Vol. 4, No. 24
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October 15, 2007
Nevada's Online State News Journal
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Railcar Runaways No
Laughing Matter
Congressman Jon Porter
Weighs In On Problem
Congressman Jon Porter (R-NV) hosted a hazardous material transportation roundtable in Henderson recently, the need for which is the runaway rail tanker filled with deadly chlorine that cruised effortlessly through a large swath of Las Vegas back in August. The tanker held enough chlorine to sicken or kill thousands of people along its journey if it had derailed and burst open.
Unfortunately, we read about tanker cars filled with fuel burning for days regularly; one filled with ethanol recently caught on fire after a derailment in the midwest and burned for a week. They do burst open, are ripped open, and in some cases, explode with some regularity. The tanker in question in Las Vegas was filled with 90 tons of chlorine. The roundtable was not a congressional hearing, but Porter plans to share his findings with colleagues in Washington.
In a press release, Porter said, "During Monday's roundtable discussion, Union Pacific officials assured everyone they've put safety mechanisms in place to stop that type of incident from happening again. Also, for the first time, Union Pacific discussed exactly how that tanker got loose from the yard. They attribute it to human error.
"Here's the basic outline of what they say happened: During switching operations, the chlorine tanker got accidentally switched from one of the six tracks in the yard to a main line. From there, it should have gone to a dead end track, but at the same time there was a train with permission to leave the yard, so the conductor, thinking that was the train, switched it to Las Vegas."
Chlorine gas is bad enough to think about, what if that had been a train car filled with casks of high level nuclear waste? Union Pacific is calling the incident a safety concern and accident. There was a period of almost ten minutes in which the railyard did not notify anyone of the "lost" tanker. The railroad is calling that a "breakdown in communications."
Porter believes the railroad wants to do things the right way, "But as I mentioned, we can do a thousand things right and then we do one thing wrong and we have a crisis and we want to prevent that one thing and that's what today (the meeting) was about, working together." Porter believes there are at least ten to 12 issues involved and will bring those back to Washington for further discussion. One of those proposals will give local and state government more leeway in deciding routes for dangerous material.
Chlorine has a mixed reputation and history, being something that makes drinking water and swimming pools safe, and in WW I killing thousands as a weapon. Saddam Hussein planned to use chlorine gas as a weapon, and in the current Iraq conflict, trains and trucks filled with chlorine have been targets of choice. Terrorists fully understand the deadly affects of chlorine gas.
The Arden Yard in Las Vegas is huge and thousands of rail cars filled with hazardous material flow through the area monthly. In northern Nevada, another huge rail yard is in Sparks, Reno's sister city on the Intercontinental Mainline for the railroad. Large amounts of hazardous material flows through the area regularly. This is the kind of "what-if" discussion some would want if they could have been at the meeting with Porter.
• What if the rail car had been set loose on purpose by a terrorist group and then when it reached a high density neighborhood had been hit with a shoulder fired rocket?
• What if when a trainload of hazardous material is riding through Reno's train trench, either west or east, and a terrorist drops a hand grenade or two down onto the railcars?
• What if this same kind of security that was obviously not present at the Arden Yard is to be the norm when DOE attempts to move 70,000 tons of high level nuclear waste through thousands of U.S. cities?
• And one why. Why isn't Homeland Security involved in these discussions?
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