Maybe you didn't hear about the poison gas attacks on American communities this year. No? Well in January two towns in Kentucky were attacked, a day apart. OK, there weren't exactly not exactly attacked. That part isn't true. But assume for a moment that each of the following two incidents was the result of terrorists:
Irvine, Kentucky, January 15, 2007: Four railway training cars were sent careening twenty miles down a track before colliding with unoccupied engines in a town of 3000 people. On impact, a flammable solvent, butyl acetate, ignited and then exploded. People living in twenty households were evacuated to avoid breathing the toxic plume. 3000 Irvine resident were advised to "shelter in place." 320 employees of nearby businesses were kept from work for 2 days until air monitoring indicated it safe to return. The next day, in nearby Brooks, Kentucky, railroad tank cars with hazardous materials derailed. The chemicals they were carrying were destroyed by allowing them to burn through the night. They included the potent carcinogen 1,3-butadiene, which was later found in air and water samples near the site.
Thirty-one persons, examined
After this incident occurred, approximately 350 persons from homes, schools, and businesses within a 1-mile radius of the release site were evacuated for 2 hours. Thirty-five residents of 15 homes were prohibited from returning home for approximately 6 weeks until contaminated plastic water lines (penetrable by released chemicals) were replaced. Approximately 300 persons from outside the evacuation area but within the path of the plume were ordered to shelter in place. In addition, an 8-mile stretch of an interstate highway approximately 0.5 mile from the release site and in the path of the plume was closed for 12 hours. (CDC, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports)
These two incidents are just the tip of the iceberg, an iceberg that includes, for just the 17 states where the data were available, over 11,000 transportation related hazardous materials accidents, all in the four years post 9-11. Over 1000 were railroad accidents, 78 of them involving chemical dispersions more than 200 feet from the point of release. The most common factors were equipment failure and human error. Five of the events involved chlorine releases. One was a catastrophic railroad collision near Graniteville, South Carolina where 11.500 gallons of chlorine were released killing 9 workers and sending over 500 people to medical attention.
CDC reports about 1.8 million carloads of hazardous materials shipped by rail each year, many through densely populated urban areas. Over 100,000 have materials posing acute inhalation hazards. The good news is that the rate of rail events is amenable to regulation and intervention and had been declining until 9/11. But from 2002 onward it has been increasing again, going first to 3.76/million miles in 2202 to 4.38/million miles in 2004 before a slight decrease to 4.08/million miles in 2005. But, as in Graniteville, some of the events, although counting only once in the 2005 rate, exposed large numbers of people and resulted in fatalities and illness in the surrounding community.
The railroads have always objected to re-routing hazardous materials around densely populated cities. While every citizen is subjected to the ridiculous charade of taking off their shoes at the airport, this administration has been unwilling to apply pressure to railroads. The railway giant CSX finally agreed to reroute their hazardous cargo around Washington, DC (after unsuccessfully going to court to avoid it), but the result has been a sharp increase in cargo and incidents around other towns.
From 1999 through spring 2004, not a single CSX train carrying hazardous materials had an accident in Central New York.
In the following two years - since CSX began a voluntary, anti-terrorism detour of trains carrying hazardous material around Washington, D.C. - at least 11 CSX trains carrying toxic freight have been involved in accidents in Central New York.
Three of those trains - including one that derailed Monday and exploded in a fireball in Oneida - leaked hazardous chemicals into the environment, according to records from the Federal Railroad Administration. (The Post-Standard, Syracuse)
Who needs terrorists? Are we safer now than before 9/11? Not safer from dying from one of our own, politically protected and unregulated industries.
Heck of a job, George.
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As well to take note that chemical derailments are of the class of disaster which require broadcast media to warn large numbers of people in a timely manner.
That capability has itself been undermined by corporate consolidation of broadcast. Consider the Minot ammonia cloud of 2002.
Clear Channel had bought out several local radio stations, canned the staff, and turned the stations into essentially uncrewed robot repeaters. Need to get an emergency message put out on the air? The robot is not taking requests.
The technology can certainly be imagined whereby emergency authorities would be able to submit warnings to such automated stations. Has it been budgeted for, designed, and deployed? No, no, and no.
--
Marquer: Interesting analysis of radio consolidations downside. I know here in RI all radio and TV stations are required to be hooked into the emergency broadcast system and regular tests are performed.
