My apologies if this has been posted/discussed elsewhere on this forum. (Highlights are mine.)
Toxic Trains - Coming Soon to a Neighborhood Near You
There is nothing more haunting than the sound of a train whistle. There is also nothing more terrifying. Thanks to federal resistance to regulating transport of toxic chemicals, residents of rail hub cities across the country don’t know if the trains they hear are carrying harmless cargo or something more deadly.
Not that the labeling on the rail cars gives anything away. Contents are identified only by codes that require a guidebook to decipher. It makes for scary reading.
Unlike the dubious weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, these are the real deal and the trains that carry them are vulnerable to human error, mechanical breakdown or terrorist acts.
Although most rail cargo is transported without incident, an accident could be catastrophic. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory estimates that if “the wind is in the right direction, 100,000 people could easily die” from the toxic cloud emitted by a ruptured tank.
Another issue: security. Like our nation’s ports, rail yards and toxic chemical plants are woefully under-protected. Stephen Flynn, senior fellow at the Council in Foreign Relations notes, “there are about…15,000 facilities in this country that make chemicals…but only about one-sixth of those are required to have security plans. [For] the rest of them, you don’t have a very good sense of how secure they are or what’s being done to safeguard the public.”
It is nightmare scenarios like these that keep state and local officials up at night and why cities on the northeast corridor and beyond are pushing for legislation that would require freight companies to reroute hazardous rail cargo away from densely populated areas.
Working with the Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club and Greenpeace, the D.C. city council recently passed an ordinance requiring that CSX divert these trains from the capital city and its monuments. It should come as no surprise that the railroad company, supported by the Bush administration, has appealed the decision—a process expected to last (and leave residents unprotected) for up to five years.
The government’s failure to stop the attacks of September 11 has been called a failure of imagination. The official response to Hurricane Katrina was a failure of initiative. Ignoring the problems with toxic trains can only be called a failure of will. According to Fred Millar, an expert on hazardous material transport, there is action you can take. “Learn more about the issue and introduce legislation that reduces the likelihood of a hazardous material accident in your community. Keep the pressure on Congress to mandate alternate routes, greater security at chemical plants and safer practices.”
http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000315.php
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As much as I am willing to stand in line to criticize Bush and his administration's policies, I think this article is such total BS. I wonder if the 'thinkers' at the above-mentioned organizations realize how much they themselves benefit from all of those chemicals. Do those groups propose closing the industries that use those chemicals? Or perhaps do they propose moving those companies away from 'populated' areas? And if they do so, who will work in those industries?
And the way they word the last sentance in the second-to-last paragraph really irks me. Ohhh-the big, bad railroad in conspiracy with Bush, doesn't care about all those people. Sheesh! What a load of cow-pies.
I used to be a supporter (many moons ago) of those groups, but they seem to have become just a self-serving, self-righteous organization that is so concerned about membership levels that they resort to the same tactics (with the opposite political slant) that Fox News uses. Shame on them.
If they succeed, how will Washington get the chlorine to clean their drinking water?
It is delivered in tankcars...so if they divert the tankcars...then it will have to be trucked into the water treatment plant...what a lovely thought, 30 or so tank trucks a day driving in rush hour traffic in the heart of Washington DC...talk about your mobil bomb!
Ed
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These people are radical. There is no other way around it. Supreme "nimby" folks driving their Volvos and preaching to the rest of us how to live our lives.
Chemicals are a way of life.
Their solutions of alternative routes will place the chemicals in someone else's path. Lets see...whom do they wish to endanger...which life is less important than theirs?
I am not going to go political on this forum, but frankly I have had enough of the Bush bashing for Katrina. Mistakes were made frm the locals, state, and feds. It was one heck of a storm. New Orleans sits in a bathtub.
911 was an enormous wake up call for us. I think we are now dozing again, not realizing what our world is. Take a look on this forum at the folks who are upset because their freedom to take a picture of a train is denied. Ok, what do you want...freedom to take a train picture or protection from terrorist activities?
Oh, I forgot...nimby.
ed
MP173 had it right - these bozos want the problem moved somewhere away from them, no matter who else it endangers and how much it increases transportation costs. And, immediately after hazardous materials on trains were rerouted away from them and the herds of tanker trucks started gathering, they would demand stricter regulations or bans on trucks carrying HM. It reminds me of California making emissions regulations more strict for powerplants, which caused the powerplants to be built outside California - it was the perfect solution from their point of view, the problem was exported to somewhere else.
The blockheads in DC city government are going to spend a potload of money (probably Federal grants, they wouldn't want to cut down the amount of their funds available for waste, fraud, graft and corruption) "studying" ways to reroute hazardous rail cargo around the District. Never mind that if a terrorist took a wrong turn and ended up in some neighborhoods in DC HE would run screaming in terror, because his life expectancy would be very, very short.
chad thomas wrote:Toxic trains comeing to a neighborhood near you........Guess what, They are already here and have been for a long time. Yet these whackos probably couldn't name more then 1 or 2 (if any) actual accidents involving hazmat. Heck, I'm a railfan and I don't think I could name more then a half dozen or so off the top of my head.
