Hazardous consequences

This article has been updated to reflect new information regarding the June 3 oil train derailment in Oregon. 

In April, the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF) completed an update of the 55th Street crossing in Boulder, but it appears the update could have unintended safety repercussions.

Following years of complaints by drivers, the railroad worked with the City of Boulder to come up with a cost-sharing model to update the crossing on 55th Street in east Boulder between Arapahoe Avenue and Central Street. The City of Boulder and BNSF split the approximate $70,000 cost and during construction the railway replaced 100 feet of tracks, rebuilt the ties and decking, and the City updated the surrounding sidewalks and repaved the road.

The update is a much needed improvement according to mechanical engineer Brian Nuel, who lives and works in the area and drives across the tracks multiple times a day. However, a couple of weeks ago, while sitting a few cars back in stopped traffic, he noticed a train swaying significantly as it went by.

“I was just watching the train go by and noticed the cars lurching toward me, north if you will,” he says. “It seemed pretty severe, severe enough to catch my eye and I was trying to figure out why and I then saw the track flexing underneath the wheels.”

Concerned enough to come back the following day, Nuel inspected the tracks to the east of the road crossing and noticed a gap in the joint between the two tracks, where the old track met the newly replaced section of rail. And he saw the noticeably deteriorated wooden tie beneath the joint.

“I build machinery, and every time I change or modify something, I run the risk of damaging something else and causing this ripple effect of problems,” Nuel says. “I look at this the same way. They did some work over here, didn’t mean to leave it bad but just by the fact that they were doing work an issue crept into the system.”

Although admittingly not a railway engineer, with his experience as the director of engineering at Cool Energy, Nuel says he could still tell that fatigue and stress on the rail at that location could have long term effects on the structural integrity of the tracks.

“It’s guaranteed to fail,” he says. “The question is, is it going to fail in 2 months or is it going to fail in a 1,000 years? It’s like a paper clip if you keep bending it back and forth, eventually it lets go.”

Based on previous Boulder Weekly reporting on the subject of Boulder County’s oil trains, Nuel says he is aware that he both lives and works in the so-called “blast zone” — anything within one mile of either side of a railroad track that could be significantly affected should an oil train derailment occur. The one-mile estimate is according to the Department of Transportation (DOT). Approximately eight trains transporting oil travel the tracks through Boulder County each day.

“I spend a lot of time in that zone that if I see something that is amiss I don’t just want to assume someone is doing their job properly,” Nuel says.

So the engineer took photos of the tracks and deteriorated tie. Then he showed them to his boss, Cool Energy CEO and Boulder City Councilmember Sam Weaver.

“By far and away [a derailment] is the biggest concern,” Weaver says. “We’re building housing at a prodigious rate, right there in the danger zone. There’s plenty of stuff already in the danger zone but now we’re adding new high density, concentrated residential development so that’s another reason we’d like to keep the number of derailments to zero.”

Nuel’s observations particularly concern Weaver, given they come just a few weeks after the June 3 derailment of a Union Pacific oil train traveling through Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. The train was transporting Bakken crude oil from North Dakota when it derailed and exploded in the town of Mosier, spilling 420,000 gallons of oil, some of which reached the Columbia River. The town’s wastewater treatment was damaged and closed, its water reserves used to combat the flames and a local school was evacuated and shut down for the remainder of the school year.

Fortunately, no lives were lost and the fire didn’t reach the town center, unlike the 2013 catastrophe in which a train derailed in the town center of Lac- Mégantic, Quebec, spilling 1.6 million gallons of oil, killing 47 people and causing a fire that burned down more than 30 buildings. Since that time there have been at least 13 other major oil train derailments in the U.S. and Canada.

Union Pacific Railway has said the derailment was caused by bolt failure, although the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) is still looking into the crash. A preliminary report obtained by the Associate Press on June 23 suggests the derailment was a result of Union Pacific not properly maintaining its tracks. It says the company should have noticed weakened and broken bolts holding the tracks to the ties during inspections. 

Oregon’s Department of Transportation has expressed concerns about the bolts that fasten the track to the tie on curved sections of rail and asked the FRA to suspend the transportation of oil by rail through the state until more is understood about the June 3 derailment.