I say this knowing that I work < 100 ft from a rail track that regularly carries Providence & Worcester RR freighters at least three or four times a day. And they carry some nasties too.
Not only that but the section of track near my office also passes over the West River. You can imagine what a disaster that would be.
It was really JWB that got me thinking about it (I hadn't got farther than the nuke plant bits) but, what about all the hazardous chemical accidents,
fires, pollution of air/land/water/ecosystem that will happen once pandemic starts making people sick, or disrupting supply chains, transport, security?
What happens when no one is minding the chemical stores?
What happens when we lose the people that know what is where, when something needs to be done to it,
and
what to do with it
and what not to do with it?
:-/
Do anyplace's official pandemic plans take into account securing all hazardous materials safely? Or at least clearly identifying them?
Does they know what is in the warehouses, on the rails, in the ports, bubbling away unattended in some factory, when the workers are fled, dead, or so the place is so understaffed people don't know how to get a handle on things?
(Heck; in peoples homes and garages for that matter...Labels and precautionary statements if applicable, would be nice. What did gramps put in these containers?)
Time to change my name to CSX. . . .
Besides being yet another Bush Bash Revere let me clue you into a few things. After 9/11 the Bush Administration started a review of safety procedures for all of the various railroads, and those such as Dupont, ICI, W.R.Grace and how they transported and protected those chemical cars. Bhopal India for instance was created when one single cup of isocyanate hit water and produced a gas. That gas blew thru a valve and one hell of a lot of people died. As a result of that ALL trains and high danger cargo tanks and cars all have their own GPS locators. If a car deviates from its intended track by 13.75 feet or more, they assume a derailment or a theft.
Those tank cars represent a clear and present danger and part of the problem IS the fact that they are being rerouted away from cities. Those lines while viable are not designed to take the traffic say that you see along the highway types of lines. Looks the same? I thought so too until I took a primer course with the folks from ICI. They wont even let them transport the stuff as part of the normal rail traffic now. It goes special delivery and they use their own loco to move it. EXPENSIVE to the nth degree. They are also routing the Amtrak commuters over cargo rail traffic routes so there is more danger at any given time. Those Amtrak trains blast away at 70 mph in many sections. The cargo carriers are required to do no more than 50.
Anything that is related to human error IS preventable. Someones procedures werent followed, but you would have to go a LONG way Revere to say that this is yet another thing that is GWB's fault that accidents are debatably on the rise. The record proves that this is not true.
http://transportation.house.gov/news/PRArticle.aspx?NewsID=182
http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/Forms/Default.asp
ON this one click the Railroad Safety Annual Report for 2005 which contains the last some ten years. The total number of accidents and incidents is DOWN Revere. You can also just put it into a search and it should bring it up by that name.
Randy: The Bush admin. is notorious in it lack of attention to chemical safety. Regarding the numbers, you can also use the link I provided -- from CDC. I'm glad you know how Bhopal happened -- because experts are still arguing over it.
I travel over CSX tracks transporting hazmat substances less than one mile from the National Capitol every time I take the train to Baltimore. Nothing has changed.
If I were a railroad spokesperson I'd be pointing out that 1000 out of 11,000 transportation related hazardous materials accidents isn't so bad, especially if you consider that over 20 percent of the ton-miles were rail versus, say, truck. Maybe "accidents" isn't the best measure anyway; not even something like "gallons spilled" seems adequate, because you'd be lumping spilled soybean oil with spilled insecticide. Figuring out what is really the safest way to move stuff could get a little complicated, but it surely ain't exactly rocket science. Or epidemiology.
Racter: Nothing is simple. The CDC link dealt with accidnts of public health importance, which is why I discussed it. And even though it's not simple, there are things that can be done regarding how to move and what routes to take, work practices and much else. The regulated industry doesn't want to be regulated. That's understood. I don't want to take off my shoes at the airport, either.
I didn't mean to suggest that the matter is not relevant to public health, but that the difficulty in calculating the relative risks (road versus rail) doesn't seem particularly daunting compared to the complexities routinely encountered in epidemiology.
