Rail safety is now burning issue

Protests and legal challenges in the past year have targeted coal trains rolling across the northern-tier states to West Coast ports.

Given recent events, however, the protesters might have been more on point if they were concerned about oil trains, not coal trains.

Thanks to skyrocketing production in the Bakken area of Eastern Montana and western North Dakota, there has been a phenomenal surge in long oil-carrying trains — a 40-fold increase in just five years — heading to refineries.

Some of those trains are rolling right through Northwest Montana — along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park in the derailment-prone Middle Fork area, past the edge of Columbia Falls, through downtown Whitefish and around the perimeter of Whitefish Lake.

BNSF says “99.99 percent” of its hazardous shipments are delivered without incident — but it’s that other tiny percentage that is cause for concern.

Three fiery, explosive accidents in the past year have involved trainloads of Bakken crude oil. One was in November in Alabama, one was two weeks ago in North Dakota and the worst was last summer in Quebec, killing 47 people and obliterating a city’s downtown.

It turns out that not just the number of trains but the quality of the crude oil are at play here.

Bakken crude ignites at a lower temperature, meaning it’s “closer to gasoline than to diesel fuel,” according to Columbia Falls Fire Chief Rick Hagen. That means higher volatility and greater chance of explosions.

That leaves local emergency-services officials training and wondering how they will deal with a worst-case scenario such as those other three incidents.

For instance, how do you evacuate tourists from Whitefish if there’s a rail accident at the depot downtown?

“A normal resident knows the railroad is there and they’d know to head down Highway 93,” Whitefish Fire Chief Tom Kennelly said. “But we have a lot of tourists and guests who don’t know that.”

Or how do you deal with a derailed train that sparks a massive wildfire?

“It doesn’t matter how much you train,” Hagen said. “It’s going to be a big disaster.” 

Before we panic and move everyone away from the railroad corridor (neither grizzly bears nor Whitefish residents are likely to go willingly), there are some safeguards that can be taken to make oil on the rails a safer operation. 

The rail industry has called for older, less reliable tank cars to be phased out and wants regulators to require tougher new tank-car standards. Those are both needed improvements.

Tighter enforcement of labeling — to accurately disclose how risky the contents of the tankers are — also might help.

A former North Dakota governor last week called for lower speed limits for oil trains.

All those and more may be needed because the oil output from the Bakken shows no sign of lessening and projections are that railroad oil traffic will continue to increase swiftly.

At some point we might need to consider an option that is anathema to some — more pipelines. The much-debated Keystone XL pipeline isn’t going to ease the Bakken oil-transport dilemma but pipelines tend to have fewer catastrophic accidents than trains, so more pipes might be in our future if we want to continue to capitalize on the oil boom.

Editorials represent the majority opinion of the Daily Inter Lake’s editorial board.