I remember being on one of my "rides" with the crew of the Magma Turn local back in '92, we went to Magma to switch out the copper mine lines there (Magma Railroad and Copper Basin Railroad). Among copper ingots to pick up, were tank cars of sulphuric acid that was recovered from the copper smelting process. The conductor told me to stand away from the cars as the train was being switched - stating that it wasn't out of the ordinary for a valve at the top of the tank to allow acid to spray 50' into the air during a hard couple. The acid (hazmat code 1830) was not full strength, but was strong enough to melt the flesh off of your arm on contact. Anyways, this train would normally have anywhere from 2 to 15 of these tanks on it on the inbound run to Phoenix, and it ran nightly 6 days a week.
In many, many years of this train running and not having one accident, it's a testament to how safely these chemicals can be transported by rail.
Brian (IA) http://blhanel.rrpicturearchives.net.
Yea, you know what I mean though. Here is one to pucker the media up.
chad thomas wrote:Exactly. These media types are just trying to sensationalize this stuff. Really, what are the odds of a hazmat disaster happening in a major population center. I would be willing to bet it's way over a million to one.
Chad, please don't use the shotgun approach to indict. The origin of the article is the website of a greenie think tank, not the media. In this case.
However, the media is as guilty as sin if it prints it or uses it without balancing statements.
All our political leaders are doing is trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle…and it is way too late for that.
Come on guys, the very machine and internet you are using right now to read this thread allows them to sit in their tent and gather almost any information about trains, planes, ships, traffic patterns, address, phone numbers, products made, products sold, shipped and stored, when where and how…
A few hundred dollars in cell phones, one or two laptops…
It isn’t about physically being present, it is all about gathering the needed information to perform the task they want…and it is all here for free.
You can no more close the US to outside forces than you can stop the planet from turning.
The only real solution is either take the fight to them, not a police action, but a real, all out war with the intent of conquering and occupying their country, or…
Find a way to change their fundamental way of thinking about the US, fix what ever it is that make them hate us, or our country.
Option one will take billions of dollars, and years to complete…option two will take billions of dollars, and years to complete…
Think about the Marshal plan.
Meanwhile, our political leaders need to keep the public fear ratio high, to justify their jobs and agencies, while they try to figure out if there is a option three, which there isn’t, but they really don’t want to chose either of the other options they have…so we embark on a “limited engagement” to “free” a people who didn’t ask to be freed, while we try to figure out how or what to do now.
Cracking down on civil liberties at home does nothing to stop the terrorist abroad.
What we should be doing right now is a modified version of the Berlin airlift into Lebanon.
The average Lebanese could care less about who provides him something to drink…as long as he gets a bottle of water.
Think about this…
Here is a Dad, his kids are now thirsty, cold, homeless, sleeping in the street, with nothing to eat or drink.
Along come Hezbollah, hands him a case of water, a tent and some cots, a few meals, and a hundred bucks…now, who do you think he will support next year?
Flip it around…he looks up and see a few hundred B52s landing with mobile generators, water, food, civil engineers to repair his streets and buildings, he sees US soldiers stringing power lines up, opening a local hospital to treat everyone for free…providing him with a Coke and a Big Mac, handing him shoes for his kids, Cat bulldozers clearing the streets…Chevy Surbans carrying the hurt to the free hospital…
Which one would you like him to see?
Because I can promise you what he is seeing right now and it sure as heck doesn’t have the starts and strips on its side.
silicon212 wrote:Among copper ingots to pick up, were tank cars of sulphuric acid that was recovered from the copper smelting process. The conductor told me to stand away from the cars as the train was being switched - stating that it wasn't out of the ordinary for a valve at the top of the tank to allow acid to spray 50' into the air during a hard couple. The acid (hazmat code 1830) was not full strength, but was strong enough to melt the flesh off of your arm on contact.
Wow. A few weeks ago a train went through with lots of those tanks on it carrying sulphuric acid. I was probably no more than a couple yards away from them, standing on the station platform. After reading this, it's kind of creepy to think what could happen if one of those has a leak...
Keep in mind the majority of train tracks are NOT near population centers…most of this stuff travels thousands of miles out in the boonies, and a few in populated areas.
Yes, some of it is pretty awful, if it gets out of the tankcar.
LPG, Sulfuric acid, hydrocyanictic acid, caustic soda…and Trees methyl-ethyl awful…but tank cars are pretty stout; it takes a lot to bang a hole in one.
The “tank” you see is only a sheet metal cover…like a thermos bottle, there is an inner tank, covered by insulation, braced and protected by the outer tank.
Short of tearing the outlet valve off, you can pretty much beat the tar out of them and they hold.
If you see one”spraying” into the air, you can pretty much bet it is the overfill or safety valve letting off the excess pressure…and yes, if you happen to be right there, it will get on you…which is why we are taught to stand at least ten feet back from the cars unless our job demands us to be closer.
You only real option is to ship it in trucks, on your roads, with your wife, husband or kids driving right next to it…not really an option from my point of view.
It's been fun. But it isn't much fun anymore. Signing off for now.
The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer, any other railroad, company, or person.t fun any
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