What "pandemic flu" and "peak oil" have in common is that the only thing in dispute among experts is the timing; they all agree that at some point we will face these threats. Over a number of decades, we have continued to become more dependant on roadways and less dependant on railways. This cannot be sustained much longer. Moving stuff by rail may be awkward where "just in time" delivery is the guiding principle, but it's MUCH more efficient in terms of fuel, and I feel confident in predicting that in the years ahead, that's going to start to seem REAL important.
I think a close look will reveal railways to be safer as well, even now. When railway accidents do occur they tend to be rather spectacular, but I'm willing to bet that taken as a whole, a lot more hazardous materials are released into the environment in roadway accidents than in railway accidents. Certainly, railway accidents are not acceptable even if they are relatively rare, and the National Rail Safety Action Plan initiated in 2005 appears to include some fairly aggressive measures. One passage I find to be of particular interest:
"[i]Two categories of accidents -- those caused by defective track and those caused by human factors -- comprise more than 70 percent of
all train accidents[/i]."
Better regulation might reduce accidents of the human error type, and it looks like they are working on that, but I see defective track as a symptom of a more serious underlying problem: America has badly neglected her railway infrastructure. (If I recall correctly, the way Al Gore put it was: "we have a railway system that Romania would be ashamed of"). I see this as a problem not easily solved through a top-down approach; the decision was made long ago to commit to laying asphalt instead of rail, and the lives of millions of Americans are wrapped around the assumption that that's going to continue to work. If they don't start giving more thought to what changes they'd need to make in order to accomodate some very significant increases in the price of fuel, they're going to be in for a world of hurt.
Amnesty Intl.
http://web.amnesty.org/library/pdf/ASA200152004ENGLISH/$File/ASA2001504…
London based study
http://www.bhopal.com/pdfs/casestdy.pdf
Human intervention or really the lack of it caused that one. Series of events not interdicted along the way. Either way the known factor is that water or contaminant liquid entered the tank.(Most believe water because they know how it reacts) Isocyanate is warm when its manufactured and when it hits water.... poof. Could have been something else entering the tank under pressure but all of the safeguards failed apparently too... due to human intervention. Calling Jimmy Carter, Three Mile Island is under control.
Rail cars also Revere have been redesigned and the older ones are being retrofitted or removed from service. Like ships, double and triple hulled. Drops the capacity a bit but used to be you could hit one with a .50 cal round and pop it open. Not anymore. Another thing that was found was that bogies manufactured in 1955 were still in use. The wheels started cracking causing derailments. Oh they fixed it and part of it was done under Clinton, but the majority under Bush.
Also, the regulation of the industry relating to hazardous waste is done by Congress and administered by whatever Administration. If they dont follow the law then thats one thing. If its open to interpretation its another. E.g. I can load 20,000 pounds of explosives with a permit onto a 747 right here in Memphis with an exemption, but I cant move anything higher than a firecracker capability in an overnight package. So what are they going to do reroute air traffic too because I would rather have a train go up rather than a load of biohazardous in the air. Strange, but its been like that for 50 years. Rails are safer than they have been in years. I read the CDC report but its a pulldown of selected information as best I could tell. Reading that I would have drawn the same conclusion as you did. But is that a purview of the CDC? Is it a health issue relating to train derailments, collisions, or leaks?
Equipment failures happen a lot. Valves stick, someone goes too fast in a parallel track arrangement and clips the train going the other way? I agree that the effects are health related once there is an accident/incident. It doesnt give them jurisdiction to make the statements that I think they are pushing. That being that because of "X" reason we have to assume that routing cars away from cities would improve the health situation after an accident/incident. In fact Revere it could ensure the death of an entire city. If the plume from a toxic spill or fire were out on the perimeter and the wind was right it would spread in a fan shape. It could engulf the whole city instead of part of it. Lots to consider. Rather take part than the whole banana.
Could they do more? Yeah! But until its integrated into law and what is not open for interpretation we can only keep our fingers crossed.
Want to talk about soft steel in the summertime in DC on rails and how it anneals them for breakage in the really cold winters? Or how they bend when those cargo cars roll over rails intended for pax traffic? Hmmmmmm.............
Hey, watch out for janitors too.
This is about medical processing equipment cleaning, but I'm sure it applies to cleaning railroad tank cars as well:
http://www.labtechnologist.com/news/ng.asp?n=77372-roche-cleaning-valid…