Tuesday, July 31st, 2001 at 19:15 EDT Avoiding Tunnel is Impractical, Costly, CSX Says; Federal Law Limits Local Authority Over Hazardous Freight; Bypasses Create Delays By Heather Dewar and Kimberly A.C. Wilson Any attempts to reduce the flow of hazardous chemicals through Baltimore's Howard Street Tunnel, where a chemical-laden train derailed July 18th and burned for four days under ground, would face almost insurmountable legal and practical obstacles, safety experts say. And the technology that might make the tunnel safer is so expensive and glitch-prone that it has rarely been tried. After the derailment of a CSX train carrying eight tank cars of acid and other dangerous chemicals, Gov. Parris N. Glendening promised to convene a task force to look at ways to make the tunnel safer. Some local activists said the city ought to ban the most dangerous chemicals from the tunnel. "We need to look at alternatives to using the tunnel" for hazardous chemicals, said Brooklyn activist Doris McGuigan, a member of the city's local emergency planning committee. Certain hazardous chemicals are prohibited in the Harbor Tunnel, McGuigan pointed out, asking, "Why do we have two sets of rules and regulations, one for trucks and another one for trains?" The answer, experts say, is that powerful federal laws protect the railroad industry from state or local regulations. Patrick S. Berdge, an attorney with the California Public Utilities Commission, said the 1970 Federal Railroad Safety Act strictly limits the states' ability to restrict rail traffic. The law is based on the constitutional doctrine that forbids the states from interfering with interstate commerce. In 1991, when California suffered two chemical train derailments within a week - one an herbicide spill that killed every plant and animal in a 38-mile stretch of the Sacramento River - the state's lawyers soon discovered there was little they could do. "It's an ongoing problem," Berdge said. "The railroads handle most of the hazardous material shipments in the U.S., and they are doing more and more. "The Federal Railroad Administration has rules for these hazardous materials, and if the railroads abide by these rules they can run their hazmat cars anywhere on the interstate system," Berdge said. The federal rules cover the loading and labeling railroads must use in shipping hazardous chemicals, but they don't restrict the contents of the shipments. Berdge said federal law does allow states to impose extra safety requirements in particularly risky places - a tight curve adjacent to a wildlife refuge, for example. If high accident rates or other evidence proves there's a "local safety hazard," states can impose safety rules in those spots. California did that in 1997, but the railroad companies appealed. Last year a federal judge threw out seven of California's 10 safety regulations, and the railroads have gone back to court seeking to overturn the other three. Fred Millar, an expert on hazardous materials transportation and former member of the Washington, D.C., emergency planning committee, suggested that railroads would voluntarily reroute hazardous shipments away from densely populated areas if the political pressure were great enough. "There's been very few efforts" to restrict chemical cargo, Millar said. "The political oomph for doing the rerouting has not been there [because of] the formidable political clout of the railroads." But officials at CSX and its main East Coast rival, Norfolk Southern Corp., said political pressure won't solve Baltimore's practical problem: There is no good alternate route to the Howard Street Tunnel for freight trains. Jim McClellan, a senior vice president at Norfolk Southern, said there are two rail routes along the East Coast: CSX's line, which goes through the Howard Street Tunnel, and the Amtrak line, which Norfolk Southern uses. The Amtrak line, which primarily carries passengers, has three short tunnels a half-mile west of Howard Street, McClellan said, and it can't handle all of CSX's cargo - it's so busy with passenger trains that freight moves only at night. To avoid the Howard Street Tunnel, CSX would have to send hazardous chemicals west to Cleveland, OH, then north to Albany, NY, and south to Baltimore, MD - a three- to four-day delay, according to company spokesman Rob Gould. Norfolk Southern's trains would have to detour from Manassas, VA, to Harrisburg, PA, and jog south to Baltimore, about a one-day delay, McClellan said. The detours would cost more, and the rail companies' customers would probably turn to trucks for hazardous shipments, Gould said. "Rail is safer than any other mode of transportation," Gould said. "We transported over a million carloads of hazardous materials in the past year and [had] only 15 incidents" of chemical spills. Department of Transportation records show that trucks, carrying about 43 percent of hazardous materials in 1998, had 339 serious accidents compared with 69 for railways, which carried 4 percent of hazardous shipments. A comparison of accident rates per mile was not immediately available. There are no laws addressing fire safety in freight tunnels and no reliable equipment for dousing such fires, said Arthur Bendelius, a New York engineer specializing in tunnel fire prevention. Seattle is the only U.S. city to try sprinklers in tunnels that carry automobiles, he said, but the system cost $10 million and has been subject to false alarms. He said firefighters need to be trained to respond quickly to tunnel fires. "Beyond that, there's not much that can be done," he said.
For what it's worth... I live about an hour north of Seattle and have been involved with local emergency management here for some time. I was at a training a couple of years ago and was talking with a Seattle Hazmat instructor about recent tunnel firefighting training they had done. As you may know there is a several mile railroad tunnel under Seattle between King St. Station and Alaskan way that carries the BNSF main line as well as many Amtrak trains and some UP overhead traffic. THe Seattle Fire department does regular training in the tunnel and with the raiload. I'm not at all convinced that if this accident had happened in Seattle rather than Baltimore it would have made any dfference, but there are at least some places who take this sort of emergency seriously.