According to the FRA, the number one cause of all train derailment, oil train or otherwise, is defective or missing crossties, followed by broken rails. Additionally, the DOT has predicted an average of 10 derailments a year for the next two decades.

Recognizing the threat oil train derailments pose to communities living near railways, the DOT, in conjunction with the FRA, announced new regulations for transporting flammable liquids by rail in May 2015. As BW reported at the time, these regulations address some issues such as train speed, outdated tank cars and routing, particularly requiring a company to reroute trains transporting hazardous materials if a route is deemed unsafe by the FRA.

However, the new regulations don’t address track maintenance or inspection.

In addition to these concerns, the tracks running through Boulder County have not been updated since a 1985 head-on collision between two trains (not transporting hazardous materials), which caused a U.S. 36 bridge to collapse after its supports melted from the ensuing fire.

These tracks have long been used by BNSF as an overflow and detour track. As the oil boom in recent years has caused increased congestion on the nearby Sterling route, traffic through Boulder County has intensified. Because of the routing priorities, as pointed out by former BNSF employee Paul Gibb when writing for BW (Re: “The perfect storm,” April 9, 2015), the company has been spending its money primarily to add capacity to the Sterling line rather than on Boulder County’s overflow route even though the County’s tracks get their fair share of oil trains on a daily basis.

When Nuel showed Weaver the photos of the section of rail near the 55th Street crossing, the councilman was concerned by what he saw, particularly the deteriorated tie. Additionally, Nuel set up a video camera on a nearby tree to document train cars traveling over the tracks. As the train wheels moved from the new section of track to the old section, the two men observed the rails on both sides bouncing and lifting enough to see light underneath the track.

“Maybe it’s fine. Maybe it’s within [BNSF] standards,” Weaver says. “But I can’t imagine that deteriorated wooden tie is within any set of safety specifications.”

Weaver passed the photos on to Boulder’s Public Works Department, asking them to report the uneven joint and deteriorated tie to BNSF and also asking for an update about rail safety, including the City’s role in inspections, what hazardous materials are being transported through Boulder and the possibility of rerouting trains carrying hazardous materials including oil.   

“A mistake like that, if it is indeed a mistake, can have much greater consequences when you have all this explosive material running through town,” Weaver says. “Maybe it would be less of a concern if it was just straight cargo but when it’s hazardous cargo it just elevates the level of concern even just noticing something like that. A train derailment that didn’t have explosive potential would be a lot less damaging to Boulder’s citizens than one that does.”

Gerrit Slatter, principal engineer for capital projects at the City of Boulder, worked with BNSF on the 55th Street crossing update. He also says the photos are alarming, although he hasn’t observed the track in person since City employees are not allowed on the railroad right of way without the permission of BNSF.

“The evidence that we’ve been able to view from the photos, it would appear that some track maintenance is warranted in that location,” Slatter says. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that there is going to be some sort of a derailment because of the condition that is in place there because that is way outside my expertise.”

But Slatter also shared the photos with “a couple of trusted resources,” he says. “They’ve commented to me that it would seem that this is the kind of condition that the railroad would want to consider performing some maintenance on.”

Slatter reported the issue to BNSF who had two different crews inspect the rail in question and ran an inspection car over it, says Joe Sloan, the regional director of public affairs.

“They may have seen the same thing the resident (Nuel) saw, but they had no concerns,” Sloan says.

When pushed on the issue, he says on joint tracks, such as the one in Boulder, often times work crews will wait and see how a new joint functions before performing any maintenance. The company inspects the railway in Boulder every other day at minimum.

“Often after a project like that they’ll tend to see how the crossing does and if there is any maintenance or work that needs to be done after a project, they’ll just follow up,” Sloan says. “They will probably do some field welding at some point, but again they don’t have any concerns about it. That’s kind of how it’s done all across the system.”

In terms of the deteriorated tie, Sloan says the inspection crews aren’t worried either.

“It depends on how many sequences there are. If there is one bad tie in a long sequence then they won’t get in there and just replace that one,” Sloan says. “It could’ve just been that the one had bigger corrosion issues.”   

Weaver says concrete ties could be a good option in highly populated areas with the possibility of impacting a lot of people. But in reality he has more questions than answers.

