Roundtable Review – Part 1: The latest on rail tank car safety

By Robert L. Sumwalt

 

Member Robert L. Sumwalt opens the Rail Tank Car Roundtable at the NTSB Boardroom and Conference Center.

I had the privilege of moderating a day-long NTSB roundtable pertaining to rail tank car safety on July 13, 2016, in which more than two dozen rail-car manufacturers and owners, union representatives, and transportation safety associations discussed the rail industry’s progress and challenges on implementing new federal safety standards for tank cars that carry flammable liquids. The event provided rail industry leaders an open forum to discuss the logistics of replacing the existing tank car fleet in flammable liquid service to meet new federally imposed deadlines, and to identify ways in which government and industry can overcome roadblocks they face to meeting those mandates.

The U.S Department of Transportation (DOT) is requiring shippers to address the oldest, higher risk tank cars first: DOT-111 tank cars – which historically have been the most common type of cars to carry crude oil and ethanol. Shippers using legacy DOT-111 tank cars to haul crude oil must decide to either retire or retrofit them to new standards by March 2018, at the latest. For the DOT-111 tank cars that haul ethanol, shippers have until May 2023.

The deadlines set by federal officials for compliance are more relaxed for newer, modified version of these tank cars, called CPC-1232s. Deadlines to get CPC-1232s out of service for shipping crude oil and ethanol (or retrofitted to meet DOT-117 standards) extend as far into the future as May 2025. For shipping other Class 3 flammable liquids, shippers have until May 2029.

DOT-117 tank cars are a safer means of transporting flammable liquids because these tank cars are less likely experience a puncture (and therefore, a product release) because of several safety specifications that DOT-111 and CPC-1232 tank cars do not have.

Newly manufactured DOT-117 tank cars are built with a thicker shell that is nine-sixteenths of an inch thick, which is 28 percent thicker than legacy DOT-111 tank cars and most CPS-1232 cars. DOT-117 cars also have thermal and top fittings protection; an extra layer of 11 gauge (approximately 3 mm) steel surrounding the shell, known as a tank jacket; and full-height head shields, which add an extra one-half inch of protective steel on each end of the tank cars. Also, there is improved protection to the bottom outlet valve handle to guard against inadvertent opening during a derailment.

Two main points are relevant when considering whether shippers can meet these new deadlines. First, can tank car manufacturers supply enough cars to meet demand? We were encouraged to hear that manufacturers felt they could.

There are, however, more complex considerations on the demand side. With the recent decrease in domestic oil production, some in the industry see steep price tags for new and retrofitted cars as being prohibitive. “This is a game changer for shippers,” said Gabe Claypool, with Dakota Plains Holdings, Inc., during the roundtable.

John Bryne, of the Railway Supply Institute, agreed. He said economic factors heavily influence the decision making process when it comes to the timing of the legacy tank car phase out. “Industry has done a good job at meeting voluntary improvements for better packaging, but more needs to be done. Also, there needs to be some sort of incentive for the shippers to act more quickly.”

Without those incentives, Bryne warned that progress toward swifter compliance with federal deadlines could be stifled, although the deadlines themselves can be met. This leads to the next point: one hurdle toward quick implementation of these needed changes are, in a sense, the deadlines themselves. With some of the due dates extending nine years or more, shippers and those who currently lease tank cars can wait several more years before the recommendations to phase out older tank cars become absolute law.

While these considerations may make sense from a business perspective, from the NTSB’s perspective, the sooner these changes are made, the better – a belief that is fueled by numerous accidents we have seen involving breached tank cars. In the past decade, there have been 28 significant accidents in the U.S. and Canada involving flammable liquids transported by rail, in which nearly 5 million gallons of crude oil and ethanol have spilled. In each of these accidents, legacy DOT-111 or CPC-1232 tank cars were used to transport flammable liquids. If past performance is a predictor of future performance, continuing to transport crude oil and ethanol in DOT-111 or CPC 1232 tank cars poses an unacceptable public risk.

Several roundtable participants expressed optimism that the deadlines could be met.

Robert Fronczak, assistant vice president of the American Association of Railroads, provided statistics showing the number of legacy DOT-111 tank cars in crude oil transportation has steadily decreased since 2013 – from a peak of more than 21,600 three years ago, to just 708 through the first quarter of this year.

Kevin Neels, Ph.D., a transportation and research consultant with The Brattle Group, stated those numbers are a sign industry is headed in the right direction. “A lot of the riskiest cars are going out of service. And that’s good. We need to continue to monitor this to ensure that risk-prone tank cars stay out of service. In due course, we’ll see a much safer fleet hauling these materials.”

In next week’s blog, we will discuss how the industry is monitoring its progress and the available options for meeting the earliest federal deadlines.

 

Robert L. Sumwalt is an NTSB Board Member.

Rail Tank Car Safety Improvements, Up Close and Personal

By Christopher A. Hart

The North American energy boom has resulted in placing rail tank cars into service as ad-hoc pipelines; it’s the ad-hoc part that is troubling. Several recent high-profile derailments and hazmat releases have resulted in pressure to make transportation of flammable liquids by rail tank cars safer.

