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Center for Biological Diversity:
Oil Trains
POLITICO, April 30, 2014

Oil train derails, burns in Lynchburg
By Kathryn A. Wolfe and Bob King

A train carrying crude oil derailed in a fiery crash Wednesday afternoon in downtown Lynchburg, Va., prompting the evacuations of hundreds of people in a region where activists had been warning of the dangers of oil trains.

The crash is the latest in a series of accidents across North America involving railroads’ crude oil shipments, which have surged dramatically as oil production rises in regions like North Dakota’s Bakken shale and western Canada. Federal regulators have faced criticism for reacting too slowly to the problem, while oil transport by rail has inspired political and legal squabbles from Albany, N.Y., to the San Francisco Bay area.

Hours after the crash, the U.S. Department of Transportation submitted a hotly awaited package of proposed rules on oil train safety to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

Wednesday’s derailment was apparently the first crude-oil train accident to occur in Virginia in at least 43 years, based on a search of DOT data — a fact that fits the pattern of the fuel shipments stretching to new parts of the country. Yorktown has become an oil destination following the conversion of a former refinery into a storage and shipping terminal.

CSX, which runs the railroad where Wednesday’s crash occurred, said the train had come from Chicago. The company would not say whether the derailed train passed through Washington, D.C.

The Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group, cited the crash in repeating its call for a moratorium on oil-train shipments in the Northeast.

“Every day trains with tens of thousands of barrels of highly flammable Bakken crude are rumbling through cities and small towns across the country, endangering people, rivers, wetlands and wildlife,” said Mollie Matteson, senior scientist at the group’s Northeast office in Vermont.

Nobody was killed or injured Wednesday, but the accident’s effects were being felt almost 100 miles away in the state capital of Richmond, which draws its drinking water from the James River downstream of the accident site. Richmond was prepared to switch to an alternative water source if necessary, while placing protecting booms near its water intake, city officials told the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

In Lynchburg, authorities shut down roads and bridges, evacuated businesses and homes and sent buses to help people leave the downtown area, while debris was preventing employees of a pipe foundry from leaving, according to the Lynchburg News & Advance. The city said later that residents could return to their homes, although areas including trails along the river remained closed.

The Federal Railroad Administration was sending inspectors to the scene, while Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said in a statement that Adam Thiel, the state’s deputy secretary of public safety and homeland security, was on his way. He “will provide my team and me with constant updates as this situation unfolds,” the governor said.

The National Transportation Safety Board, which held a two-day forum last week on the dangers of oil trains, was also sending investigators to the crash site.

JoAnn Martin, director of communications for the city, told POLITICO that the derailment involved 12 to 14 CSX tanker cars carrying crude oil, with three or four of them breached and still aflame. Some 300 people have been evacuated from nearby buidings due to “heavy smoke and flames.”

“The fire department is watching it, assessing it, but it’s pretty much burning itself out,” Martin said. No injuries have been reported.

The crash site is astride the James River. Gary Roakes, the public safety director in Amherst County, told local television station WSET that some of the “product” from the trains ended up in the river.

WSET also quoted a bystander who said the tracks appeared to “give way” shortly before the accident.

© 2014 POLITICO LLC.

This article originally appeared here.

Photo © Paul S. Hamilton