“I don’t care what the material is, it needs to be in good shape so the rails are in good shape,” he says. “What do we know about alternatives to what’s there now and would those alternatives provide a safety improvement when we’re in a high population zone?”

Sloan says the railroad does use concrete ties in some areas, but the majority of tracks still have wooden ties. “It really just varies on the traffic and the best material to use,” Sloan says. “There are options. You don’t want to mix the type of ties. When you see concrete you’ll see very long stretches of them, you won’t just see small sections of them.”

This helps explain why the tracks throughout Boulder are still made of older wooden ties; the cost of replacing the entire section of the system with concrete would undoubtedly be high. It seems unlikely, based on the Weekly’s previous reporting, that BSNF would be compelled to update the tracks through Boulder, given that it is an overflow line and the company appears to have little desire to spend its resources on tracks running through Boulder. Such improvements would require, among other things, purchasing property to get rid of curves and grades that make transporting heavy oil trains less safe. 

The swaying of the railway cars, like Nuel observed, is also normal according to Sloan. In what’s known in the industry as “hunting oscillation,” train wheels are designed to essentially “hunt” for equilibrium as they go around curves or the tracks change in elevation, in order to stabilize the cars. Sloan says the elevation change can be as minimal as a joint in the track that isn’t perfectly even, such as the one near the 55th Street crossing.

Based on Sloan’s responses, it doesn’t appear that the railway is going to be doing any repair work on the section of rail in question. And the City of Boulder has no authority to either inspect or perform maintenance work on the property of another entity. “Even if there is a concern and [BNSF is] not acknowledging that they want to do anything about it, we have no authority to be able to go and take care of it for them,” Slatter says. He is set to meet with BNSF at the site this week to further express the City’s concerns.

In regards to Weaver’s questions about possibly rerouting trains carrying hazardous materials, Sloan says that railroads really have no choice in the matter. As common carriers, BNSF and other railroads are federally required to transport anything and everything asked of them that is properly packaged.

“Whether that’s chlorine for a water treatment plant or crude oil or ethanol, or even military or nuclear, really anything basically that can be packaged and that’s the federal requirement,” he says. “So we’re required to move it and then how we move it is based on where the customer is and where the track classification is.”

Despite recent catastrophes involving oil train derailments, several of which have been BNSF trains, Sloan says the railroad has a 99.98 percent success rate when delivering hazardous materials. “That’s safer than any other form of transportation,” he says.

Regardless, Weaver is still interested in lobbying BNSF to reroute trains transporting hazardous waste away from Boulder, although he recognizes such efforts may be futile.

“Even if Council voted, ‘Hey, this would be a great idea if they could reschedule,’ it doesn’t even mean that it would be actionable,” Weaver says. “We’re dealing with a much bigger entity than us, we’d have to put this out and maybe talk with our neighboring cities to see if we could build a coalition.”

For now, the largest concern for the councilman is decreasing the chance of derailment near the 55th Street crossing, as he watches the video of trains moving over the new joint and deteriorated tie. “The question anytime you get this kind of bending regularly is what kind of fatigue is going on with the metal,” Weaver says. “So if it’s well supported you’ll have a lot less deflection so you’ll get a lot less fatigue.” 

These safety questions about the work done at the crossing update come at a time when the City is also waiting to hear from BNSF regarding the next possible crossing upgrade near the intersection of Valmont Road and Butte Mill Road, which is near the Stazio softball fields.

“The railroad is exploring whether it makes sense for the crossing to be moved entirely or whether they will be conducting an upgrade there,” Slatter says.

That particular section of line is a spur, or side track that ends 150 feet from the crossing, Slatter says. It could make sense to remove that section of rail altogether and simply repave the street over it. “If they don’t need it they would prefer to remove the crossing because it creates a maintenance and safety concern for their operation as well,” Slatter says.

Or the railroad could elect to upgrade the crossing, which would require the same cost-sharing process as the 55th Street crossing. The City is expecting a decision from BNSF by sometime in July, if not before.

As a matter of clarification, although Nuel talked to BW about both the gap between the two tracks, as well as the gap between the tracks and the ties, his largest concern and the reason he reported the issue is the gap between the track and the ties allowing the track to flex as trains pass over it.