trucks and barges,” said Robert Full, the county’s chief of emergency management. “We monitor the traffic daily.”
Nationally, there were 25 incidents in which hazardous materials were released into the environment in 2003, out of 1.7 million carloads of such materials moving on the rails, said Tom White, spokesman for the American Association of Railroads.
“It is very unusual that any material is released,” he said, citing advances in tank car safety and improvements to tracks. “Most of the hazardous materials are run along the best maintained track, so you’re less likely to have something happen with them.”
But accidents occur. According to statistics from the Federal Railroad Administration, trains carrying hazardous materials were in 26 accidents in Pennsylvania in 2003, including six in Allegheny County. But in only 11 incidents were those cars damaged, and in that year, no hazardous material was released and no people evacuated.
Even that is too much for some.
“It’s only a matter of time that this is going to happen, given how many hazardous materials are shipped in and through the Pittsburgh area,” said Myron Arnowitt, Western Pennsylvania director for the environmental group Clean Water Action.
“There needs to be better public information to communities about what some of these hazards are, especially in the post 9/11 world that we’re living in.”
The new security measures to prevent an attack on these trains presents Arnowitt with a Catch-22 of sorts: Although he would like to alert residents about the dangerous material passing through the city so they would advocate against its presence, the companies have become more hesitant to release the location of such materials so as to protect them from attack.
Nine members of the Washington, D.C., city council introduced a bill on Friday that would keep trains and trucks carrying poisonous and flammable gases, explosives and other hazardous materials from traveling within 2.2 miles of the Capitol without permits.
“We are currently shipping cargos which the federal government calls weapons of mass destruction through high-threat target cities as if they were peanut butter,” said Fred Millar of Friends of the Earth, a hazardous materials consultant who is working with the District of Columbia council.
The materials are transported as liquids. A puncture from a sniper’s rifle could release the material like an aerosol at high pressure, forming a gas cloud. Chemicals like chlorine could be highly fatal for up to 14 miles if released into a highly populated environment, he said.
Millar said that any local community can pass a local terrorism prevention law, and urges other communities to follow the District of Columbia’s initiative.
Newer train cars have safety measures to prevent hazardous material spills. Most have a system designed to prevent the coupler from puncturing the car, said White. Many of the new tank cars are built from normalized steel, which is stronger than the old material, and are equipped with pressure release devices that would protect the car in case of fire.
Train industry advocates maintain that since hazardous material has to be moved, trains are the best way to do it, and they frequently cite the statistic that trucks carrying hazardous materials are 16 times more likely to be involved in accidents than trains. Because of safety improvements to tracks and railcars, railroads have reduced hazardous material accident rates by 87 percent since 1980.
“We want to do anything possible to ensure that the transportation is as safe as possible,” said Warren Flatau, spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration. “When you look at it in the long-term, there have been tremendous gains.”
(Post-Gazette staff writer Nate Guidry contributed to this story.)