Government Watchdog Group Seeks EPA IG Scrutiny Of Rail Spills
Train Derailment Exposes Gaps in Regulation of Chemical Safety
When local emergency responders arrived at the scene of a South Jersey train derailment and observed clouds of toxic gas spewing from railcars, they were unable to measure the concentration of the highly toxic and flammable vinyl chloride gas because their air monitoring devices lacked batteries!
How’s that for local emergency response preparation?
Does anyone even know that federal and state environmental laws mandate local emergency response plans? Or facility risk management plans? Or off site consequence analysis (mapping kill zones)? Or that railroad regulations do not?
Do you feel safer now?
Portions of the Paulsboro community were evacuated, while other exposed residents were asked to “shelter in place”.
Think that can only happen in a “working class” town in “industrial” portions of South Jersey?
The accident occurred in Paulsboro NJ, in Senate President Sweeney’s district. He was quoted in the local newspaper, blasting the US Coast Guard’s “Unified Command” that managed the response:
A three-day evacuation of 100 households later turned to a seven-day displacement of 204 households.
Then, Tuesday’s canceled public meeting for residents was the last straw for state Senate President Stephen M. Sweeney (D-3, of West Deptford), who gave the joint command center for Paulsboro’s train derailment an “F” for its communications out of the command post.
“If they grade themselves internally, they have to give themselves an ‘F’,” Sweeney said. “It’s not the press saying it. It’s not me saying it. It’s everyone saying the same thing.”
Certain aspects of the story have gotten huge south jersey/Philadelphia media coverage, but, despite similar chemical risks in north jersey/NY metro area, it has largely been ignored by north jersey media.
And, as is all too typical, there has been virtually no coverage of the policy and regulatory issues the accident highlighted, nor any coverage at all of the complaint we filed with the Inspectors General of the US Coast Guard and US EPA.
So, I thought I’d pass on this national story that ran inside the Beltway – the publication is a subscription service called Inside EPA. The audience for that trade journal is beltway policymakers.
So I find it disgraceful the the NJ press corps ignored this story in their own backyard, but it is running and having an impact nationally.
Government Watchdog Group Seeks EPA IG Scrutiny Of Rail Spills
Originally published in the December 24, 2012 issue of Superfund Report.
A government watchdog group is asking Inspectors General (IGs) at EPA and the Department of Homeland Security to review the federal response to a recent train derailment in New Jersey that spilled highly toxic and flammable vinyl chloride, an effort that the group hopes will expand EPA’s authority over chemical safety on railways and clarify the agency’s emergency response powers in case of future spills.
In a Dec. 17 letter to the IGs, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) says the toxic release inappropriately triggered a response under the the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) National Response Framework. DHS put the U.S. Coast Guard in charge of a chemical contamination emergency that PEER says EPA and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) were better equipped to handle. The letter is available on InsideEPA.com. (Doc ID: 2419340)
A source with PEER says the incident and botched response that ensued creates an opportunity to close a loophole in chemical safety regulation and prevent future spills. Although EPA’s rules implementing section 112 (r) of the Clean Air Act require chemical facilities to have risk management and emergency response plans, the rules often do not apply to rail cars and railways because they are generally not owned or operated by the chemical facilities.
The result is that chemicals on railways are essentially unregulated, a widespread problem considering the numerous trains carrying chemicals on the nation’s railways, the source says. “These risks and incidents are not confined to New Jersey,” PEER says in its letter to EPA IG Arthur Elkins and Acting DHS IG Charles Edwards. “It is critical that any ‘lessons learned’ be transmitted on a national scale so that responders in federal and state agencies across the country can improve spill response measures and strategies.”
On Nov. 30, 13 Conrail freight cars derailed and overturned on a bridge in Paulsboro, NJ, near the Philadelphia International Airport, and three cars plunged into the Mantua Creek with one tank-car releasing 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride as vapor. Vinyl chloride, used in the production of PVC plastic, causes dizziness and headaches in small doses and death after very high-level exposure, according to EPA’s website. About 80 people were treated for respiratory complications in the days following the spill, according to a source with PEER.
In its “Request for Performance Review” PEER asks why the Coast Guard was selected as lead agency instead of EPA, which has authority under its National Contingency Plan (NCP). PEER says the decision was likely a factor in a chaotic response where federal and state organizations issued conflicting, confusing and sometimes inaccurate information to the public.
In PEER’s letter to the IGs, the group says the response “was badly mishandled as characterized by contradictory public health advisories, false information disseminated to the community, lack of a workable emergency response plan” and other concerns.
In addition, PEER says the Coast Guard and NJDEP said air was safe despite “exceedences of the level of concern,” and the environmentalists also questioned why some residents were told to “shelter-in-place” when that is ineffective in cases of airborne contamination. An evacuation was eventually ordered.
PEER says EPA should have been given the lead under its authority under the NCP and the Emergency Planning and Community Right To Know Act. The group asks whether local emergency response plans required by EPA and NJDEP were invoked, and which agency conducted the scientific evaluation that led to the evacuation.
While the National Transportation Safety Board will issue a report addressing the transportation aspects of the derailment, the PEER source says chemical safety issues raise the most significant questions about the incident and should also be addressed. “The toxicology and chemical safety part, these were the fundamentally important parts,” the source says, “the bridge was secondary.”