Panel: As exports climb, so will train traffic

SANDPOINT — Former presidential candidate Ross Perot coined the phrase, “giant sucking sound,” during his failed 1992 presidential bid. He was referring to the sound American jobs would make when they were sucked offshore to cheaper labor markets in developing countries overseas should the then-proposed North American Free Trade Agreement be approved.

The same idea applies to the sudden rise in American oil and coal transport and hoped-for exports by those industries, according to some in a group of panelists gathered at an oil train forum at Sandpoint’s Heartwood Center Wednesday night.

Co-sponsored by Lake Pend Oreille Waterkeeper, Idaho Conservation League, and the Sightline Institute, panelists discussed the potential impacts of increased train traffic through Bonner County, and specifically oil trains hauling potentially explosive Bakken shale oil to ports on the Pacific coast.

The key, according to several panelists, are 11 existing and proposed oil export terminals on the Washington and Oregon coast. One proposed crude oil terminal in Vancouver, Wash., would be the largest in the world, according to Eric de Place, policy director at Sightline Institute, a Seattle-based sustainability think tank.

Those terminals would serve as a vacuum, sucking American oil and coal to energy-hungry Asian markets.

Although some terminals are still in the proposal phase, if built to capacity, the result would be an increase in long train traffic through Bonner County. Those trains — called unit trains because they carry only a single commodity, such as oil or coal — could each be up to a mile long, according to Sightline.

Oil trains alone could increase to as many as 12 per day, “at relatively slow speeds through town,” de Place said.  

“Sandpoint sees every last train bound for the terminals,” de Place said.

Selkirk Fire Rescue & EMS fire chief Ron Stocking, a 32-year veteran firefighter who was responsible for emergency preparedness in Orange County, Calif., before he came to Sandpoint, put what those trains carry into perspective.

“Almost every nasty and bad thing that is known to man travels on railcars, and comes right through Sandpoint,” Stocking said.

The increase in train traffic is a recent phenomenon that began in 2012, when a “radical shift” occurred. Tar sand in Alberta, Canada, and Bakken oil deposits in the Dakotas, began to yield crude oil. Meanwhile, deposits in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming continued to yield vast amounts of coal.

Between those natural resource deposits and coastal export terminals are rail lines that carry oil and coal through a railroad bottleneck known as “the funnel” that runs between Bonner County and Spokane. For Asia to get its coal and oil, much of it must travel through the funnel.

“If they don’t travel through the Pacific Northwest, there probably is no market for them,” de Place said.

Eleven new coal terminals have been proposed on the Cascadia coastline, in addition the expansion of three existing terminals. Fourteen oil-by-rail terminals are also proposed, all newly proposed in the last three years, according to de Place.

“There is something for everyone to hate about these projects,” he said.

The number of trains that pass through Bonner County is a moving target, depending on the source. According to Lake Pend Oreille Waterkeeper information, 50 to 60 trains rumble through Bonner County each day. Of those, about five carry oil or coal, causing about 18 minutes of delay locally while motorists sit at rail crossings waiting for the coal or oil trains to pass.

 If all proposed coal and oil terminals are running at capacity, train traffic would increase to 64 coal or oil trains per day, and cause about 241 minutes — 4 hours — of delay each day.

De Place admitted that BNSF debates the delay numbers, “but it’s really basic math,” he said.

Those delays would have an effect on things like emergency response times.

An increasing number of train derailments correspond to increased oil train traffic, and have resulted in explosions, many catastrophic. According to de Place, between 2005 and 2009 there were 7,398 carloads of crude oil hauled by rail. By 2013 that number had increased to 425,000 carloads.

An interactive National Geographic chart (www.bit.ly/1E23d2s) shows nine accidents involving railroad tank cars in 2010, involving 4,900 spilled gallons of crude oil. By 2014, those incidents rose to 143 accidents and 57,600 gallons of spilled oil.

And that’s just in the U.S. A 2013 derailment in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec killed 47 people and incinerated the downtown area.

“The reason we are seeing derailments and fires with crude oil trains is because we are running so many oil trains,” de Place said. “It’s not safe. It’s fundamentally not a safe enterprise.”

Oil tank cars, many of them originally designed to carry syrup, are prone to explosion during derailment regardless of speed or weather conditions.

“The problem is, we can’t get these things to stop running,” de Place said.

Local emergency officials are preparing for the worst — as best they can. BNSF has supplied some equipment, but the majority of the incident response gear is in either Whitefish, Mont., or Spokane, according to Stocking  

“If we have one of these things happen, we don’t have enough people on duty to handle it,” Stocking said of a train derailment and explosion. “If you think the fire department or any emergency responder is going to go in and solve this problem in the next 30 minutes or 45 minutes, it’s not going to happen.”

Instead, emergency responders will be focused on evacuation — moving people out of harms way while outside forces are mobilized. Their focus will be Sandpoint, with its thousands of residents and tourists. Any train incident in Sandpoint will require the rapid relocation of people “right now — immediately,” Stocking said.

One question raised by a member of the audience was the popular City Beach, which has only two evacuation routes: under the tracks or, if the tracks are blocked by a catastrophic train incident, by water, which emergency responders are not equipped to handle.

“It’s going to be a lot of improvising,” Stocking said of any City Beach response. “A lot of neighbors helping neighbors.”

Asked about a blast radius, Stocking firefighters assume a one-half mile evacuation radius for any train accident.  

According to de Place, railroads accidents and the liability for them are treated differently than other transit-related accidents.

“If you are an airplane manufacturer and you have a battery fire, the federal government grounds those planes until the problem is fixed,” he said, a reference to the 2013 grounding of Boeing 787 Dreamliners due to lithium-ion battery fires.

Cars are recalled regularly for various issues.

“But if you are the oil-by-rail industry, you can have 10 catastrophic explosions in the space of two years — one of them killing 17 people — and then the debate we are having is what is the phase-out period for the older, most dangerous tank cars,” de Place said. “Or should we slow them down in high-threat urban areas.”

Sandpoint, he pointed out, is not considered a high-threat area.

De Place also noted that no other industry is allowed the latitude of railroads.

In terms of cost, the Quebec incident alone required $200 million in cleanup costs, and generated an estimated $2 billion in liability costs against the short line railroad responsible for the derailment, according to Sightline. The railroad declared bankruptcy. The Canadian government paid for the cleanup.

De Place estimated (the actual number is private) that BNSF carries $1.5 billion in liability insurance.

Shannon Williamson, executive director of Lake Pend Oreille Waterkeeper and Sandpoint councilwoman, felt the best focus is on potential environmental issues, noting that the trains travel next to the Pend Oreille River and over the Lake Pend Oreille several times each day.

What’s going to happen if a spill enters the lake? It serves as drinking water for some, she said.

“In reality there’s millions and millions of gallons of oil and a ridiculous amount of coal in those trains, and that’s going to be a really hard thing to clean up,” Williamson said.

And who will pay for cleanup, she said.

The risk of a spill will only increase if a second railroad bridge is constructed over the lake as proposed by BNSF.

She noted that the BNSF “would like you to believe … that it’s just to help us out,” Williamson said. “The real reason is so they can double-track on both sides as far as they can to connect the dots and shove twice as many trains through the community, so now we have twice the risk.”