13 Mar 2014
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Dangerous Railway Tanker Fleet to be Phased Out
posted by Unknown @ 10:13 0 Comments
These DOT-111 tank cars have been held responsible already for several fiery derailments. "I would go as far to say five years is a long time as well," says Raitt.
Why not just repair the old cars?
The Railway Supply Institute has
already estimated it might take as long as ten years to get the fleet back up
to speed. Last month a new proposal for
weeding these tankers out was put forth, that is if certain ethanol and crude
tankers could be modified first.
BNSF Railway Co., a unit
of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, already said it is working on a
seven-year phase-out plan.
As oil production ramps up here in the US
and in Canada ,
crude-by-rail services are under more and more pressure to deliver
services. As such, they have come under
fire for a series of accidents including one that is responsible for killing 47
people in Lac-Megantic , Quebec
That accident involved a DOT-111 railway tanker car that was
not updated to meet new industry standards implemented in October 2011. Right now in North America
there are an estimated 228,000 of these older cars. 92,000 of these are used to transport
dangerous, flammable liquids. You can
see the urgency in moving up the retirement date, especially for these
railcars.
"We need
to get to a point where we have a plan on phasing out these DOT-111s and that's
the importance of next week for me," says Raitt. "Make no mistake, we
will be phasing out these older DOT-111 cars." Raitt and US Transportation Secretary
Anthony Foxx will meet in Washington
next week to discuss the matter further.
Claude
Mongeau, chief executive of Canadian National Railway Co., said earlier in the
year that these CPC 1232 railcars are safer, with just a 50 percent chance of
failure when compared to the DOT-111.
BNSF,
which also suffered a fiery derailment at the end of 2013, says it has opened
up the bidding process from railcar manufacturers for as many as 5000 what they
call “next generation” taker cars. The
safety features on these surpass even those built after October 2011.
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