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Senator promotes oil train safety bill
YOUNGSTOWN
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has brought to Youngstown his campaign for strong safety standards for trains carrying oil and other hazardous materials.
The senator appeared Monday morning with firefighters and public-safety officials at the Mahoning County Emergency Management Agency office to promote the Hazardous Materials Rail Transportation Safety Improvement Act of 2015.
Senate Bill 1175 has been referred to the Senate Finance Committee.
Brown and six other Democratic senators introduced the bill April 30. It would expedite the phase-out of older tank cars and encourage companies to replace them with newer and safer cars. It would provide a tax credit to companies that upgrade newer cars to the highest safety standards.
The measure would fund oil train accident cleanups, advanced training for emergency responders and grants for states and cities to reroute tracks carrying high volumes of hazardous materials away from highly populated areas. These activities would be funded by a $175-per-shipment fee on older tank cars containing crude oil and other hazardous materials.
The measure also would require the U.S. Department of Transportation to give emergency responders real-time train transportation information, update track maintenance standards and study emergency-responder preparedness for train wrecks involving large quantities of flammable liquids.
USDOT predicts trains carrying crude oil or ethanol will derail an average of 10 times a year over the next 20 years, causing up to $4 billion in property damage.
“There’s been growing concern in the Mahoning Valley of potential train derailments with hazardous, and toxic and flammable material,” Brown said. “There have been problems all over the country as more and more flammable, volatile material – typically liquid material – is brought through on increasingly older tank cars.”
As to the bill’s cost, he said: “We don’t know yet, but we do know that it’s paid for out of the hazardous fund that railroads pay into, so it doesn’t cost additional tax dollars.”
Some railroad tank cars are 50 to 60 years old, according to Silverio Caggiano, Youngstown fire battalion chief.
“The steel is not thick enough, the corrosion, the issues of leakage and all – that’s why it’s important to speed up the phase-out of older tank cars,” Brown said.
“Almost every time, when a disaster like that happens, we are playing guesswork when we get there, trying to find a responsible party to identify the product for us, so we have a direction to go” in emergency response, Youngstown Fire Chief John J. O’Neill Jr. said of train wrecks involving dangerous freight.
If it’s enacted, Brown’s proposed legislation would improve the well-being of firefighters, area residents and the environment, he said.
“Any preparedness that we can do on the front end would help mitigate any potential accident,” said Dennis O’Hara, Mahoning County emergency-management director. A busy railroad corridor follows the Mahoning River through Lowellville, Struthers and Youngstown, and busy tracks also run through Beloit and Sebring, he noted.
Mahoning County has a preparedness plan for all hazardous-material-transportation emergencies, whether they occur on roads or railroads, O’Hara said.
Brown’s visit here follows the July 2 nighttime derailment of a CSX train with 27 cars filled with crude oil near Maryville, Tenn., which forced the evacuation of thousands of residents within a 2-mile radius of the accident. In that derailment, a flammable and noxious substance used in plastics manufacture burned for hours in a derailed tank car.
The railroad offered emergency assistance, including temporary lodging, to evacuees at an emergency center at a local high school.
With two locomotives and 57 cars, the train was en route from Cincinnati, to Waycross, Ga.
On its website, the Association of American Railroads said the railroads favor stricter design standards for tank cars that carry crude oil together with safety-enhancement or phase-out of older cars.
An association spokeswoman said her organization has no comment on Brown’s bill.