American Petroleum Institute Failed to Respond to Concerns of Oil Train Safety

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On July 29, 2013 Thomas J. Herrmann of the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) wrote a letter to Jack Gerard, president andย CEO of the American Petroleum Institute (API). The letter was in response to the oil train disaster that occurred earlier that month in Lac-Mรฉgantic, Quebec,ย whichย killed 47 people and reduced the downtown to a vacant lot (and it remains so over four yearsย later).

Herrmann was writing to Gerard because the oil tank cars hauled by trains are actually owned or leased by members of the American Petroleum Institute, not byย railย companies.

Among the several concerns detailed in Herrmann’s letter about oil train risks was the possibility that oil companies were โ€œoverloadingโ€ the tank cars, but because the oil industry didnโ€™t weigh the cars to check, it was difficult to know if cars were beingย overloaded.

FRA noted that overloaded tank carsย are typically identified when they go over a weigh-in-motion scale at a railroad’s classification yard. However, crude oil is typically moved in unit trains, which haul a single commodity, and the cars in a unit train do not typically pass over theseย scales.

Herrmann also noted at the timeย that there hadย been โ€œproduct releasesโ€ through the top valves on oil tank cars, indicating that the tank carsย wereย overfilled.

Herrmann’s letter suggests that, shortly after the disaster in Lac-Mรฉgantic, there was evidence of the oil industry overloading tank cars. The industry had incentive to do so: The more oil in each tank car,ย the more profit. Longer, heavier trains are more profitable for the oil industry.

Would the industry risk accidents just to make more profit? The oil train involved in the Lac-Mรฉgantic disaster was recently revealed to be almost 50 percent heavier than regulations said it should haveย been.ย 

Weighing theย Evidence

The cause of the June 2016 oil train derailment and fire in Mosier, Oregon, was found to beย sheared boltsย used to hold the rails in place. As rail consultant and former industry official Steven Ditmeyer told DeSmog at the time,ย โ€œThis sounds like a very similar circumstance to what was happening in the early 1990s with overloaded double stack container cars.โ€

According to Ditmeyer, that issue was resolved when the rail industryย started weighing containers before loadingย them on double-stacked cars, an easy fix forย avoiding the problem of overloading.

Except, of course, as noted in Herrmannโ€™s letter, the oil industry doesnโ€™t weighย oil tank cars.

And as previously noted on DeSmog, the LA Times reported in 2015ย that investigators at Canada’s Transportation Safety Board suspected that oil trains were causing unusual track damage.

โ€œPetroleum crude oil unit trains transporting heavily loaded tank cars will tend to impart higher than usual forces to the track infrastructure during their operation,โ€ the safety board said in a report. โ€œThese higher forces expose any weaknesses that may be present in the track structure, making the track more susceptible toย failure.โ€

After oil trains kept derailing, Doug Finnson, president of the Teamsters Rail Conference of Canada, expressed concerns about the forces the trains were exerting on the tracks to CBC News in March 2015, saying, โ€œThese trains are likely too long, too heavy, and going too fast for the track conditions inย place.โ€

All of this came in the years after the Federal Railroad Administration expressed its concerns about overloaded oil tank cars in that 2013ย letter toย API.

The American Petroleum Instituteย Responds

The Federal Railroad Administration required DeSmog to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtainย a copy of APIโ€™s response to Herrmannโ€™s letter, which we have finally received. This is the entirety of theย response.

The oil and gas industry’s largest lobbying group avoided addressing a single questionย from regulators, instead punting to its members. Whether any of those oil companies responded to the Federal Railroad Administration’s concerns remainsย unclear.

This ability to essentially ignore regulators’ safety concernsย speaks to the danger of transportingย oil by rail in Northย America.ย 

Furthermore, all of this played outย before the current anti-regulation agenda of the Trump administration. As we have noted at DeSmog before,ย the new approach known as โ€œperformance based regulation,โ€ which is championed by current FRA administrator nominee Ronald Batory, wouldย move towardย a system of industryย self-regulation.

Based on APIโ€™s response, however,ย industry self-regulation doesnโ€™t appear to be anythingย new.

Main image:ย American Petroleum Institute president and CEO Jack Gerard. Credit: U.S. Department of Energy, publicย domain

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Justin Mikulka is a research fellow at New Consensus. Prior to joining New Consensus in October 2021, Justin reported for DeSmog, where he began in 2014. Justin has a degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University.

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