In January, the NTSB placed Improve Rail Tank Car Safety on our Most Wanted List of transportation safety improvements. We recently issued four urgent recommendations calling for an aggressive schedule of replacing or retrofitting the current rail car fleet with better thermal protection against heat from fires and installing appropriately sized  pressure relief devices. And earlier this week, I testified before Congress on the issue of rail safety, including rail tank car safety.

Today, a team of NTSB investigators and I visited The Greenbrier Companies, where they manufacture, repair, and refurbish rail tank cars. They gave us a first-hand look at the intricacies of making and servicing rail tank cars at the Hockley & Greens Port facility.

What I learned today only underscored my confidence that the necessary retrofits can be completed in much less than the ten years that has been proposed by some in the industry. We saw how the existing tank car fleet can be retrofitted with puncture resistance and thermal protection systems, and valve protection to significantly reduce the possibility of releases in accidents of highly flammable materials such as crude oil and ethanol. We also saw significantly improved tank cars that exceed current federal and industry standards for puncture resistance and thermal protection. Retrofitting the fleet can be done in less than a decade.

We know that preventing tragedies will require a systems approach that keeps trains from derailing, especially in sensitive areas, preserves tank car integrity if a derailment occurs, and prepares our emergency responders for such events.

Our visit has given us deeper insight about how the industry is preparing to meet the crashworthiness challenge. What I learned today gave me a better understanding of how this work can be done safely and quickly.

Deadly Addictions

NTSB Board Member Robert Sumwalt moderates roundtable on “Disconnect from Deadly Distractions,” held at the NTSB Boardroom and Conference Center.

By Robert Sumwalt

At the NTSB’s March 31 Roundtable — Disconnect from Deadly Distractions — an interesting discussion emerged about the “addictive” nature of staying connected through our personal electronic devices (PEDs). “There is nothing more interesting to the human brain than other people,” stated Dr. Paul Atchley. He explained that dopamine is one of the brain’s reward chemicals that produces positive feelings and sensations. “There is nothing more rewarding than the opportunity to talk to someone else,” said Dr. Atchley. Because connecting with others produces a release of dopamine into the brain’s midsection, it is very difficult for us to ignore the urge to connect with others.

Andrea Brands of AT&T followed-up on that point by mentioning a survey the company conducted last year through Dr. David Greenfield, founder of The Center for Internet and Technology Addiction. They found that 74% of the 1004 people surveyed admitted to engaging in texting or checking social media while driving. A large percentage of the survey respondents rationalized that behavior even though they knew it was dangerous — a true sign of addictive behavior, said Ms. Brands.

Dr. Greenfield stated in a November 2014 interview, “We compulsively check our phones because every time we get an update through text, email or social media, we experience an elevation of dopamine, which is a neurochemical in the brain that makes us feel happy. If that desire for a dopamine fix leads us to check our phones while we’re driving, a simple text can turn deadly.”

Whether we call it addictive, compulsive, or just a habit, the fact remains that using a PED while operating any vehicle is dangerous business. It can be deadly.

Nowhere was this fact more apparent than in the NTSB’s investigation of the August 5, 2010, multi-vehicle crash near Gray Summit, Missouri. In this accident, a 19-year-old pickup truck driver slammed into the back of a stopped tractor trailer, setting up a chain reaction crash involving two school buses following behind. In the thirteen minutes immediately before the crash, the 19-year-old driver sent and received 11 text messages on his phone. The tragic result of his choice to drive distracted was the loss not only of his own life, but also the life of a 15-year-old student aboard one of the buses.

The NTSB is very concerned with distractions in all modes of transportation. Please, give yourself the permission to disconnect from deadly distractions. Break the addiction, and save lives.

What does transportation have to do with your health? . . . Everything!

By Natalie Draisin

Often, I get some confused looks when I tell people I’m doing an internship at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) as part of my joint public health and business degrees at Johns Hopkins University. “What does transportation have to do with public health?” they ask.

Actually, transportation has a whole lot to do with public health. How did you get to work or school today? If you walked, drove, cycled, or took a bus, you were in danger of a life-changing incident. You could’ve been struck by another vehicle. Imagine the hospital bills, the lost productivity, and the debilitating consequences. Flown on a plane recently? Did your palms sweat a little when the turbulence started? You probably arrived at your destination safely, nonetheless. That’s because your pilot was well trained, following safety protocols and mitigating the inclement weather that in another situation, could have brought the plane down.

If you believe that you have the right to cross the street without worrying about being hit, injured, or killed by a drunk driver, or you believe that you have the right to board a plane, take off, and land safely – then you believe in transportation safety, and you believe in public health.

The two are integrally linked – think about the effects of a transportation incident on our public’s health. When a bus carrying an entire high school band crashes, it has a ripple effect, impacting the rest of the transportation system, the health system, and of course, the victims’ families. Miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic will follow, which could lead to further crashes, along with lost productivity when you, and everyone else caught in traffic, are late to work. Hospitals nearby will receive an influx of patients. In major incidents, it’s often more than one hospital can handle. Victims may not be able to function at the same level thereafter, and their families might be permanently scarred, in desperate need of mental health services.

