Hazardous Spill Rate Rises for Thin-Skin Tank Cars : Freight: Railroads say safety is improving but accidents have potential for large catastrophe.

In the pre-dawn of a fog-choked, icy February morning, six locomotives were pulling a 49-car train up a lonely mountain grade toward the spine of the Continental Divide.

With the wind chill, it was 71 degrees below. And when the cab heaters failed in the second and third locomotives--and the lead engine quit altogether--the crew stopped to switch the other three locomotives to the front.

But one crewman, fearing frostbite, jury-rigged the brakes on the rest of the train, rather than walk its half-mile length.

And in his haste, the cars slipped away.

They careened down the mountain into the outskirts of Helena, plowing into a pair of standing locomotives. Fifteen derailed cars piled up like metal sausages next to the local college. Industrial strength hydrogen peroxide began leaking from a punctured tank car.

Dripping onto creosote-soaked railroad ties, the peroxide ignited. The fire melted polyethylene pellets in a car upended atop the tank car, releasing flammable vapors.

Eighteen minutes after the Feb. 2, 1989, crash, two explosions rocked Helena--the second so massive that many residents thought they were under nuclear attack.

Windows and electric power were blown out in much of the city. A rail car axle sailed nearly half a mile, crashing a foot away from where 80-year-old Catherine DeBree was sleeping on the other side of a bedroom wall. More than 3,500 students and townspeople were evacuated in the sub-freezing dark, many in bare feet over broken glass and ice, leaving as much as $28 million in damage behind them.

The punctured tank car that unleashed the disaster was the kind that hauls most of the hazardous material, or hazmat, carried by rail in the United States. With its several variations, the thin-skinned model--known by its government label as the “DOT-111A”--accounts for more than half of the hazmat spills on the nation’s railways, according to a computer study by The Times of U.S. Department of Transportation data.

Critics say the railroads have shied from improvements to the basic tank car to keep costs down in the highly competitive transportation business, where rail for years has been losing market share to trucking. The railroads acknowledge the competitive pressure but insist their safety record is improving.

The Times computer study--which analyzed nearly 10,000 railway hazardous materials spills reported to the DOT--found that incidents grew 36% over the last decade, from 830 in 1982 to 1,130 last year. Railroad companies defend their safety record, particularly when compared to the dramatic increase in the volume of dangerous cargo they now transport. In 1989, 1.52 million carloads of dangerous chemicals traversed the nation’s rail lines--up 66% from 1985, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.

Yet, a great concern to critics is the sharp rise in incidents involving the workhorse 111A tank car, which have more than doubled over the last 10 years--from 342 to 755. The 111A figured in 5,418 of the railway spills during the decade--55% of the total.

Most such incidents are small, a leaking valve or the like. And exploding gasoline tankers on the nation’s highways claim more lives.

But what sets hazardous materials accidents on the railroads apart is their potential to create far larger catastrophes, threatening larger populations and more widespread environmental harm, as in Helena.

Earlier accidents shocked the nation and spurred reforms:

* In 1978, a pressurized tank car filled with liquefied petroleum gas exploded in Waverly, Tenn., killing 11 people, injuring 75 and leveling one-half square-mile of the small town.

The devastation prompted DOT to require improvements in pressurized tank cars--including the addition of heavy metal shielding on the ends of the cars, where most punctures occur. Also mandated were new couplers less likely to come apart and punch holes in adjoining tank cars during accidents.

Together, these measures have reduced the incidence of car-end puncture by 91%, according to a recent study by the railroads and the Railway Progress Institute, the trade association of the car, signal and track manufacturers.

But the DOT ordered new couplers but no head shields for the 111A.

* When an insulated tank car derailed on a bridge near Miamisburg, Ohio, in July, 1986, molten phosphorus spilled from a gash ripped in the bottom of the car and caught fire.

Toxic smoke forced the evacuation of 7,000 people. As workers tried to clear the wreckage the next day, a bridge structure collapsed, releasing several hundred more gallons of phosphorus. This time, 30,000 people were evacuated, with 569 injuries reported.

After this spill, the DOT required improvements in brackets on the undersides of tank cars--the parts implicated in the Miamisburg spill.

* The 1984 toxic leak in Bhopal, India, spurred the DOT to demand that poisons harmful when inhaled be carried in stronger tank cars. More recently, under the Hazardous Materials Transportation Act of 1990, DOT for the first time required almost everyone involved with shipping such products--from truck drivers and train engineers to the people who package dangerous materials--to receive formal training in handling hazardous goods.

“That’s going to the human element,” explains Alan I. Roberts, associate administrator for hazardous materials safety in DOT’s Research & Special Programs Administration. “If you look at a lot of the problems we’ve had . . . it’s failure to screw the bunghole closed correctly, failure to close the valve--not a systems failure.”

