Canadian Rail Disaster Investigation....
The Canadian Rail disaster (one of the worst ever) was caused
by lax regulations and poor oversight……Shocking I know.
When companies are left to do what they want to do, usually
what they want to do is save money. They
do that by cutting corners. That leads
to people being killed. In this case 47
people were killed.
Eighteen errors lines up to cause last summer's catastrophic
derailment of a runaway train in the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, Canadian
accident investigators said Tuesday, concluding an investigation that has
revealed serious safety lapses in the transport of crude oil through Canada and
the United States.
Among the factors: a "weak safety culture" in the
railroad that transported the oil; a government agency that required safety
plans from industry but did little to check them; and a train that consisted
almost entirely of substandard tanker cars.
Those tanker cars -- known as DOT 111s -- still carry the
bulk of the oil from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to ports on the east
coast of the United States and Canada, although both countries -- spurred by
the Lac-Mégantic tragedy -- are taking steps to phase them out.
The Lac-Mégantic derailment was among the most disastrous in
modern North America. Forty-seven people died, some 40 buildings were destroyed
and 53 vehicles were demolished when the 63 tank cars and two boxcars derailed
and erupted in flames. About 2,000 residents of the community were evacuated.
The Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB) listed 18
factors contributing to the disaster, but declined to say whether any were more
serious than the others. The accident may have been avoided if any one of the
18 factors were not present, the TSB's Jean Laporte told reporters.
Crude oil shipments by rail have increased dramatically in
the past decade as oil companies have perfected technologies to extract oil
from shale. The increase took a number of people by surprise, including
government regulators, Tadros said.
In Canada, rail shipments of oil have increased from a mere
500 carloads in 2009 to 160,000 in 2013. In the U.S., shipments have increased
from 10,800 carloads to 400,000 in the same period.
Tadros and Laporte said Transport Canada has taken measures
of phase out the use of DOT-111 tankers -- one of three recommendations made in
January in an unprecedented joint recommendation by the safety boards of both
countries. But they sidestepped questions about whether newer, stronger tankers
would have remained intact in the Lac-Mégantic derailment. TSB investigator Don
Ross said there are "not enough data points" to determine whether
newer tankers would have survived the incident.
The incident occurred July 6, 2013, when an engineer for the
Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) parked the train for the night on
a descending grade.
Investigators said the engineer set seven of the train's hand
brakes, far fewer than the 17 to 26 needed to prevent the train from rolling.
The additional holding power of the train's air brakes kept the train secure at
first. But when a fire broke out in the lead locomotive because of a mechanical
problem, the locomotive was shut down, an no additional air was provided to the
air brakes.
A slow air leak led to the failure of the air brakes, and the
unattended train rolled down the incline, reaching a top speed of 65 miles per
hour before derailing seven miles away at a curve in Lac-Mégantic.
Many of the cars were split open, releasing large amounts of
crude oil, which ignited, causing large fireballs and a pool fire.
The TSB said the railroad cut corners on engine maintenance
and training, and that crude oil trains "ran largely unchecked" by
Transport Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the U.S. Department of
Transportation.
MMA filed for bankruptcy after the disaster. The
railroad's Canadian assets have been sold.
Investigators also discovered that the oil was improperly
described in shipping documents. It was labeled as a "Packing Group
II" product, but was shipped as a less volatile Group III product.
Following the Lac-Mégantic disaster, the U.S. Federal
Railroad Administration and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety
Administration (PHMSA) issued a safety advisory and announced an operation to
conduct unannounced inspections and testing of the crude oil that is being
shipped by rail.
Tadros, the TSB chair, said governments and the rail
industry have made improvements, but more needs to be done.
Canada "still allows trains to be left unattended on
a descending grade," she said. The government needs to do more than
rubber-stamp companies' Safety Management Systems, which are intended to detect
and address safety issues.
"It's not enough for a Safety Management Systems on paper; that SMS
has to work, to do what it was designed to do," she said.
posted by res17 at
August 31, 2014
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