When a pipeline bursts (pipelines are a mode of transportation, as they bring something from one place to another), it has economic, environmental and health repercussions. Remember the 2010 pipeline rupture and fire in San Bruno, California? More than 4 years later, that community is still rebuilding homes and infrastructure; families are still trying to pick up the pieces. Transportation incidents don’t occur in a bubble, they affect society at large, which inherently includes, of course, the public’s health.

What is it about public health that uniquely positions the field to address transportation, and particularly traffic, safety? Public health is about protecting and improving the health and safety of the population. Public health figures out what’s hurting and killing people, and then uses evidence-based initiatives to fix it. We call that preventing morbidity and mortality. And, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, motor vehicle crashes are a leading cause of injury in our country – 2,362,000 injured and 33,561 killed in 2012. The CDC estimates that Americans spend over one million days in the hospital each year from crash related injuries. In 2012, that translated into $18 billion in lifetime medical costs, and $33 billion lost in lifetime work, such as lost wages or benefits. That’s a lot of lives changed, expenses incurred, and productivity lost.

Though it may not seem like it, transportation incidents have a lot of characteristics similar to a disease, which public health analyzes through the lens of a host, agent, and the environment. In a car crash, the host could be the young driver; the agent, the impact of the car hitting another car; and the environment, the slippery roads at night. Like a disease, public health can intervene in a number of ways to reduce the occurrence of crashes – for example, implementing graduated driver’s licenses so youth can gain more experience before having full driving privileges, incorporating airbags and seat belts into cars to reduce the impact of a crash, or equipping roads with reflectors and guard rails to make it easier to see at night and in the rain, and harder to veer into oncoming traffic. Also like a disease, the incidence of these crashes can be tracked, so we can see if our interventions are working and revise them when they’re not.

The government recognizes that it has a responsibility to keep the public safe from incidents while using our transportation system, and that’s why they’ve created organizations like the NTSB. It’s not a public health agency, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t address public health issues. And the good news is that through the help of agencies like the NTSB, we can work towards decreasing crash rates. The NTSB investigates accidents, determines probable cause, assists families, and then issues recommendations to federal agencies to prevent future accidents. This leads to life-saving changes.

At the NTSB, though, I didn’t sit at a desk and analyze crash data. I helped the NTSB address all elements of the public health triad – the host, the agent, and the environment. In the Safety Advocacy Division of the Office of Communications, I helped craft messages to internal and external stakeholders, to obtain support for our recommendations. Working with staff from the Office of Aviation Safety, I’ve drafted some of the web content for the NTSB’s Most Wanted List. I also wrote advocacy blogs about traffic safety, and tweets for forums. Building on my prior drunk driving prevention work, I’ve researched state laws addressing ignition interlocks (breathalyzers on cars to prevent drunk driving), and Automatic License Revocation. Some of these projects I’ve dreamed of working on for years, since I first became involved in traffic safety after the tragic death of a friend in college who was hit and killed by a drunk driver.

Throughout my internship, I’ve picked up invaluable skills. I’m fortunate to work for an outstanding group who were equally committed to developing my skills, providing constructive feedback, while at the same time, finding the synergy between their important safety work and mine. They are equally as talented and dedicated, and they’ve given me the opportunity to work with them on a variety of topics and projects. This team is representative of many of NTSB’s employees, some of the smartest, most driven people I’ve encountered. So, what does traffic safety have to do with public health? Everything.

Natalie Draisin was a graduate student intern in the Safety Advocacy Division.

Preview: Rail Safety Forum, April 22-23

Rail Safety: Transportation of Crude Oil and Ethanol

At the NTSB, our 2014 dawned with a team o finvestigators working the scene of a serious railroad accident near Casselton, North Dakota, where 20 cars of a106-car BNSF Railway train carrying petroleum crudeoil collided with cars from a derailed BNSF grain train. More than 476,000 gallons of crude oil were released in the accident, and a massive fire triggered a voluntary evacuation of 1,400 people from the surrounding area and resulted in millions of dollars in damage.

 The nation’s railroad network is taking on an expanding role as a major channel for the transportation of crude oil and other hazardous products, which could mean that accidents like the one in Casselton will become more common. While soaring volumes of crude oil and ethanol traveling by rail has been good for business, there is a corresponding obligation to protect our communities and our environment. Everyone – industry, regulators, and first responders – must takea comprehensive approach to eliminate or significantly reduce the safety risks. This approach must include improvements to track inspection and maintenance programs and the crashworthiness of the tank cars that transport these materials.

Next Tuesday and Wednesday, April 22 and 23, the NTSB will hold a forum to address rail safety specific to the transportation of crude oil and ethanol. We have invited researchers, crude oil and ethanol shippers, tank car builders, railroad carriers, emergency responders, and federal regulatory agencies to discuss the safety of crude oil and ethanol transportation by railroad, as well as ways to reduce the consequences from accidents involving flammable liquids through tank car design, railroad operations, and emergency preparedness. As the people of Casselton, North Dakota, can attest, we must do everything we can to ensure that transport of crude oil and ethanol by rail is as safe as it can be.