But the disasters continue--particularly those involving the ubiquitous 111A.

* In July, a Burlington Northern freight train derailed 15 miles south of Lake Superior. An industrial chemical containing 40% benzene--which is known to cause leukemia and blood disorders--spilled from a punctured 111A tank car, forming a huge toxic cloud that drifted north over Superior, Wis., and Duluth, Minn. Up to 20,000 people were forced from their homes and businesses.

* In California a year earlier, near Dunsmuir and Ventura, two toxic spills brought environmental disaster and widespread disruption. In the Dunsmuir spill, a toxic herbicide drained into the Sacramento River from punctures in the end of a 111A tank car.

Still, in the world of railroading, public concern about the risks of transporting hazardous goods is thought to be exaggerated.

The railroads, the chemical industry and many government regulators say that rail transport of these materials is as safe as can reasonably be expected. Officials frequently cite statistics from the Assn. of American Railroads, the railroad company trade group. What it terms “major” train accidents involving a release of hazardous materials fell from 119 in 1980 to 35 in 1990.

Yet critics are not ready to accept the inevitability of a Dunsmuir spill or the Helena explosions. Such incidents, they warn, are bound to accelerate as the use of hazardous materials in commerce rises.

In California, the frequency of derailments or damage to rail cars carrying hazardous materials has climbed at a far faster rate--more than quintupling from 3.86 cars per 10 million miles of travel in 1978 to 21.37 in 1990, according to the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulates railroads in the state.

“If there’s a train accident, there’s more of a potential these days that hazardous materials are going to be involved,” said Paul King, senior transportation operations supervisor for the PUC.

That is especially unwelcome news in urban areas, where increased train traffic is expected.

For instance, the Alameda freight corridor between downtown Los Angeles and the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach now carries eight or nine trains a day. But predictions are that 93 trains a day will pass through by the year 2020--with about 10% of the freight cars carrying hazardous material.

Railroad workers have had more experience with the risks than most--and they are worried.

“The railroads aren’t hauling just a can of it; they’re hauling thousands of gallons of this stuff,” said Leroy D. Jones, executive director of the Railway Labor Executives’ Assn., the umbrella organization of rail unions. “We are sitting on time bombs.”

The limits of government oversight in the rail industry were apparent on a muggy Wednesday in July, when the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) conducted an unannounced inspection of freight entering and leaving the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors.

In shirt-sleeves, tie and a hard hat, Tom Paton, the DOT regional director, watched as a team of inspectors crawled into a “pig”--one of 2,500 piggyback trailers and bulk containers that passed this day, like every day, through the Santa Fe Railroad’s Hobart Yard.

Most of the hundreds of containers lined up row upon row had just arrived by ship. From Hobart--the second-largest such transfer point in the nation--they would be loaded onto railroad flat cars or attached to trucks for shipment to market. Perhaps one of every 30 bore the distinctive diamond placard announcing that hazardous materials were inside.

This pig carried photographic supplies, some of them hazardous. But everything checked out, and the inspection team moved on.

By late afternoon, the team would inspect the papers of more than 60 freight cars and open 14 containers in the yard, checking their contents, packaging and labeling. One likely violation and several less important “exceptions” would be found.

As interesting was what the railroad inspectors didn’t find.

They made no checks of any of the hundreds of containers that did not carry a diamond placard, though Paton said they have on other occasions. Even fellow regulators suspect that some shippers, trying to avoid costly rules, slip hazardous materials by the FRA in unmarked containers.

“Somebody could lie and put a waybill down as Ping-Pong balls, and you’ll never know until you have a spill like Dunsmuir,” said Jack Rich, until recently supervisor of the state PUC’s railroad operations and safety section.

In fact, the FRA’s meager staff of hazmat sleuths spends less than half its time on routine inspections.

With 43 hazardous materials inspectors keeping an eye on more than 600 railroads and 15,000 shippers, the FRA prefers to improve safety through indoctrination, rather than issue fines.

“If you can do it through education,” Paton said, “you can spend more time out inspecting, instead of sitting in the office writing up violations.”

Though government auditors have begun to see improvements in the FRA’s enforcement policies, critics--including the General Accounting Office, the Office of Technology Assessment, environmentalists and others--say the FRA still needs to get tougher. “People tend to be more honest when people are checking up on them,” said John Cameron, a rail expert with the public interest group Illinois Public Action. “The FRA has become a partner rather than a watchdog over the rail industry.”

Edward R. English, director of the agency’s office of safety enforcement, notes that 300 FRA inspectors who monitor track, locomotives and other parts of the rail system back up the hazmat inspectors.

“For the first time we’re getting a firm handle on really how much is out there,” he said.

