California City Makes Move to Block Ethanol Trains
The Tower Bridge links Sacramento with West Sacramento. photo.ua / Shutterstock.com
Connecting state and local government leaders
West Sacramento now faces a lawsuit after local officials didn’t renew a rail transport permit for a Texas company that ships through the city.
The city of West Sacramento is facing a lawsuit after it declined to renew a rail transport permit of a Texas company that had been using the city, which sits across the Sacramento River from California’s capital city, as a regular stop in its transport of ethanol.
The Sacramento Bee reports that the dispute is over safety concerns about the Texas-based company Buckeye Terminals parking train cars filled with ethanol for several days.
“I don’t understand the rail business well enough to know why all of these cars have to stay in our community for as long as they stay, and at the same time we don’t get to know what’s in them,” City Councilman Bill Kristoff told the newspaper. “That is sort of alarming to me.”
Last week, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York asked federal regulators to create new standards for improving the safety of transporting fuels like ethanol and crude oil by train.
A report earlier this year from The New York Times said that accidents with trains carrying fuel have “surged” in recent years. The uptick is almost certainly directly correlated to the massive growth in the amount of fuel being transported by train. Since 2008, the annual carloads of crude oil in the U.S. increased from 9,500 to 400,000 in statistics cited by The Times.
“This is an industry that has developed overnight, and they have been playing catch-up with the infrastructure,” Deborah Hersman, the now-former chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told The Times back in January.
When they arrive in West Sacramento, the ethanol-filled trains are stationed at a mixing facility before being mixed with gasoline and transported to Northern California gas stations.
Fire officials told the city council that they could control the flow of traffic from ethanol trucks but do not have jurisdiction over federally controlled railways, according to a report from local radio affiliate KFBK.
Buckeye attorney Braiden Chadwick said denying the company access to railways actually creates a greater risk by forcing them to deliver the ethanol by truck.
“The last thing anyone wants to see is a car vs. tanker truck (crash); that is a bad combo,” Chadwick told the Bee. “It is just a recipe for disaster.”
The company has been operating the stop at its West Sacramento facility since 2002.
In its lawsuit, the company accuses West Sacramento of failing to produce traffic studies measuring the potential risk of ethanol trucks sharing the road with residential traffic.
West Sacramento officials have been attempting to modernize the city, with new residential and business developments designed to draw in potential residents.
Early this month, the city welcomed a new cutting edge hydrogen car fueling station. In January, city residents will vote on whether to contribute $30 million in funds to a $150 million streetcar system that officials say could give a boost to the local economy.
(Top image by photo.ua / Shutterstock.com)