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A major oil-by-rail terminal proposed on the Columbia River in Washington state poses a potential risk of oil spills, train accidents and longer emergency response times due to road traffic, an environmental study has found.
Many of the risks could be decreased with certain mitigation measures, but the study released Tuesday outlined four areas where it said the impacts are significant and cannot be avoided.
The study said that while "the likelihood of occurrence of the potential for oil spills may be low, the consequences of the events could be severe."
[...] The study identified the four risks that could not be avoided as train accidents, the emergency response delays, negative impacts of the project on low-income communities and the possibility that an earthquake would damage the facility's dock and cause an oil spill.
Washington state panel outlines risk of oil-by-rail terminal
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday November 25 2017, @08:23PM (2 children)
You don't actually have real freight trains in the uk. Great passenger service. Tiny freights and sufficient pipelines so virtually no oil by rail.
The US is the opposite, lots and lots of long freights and not much for passenger service.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO1VvuqDkBI [youtube.com] 16,000 foot train with distributed power units.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMw54zzBVvA [youtube.com] Similar length but double stacked.
UK clocked 64,507 Million Passenger-KM in 2015.
US hauled only 39,287 Million Passenger-Miles in same year.
Few people want to ride a train for 4 days to cross the US. But you can do Wick to Portsmouth in 15 hours using rail and bus.
Pipe lines all over the US reliably deliver oil day in and day out with seldom an incident like the one (suspiciously timed) last week.
Rail shipment of oil is risky business. Usually you lose 40,000 gallons at a time (one tank car) if you lose a drop, and after any accident it often catches fire (big moving metal things).
Whereas pipelines usually can detect leaks within a few hundred gallons and shutdown the entire line, stop pumps, close valves in a couple minutes.
But some people don't want to see pipelines built, so oil gets shipped by rail. Environmental lobby forces the worst case yet again.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Sunday November 26 2017, @02:36AM
Hmm... then, WHY are there thousands of gallons reported for spills from pipelines, and why does it take longer than "minutes" for a response and cleanup?
Just askin'.
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Monday November 27 2017, @12:08AM
A smaller proportion of freight goes by rail in the UK because some weird accounting makes it more expensive for most loads than by road; the road tax on my car for example is getting on for two orders of magitude higher per mile than for a heavy goods road vehicle - so I for one am subsidising them. Nevertheless, it is misleading to say that there are "no real freight trains". There is considerable container rail freight to ports such as Southampton and Felixstow, and I live close to the line from South Wales into England and you don't need to be by it for long (it passes by my local supermarket car park) to see a long oil train originating from the oil terminal port of Milford Haven.
I understand that much rail track in the USA is badily maintained. In the UK OTOH, rail derailments in service are almost unheard of - the word "usually" would have no meaning here. It helps that freight mostly shares with passenger lines, whereas in the USA there are a lot of freight-only lines where they don't seem to be as fussy.
Incidentally, I was once the guy at London Underground Railway's HQ who investigated derailments, or any tendency to derail. I did the maths. The only actual derailments I had to investigate were inside depots, and it was always the case that there was visibly very crappy track on a very sharp curve, both far more extreme than on a service line.