Still, by way of comparison, the Federal Aviation Administration has 50,000 employees while the FRA gets by with fewer than 700.

“Most of the technical expertise now resides in private industry,” acknowledged Bob Matthews, president of the Railway Progress Institute. “There aren’t nearly enough people in the FRA to address the issues as they need to be addressed.”

More broadly, critics say DOT’s rules reflect a dated view of the dangers of hazardous materials, failing to take into account such complexities as the potential interactions of various chemicals, as in the Helena wreck.

DOT’s regulations derive from standards developed more than 80 years ago by the Assn. of American Railroads’ Bureau of Explosives. Munitions and other explosives were the first worry--and for many veteran regulators they continue to be.

Yet now, particularly after such disasters as the Dunsmuir spill, long-term toxic threats to humans and the environment have become a public concern.

“You can’t consider just one hazard characteristic,” said Robert J. Chipkevich, chief of the hazardous materials division of the NTSB. A flammable liquid that is also toxic by inhalation, for instance, should be carried in a stronger rail car than one that only is flammable, he explains.

The NTSB first called in 1981 for a systematic safety review of all hazardous chemicals hauled by rail, including an assessment of which chemicals could be carried in each kind of rail car. It recently renewed the recommendation--an idea now endorsed by such disparate parties as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the state PUC.

But DOT is not yet convinced.

“We believe we have done it through our (existing regulations),” said John Stoner, policy and program support director for the agency’s Research and Special Programs Administration. Stoner adds that the department has no plans to conduct such a review.

In the meantime, the NTSB has asked the rail and chemical industries to voluntarily shift some of the most dangerous chemicals to sturdier tank cars. It also wants them to give municipal officials and fire department hazmat crews a better idea of what chemicals are passing through their towns.

Yet many doubt the willingness of industry to make voluntary improvements--a judgment based in large part on the frustrating history of the DOT-111A tank car.

To critics, the dangers of the 111A are obvious.

It has the thinnest walls of any tank car. It lacks the end-shielding of most pressurized cars. In a 1985 accident in Denver that spewed fuming nitric acid and forced the evacuation of 9,000 people, the NTSB found that an aluminum 111A was punctured at an impact speed of no more than 12 miles an hour.

The Hazardous Materials Transportation Act of 1990 requires a safety study of tank car designs. But such a review may be a long time coming.

“It’s in FRA; ask Ed English,” said Stoner of the Research and Special Programs Administration.

“That issue is being looked at primarily by RSPA,” countered English, who says that his agency nonetheless is “looking at putting head shields on a lot more cars,” including some 111As.

Similar buck-passing dogs industry.

The railroads want shippers and manufacturers to use stronger cars. Shippers and manufacturers say they wouldn’t have to use stronger cars if the railroads would just keep the cars on their tracks.

Much blame falls to the Assn. of American Railroads’ Tank Car Committee, one of the most controversial players in the industry’s self-policing.

The committee--made up of representatives of the railroads, chemical industry and rail car manufacturers--has approval over all new designs and retrofits of U.S. tank cars.

The FRA can override a Tank Car Committee decision only with an emergency order--a step the government has taken just 16 times since the procedure was authorized in 1970. Only a couple of the orders have dealt with tank car problems.

It has been years, meanwhile, since the Tank Car Committee considered the question of recommending head shields for all 111A cars carrying hazardous materials.

After the outcry over the 1986 Miamisburg accident, DOT’s Research & Special Projects Administration, the FRA and the NTSB won the right to attend Tank Car Committee meetings--but they have no vote.

Formal authority for safety standards rests with the DOT. But in practice, the department rarely goes beyond what the rail and chemical industries are prepared to do.

“In my opinion,” said Paul G. Kinnecom, the railroad association’s manager of freight and tank car design, DOT needs “to feel a consensus that everyone feels comfortable with whatever regulations they put forward.”

At the heart of the hesitancy is economics.

Unlike flatcars and boxcars, rail tank cars are owned or leased primarily by chemical manufacturers--not the railroads. The railroads worry that forcing their shippers to pay for more expensive, better protected cars will impel them to use trucks instead.

And so, critics say, the parties that make up the Tank Car Committee are paralyzed by self-interest.

“You’ve got the fox in the henhouse,” said Lawrence M. Mann, a Washington, D.C., attorney who often represents railroad workers. With such a fundamental conflict of interest on the committee, Mann said, “the railroads are really not doing anything as a practical matter to take care of the problem.”

Competition with the trucking business is no joke.

Since the end of World War II, truckers’ share of all freight business has climbed to 26% from 5%, while the railroads’ has been cut nearly in half, to 37%.

“We’re fighting for every load we can get off the highways now,” said J. W. Fleshman, who represents the Assn. of American Railroads’ Bureau of Explosives on the Tank Car Committee.

