Lac-Mégantic fallout continues for crude oil shippers

A Canadian Pacific train of empty tank cars heads west for reloading. The train is passing Hammond, Ind., on Norfolk Southern’s Chicago Line, over which CP has trackage rights. Photo by Paul Burgess

The effects from the summer’s deadly oil train derailment at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, continue to ripple across the railroad industry, and crude oil shippers may be the next ones to feel the heat.
 
On July 6, 2013, an unmanned and unattended Montreal, Maine, & Atlantic freight train carrying crude oil derailed after a brake failure and subsequent uncontrolled descent down a grade outside the small Canadian town. The derailment caused several tank cars to explode and ignited a catastrophic fire in the town center; an estimated forty-seven residents were killed.
 
Since then, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, the U.S. Federal Railroad Administration, and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration have imposed a variety of actions on the railroad industry. The most recent actions were published in the November 20, 2013, issue of the Federal Register, in which the FRA and pipeline administration issued a follow up safety advisory to their actions of last summer.
 
The new advisory points out the continuing emphasis on correctly classifying hazardous materials; specifically, it calls on both the petroleum and rail industry to verify that the correct Packing Group (I, II, or III) is assigned to the various grades of crude oils that are being loaded into tank cars and carried on freight trains across both the United States and Canada.
 
Packing Groups are a sub-classification of hazardous materials, in addition to the general hazard class to which they belong. (For instance, petroleum liquids are assigned to Hazard Class 3, Flammable or Combustible Liquids. A material like sodium hydroxide would be assigned to Hazard Class 8, Corrosives, Dynamite to Hazard Class 1, Explosives, and so on. Nine hazard classes exist, covering a wide range of materials.)
 
Packing Groups also make reference to the degree of risk involved in transporting the specific material, with Packing Group I representing the highest level of risk, and Packing Group III the lowest. In the case of flammable liquids, the flash point of the material, which is the lowest temperature at which the material vaporizes in sufficient quantity to form a flammable mixture with air near the surface of the liquid, is the determiner of the Packing Group. Materials that have low flash points (and thus greater vaporization rates) are assigned a higher risk than those with higher flash points.
 
Although the Lac-Mégantic incident is still under investigation, speculation has been rife that the contents of the oil train may have been mistakenly classified as the less volatile Packing Group III, when instead upon investigation the cargo allegedly exhibited the flash point characteristics of the more volatile Packing Group II. The consequences of this type of misclassification, and its possible impact on the severity of the accident, remain unclear.
 
Nevertheless, the FRA and pipeline administration announced the launch of “Operation Classification,” which is described in the advisory as “a compliance investigation initiative involving unannounced inspections and testing by PHMSA and FRA to verify the material classification and packing group assignments selected and certified by offerors of petroleum crude oil.”
 
The advisory also delineates the available classifications and packing group assignments for both Petroleum Crude Oil, (UN 1267, a number observers would see on the tank car’s hazardous material placard) and Petroleum Sour Crude Oil (UN 3494).
 
Interestingly however, the domestic classification NA 1270, which also refers to Petroleum Oil and falls under the same bulk packing instructions as UN 1267 and UN 3494, is left unaddressed.
 
UN and NA numbers are identification numbers assigned by the Hazardous Materials Regulations that the U.S. Department of Transportation enforces as a way of directly identifying specific chemical materials in addition to their names. (To learn more, search for the Hazardous Materials Tables of the US 49 CFR 172.101.)
 
At the time of this writing, no specific information exists as to where, when, or how often these unannounced inspections will occur. The most logical place for such inspections would be at the outbound terminals for crude loading, since that is where classification must take place. (Classification is required before the material can be transported commercially.) However, whether or not FRA will also spot check materials during transit remains unclear. Conducting such a check would realistically have to involve opening the tanks en route to their consignee to draw samples, which would represent a significant departure from normal practice. A somewhat more likely scenario would involve an additional check of the material at its destination, to verify it is what the shipper attested to.
 
The advisory additionally directs railroad operating companies to review their now in-place “Safety & Securement” plans for trains carrying hazardous materials that are left unattended on mainline tracks or outside of rail yards. The directive creating those plans was initially issued in FRA Emergency Order 28 of August 7, 2013, and those plans are a separate entity from the safety and security plans that were already required by the Hazardous Materials Regulations.
 
In this new advisory, the two agencies direct carriers to “re-evaluate the risks of leaving the equipment subject to the new plan(s) unattended and to review and revise the plans as/if necessary to also take into account the underlying risk assessments required by the HMR.”
 
While the current regulations leave room for continuing the practice of tying down trains with hazardous materials outside of yard limits, albeit with significant new limitations, some railroads are considering or have already banned the practice in their operations and those of their interchange partners (BNSF being one example of taking preemptive action in this regard).
 
The new November 20 advisory shows that the regulatory agencies involved in the investigation of the Lac-Mégantic derailment and associated enforcement actions will continue to take action they deem appropriate to address in a timely fashion any safety issues they uncover, and that both crude oil shippers and railroads will be held accountable to carry out significant new regulatory requirements.

Paul Burgess of Homewood, Ill., is a regulatory specialist and former railroader whose expertise is in the transport of hazardous materials.