Given the competitive pressures, the railroads are reluctant, for example, to back head shields. By chemical industry and railroad estimates, they would add $10,000 to $20,000 to the up-front costs of a 111A tank car that costs about $60,000 new.

Head shields also increase the weight of a car, decreasing the amount of chemical that can be shipped under federal gross weight restrictions. That boosts the shipper’s costs as well.

Another high-cost improvement to the 111A would be a redesign eliminating outlets on the cars’ bottom. Such fittings all too often leak in wrecks. But because most tank cars are unloaded from the bottom, a change would force chemical companies to install expensive new discharge facilities.

Yet the costs of safer tank cars are in the eye of the beholder.

As disaster follows disaster, for instance, the economic benefits of safer tank cars are becoming clearer to the railroads. “For certain chemicals,” Fleshman said, the train companies “want a better car, because their cleanup costs are just astronomical.”

John Cameron of Illinois Public Action points to estimates that installing head shields on 111A tank cars would add only 1/2-cent a gallon to the cost of transporting hazardous materials over the life of the car. Environmentalists argue that such expenditures should be part of the everyday cost of doing business for manufacturers and shippers of hazardous goods.

In any event, fears about losing chemical manufacturers to the truckers are “smoke that the railroads are throwing up,” said M. A. (Jim) Crane, director of logistics for Ethyl Corp., a Richmond, Va.-based chemical company that makes everything from ibuprofen to petroleum additives.

Crane, who serves as chairman of the Chemical Manufacturers Assn.’s Rail Task Group, notes that “many, many” chemical companies have voluntarily added safety features to their 111As beyond those mandated by the DOT.

Ethyl Corp., he says, has installed thermal protection and eliminated bottom fittings. In 40 years of using these modified cars, the company has yet to have a significant spill, according to Crane.

But there are limits to what his--or any firm--will do on its own.

“Would I voluntarily spend $10,000 a car to put on head shields?” Crane said. “The answer is no, because I don’t think we need them.”

The economics of environmental and human risk are destined to be at the center of debates in the 1990s over the transport of hazardous materials. Government regulators, operating under financial constraints, will have to answer demands for safer shipping; accidents will continue to stir public alarm.

Boyd Lunsford knows a lot about the costs of haphazard control of hazardous materials.

On a July night in 1984, Lunsford, then a brakeman for the Santa Fe Railroad, walked around a car on a derailed freight train in New Mexico--straight into a wall of hydrofluoric acid that was spraying into the air from a damaged tank car.

Lunsford suffered lung, thyroid and brain damage, along with the loss of his railroad career.

“If people knew what we carry on those trains across the United States, they would have heart attacks,” Lunsford said. “Sometimes I wonder who the DOT works for.”

Times researchers William Holmes and Cary Schneider contributed to this story.

The Railway Tank Car has Well-Known Flaws. . .

Public interest groups, some regulators and the railroads themselves long have been critical of using the standard rail tank car--known by its Department of Transportation designation as the “111A”--in the transport of many hazardous materials. Shown below are some of the most widely cited problem areas and proposed improvements:

COMMON RAILROAD TANK CAR 1. Head shielding. In an accident, the ends of tank cars frequently are punctured. Head protection--either heavy steel vertical walls or extra plating molded over each end of the tank--is standard on some tank cars. 2. Thermal jackets. Rail accidents sometimes produce fires that can burn through otherwise undamaged tank cars, releasing dangerous materials or causing explosions. Several inches of insulation--either fiberglass or another material--can delay burn-through, in many cases by more than 90 minutes. 3. Thicker shells. The standard 111A--made of either steel or aluminum--has the thinnest shell of any U.S. tank car: 7/16ths of an inch. Other cars that carry hazardous materials, by contrast, have shells at least 9/16th of an inch thick. Also, some critics favor banning the use of aluminum tanks, which are more easily punctured, in the shipment of hazardous materials. 4. Protection of upper and lower outlets. Nozzle openings, access covers and filling pipes of the 111A are more susceptible to damage than the tanks themselves. Recommended solutions include the elimination of outlets on the bottom of the tank cars and strengthening the fittings on top. Source: National Transportation Safety Board

. . .And It Is to Blame For Many Hazardous Spills Railway Hazardous Materials Incidents, 1928-1991

People Damages Container Type Incidents Deaths Injuries Evacuated (millions of $) DOT 111A-series 5,418 0 249 8,583 $42.6 tank car Pressurized 1,188 1 57 2,112 3.8 tank car Metal drum 4,060 0 17 650 1.3 Non-metal drum 135 0 3 0 0.3

Source: Compiled from Department of Transportation Hazardous Materials Incident Reporting System by Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis