Officials learn about BNSF plans for oil spills

BNSF Railway has drafted a plan for dealing with oil spills from railroad tanker cars in Northwest Montana, it was reported during a meeting of the Great Northern Environmental Stewardship Area group in Whitefish last week.

The company’s Geographical Response Plan includes details on the placement of oil-containment booms, cleanup protocols and notification of federal, state and local emergency-response agencies.

The plan encompasses river drainages from East Glacier to Libby, including the Two Medicine, Middle Fork of the Flathead, Stillwater, Kootenai and mainstem of the Flathead rivers.

The plan was drafted in cooperation with federal, state and local agencies, including the Forest Service, National Park Service, Blackfeet Tribe and Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes.

The draft document also provides general cleanup guidelines. For example, while most gasoline in a spill evaporates within a day or two, heavier materials such as crude oil need to be cleaned up using booms and absorbent materials.

The plan also contains a Coast Guard table showing how fast an oil spill will move downstream. Based on that table, a spill in the Middle Fork at its current high water level of 13,000 cubic feet per second would move about 4.8 miles per hour. An unconfined spill in Essex would reach West Glacier, 30 miles away, in a little more than six hours.

How fast a spill moves decreases dramatically with declining river flow. During winter, when the Middle Fork is flowing at 450 cubic feet per second, an oil spill would travel at a little more than one mile per hour.

In the event of an emergency, BNSF’s main strategy is to contain and stop the spill at the source, the plan notes. A crude oil spill, particularly along the southern boundary of Glacier National Park, has been a significant concern for Park officials, as tanker cars from the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota pass through the Canyon every day.

Park superintendent Jeff Mow reiterated those concerns during the GNESA meeting. The group brings together railroad, state, federal, local and tribal officials to talk about issues and concerns in the Middle Fork Corridor. The group was created in response to large grain spills in 1989 and 1991 that attracted grizzly bears which were hit by passing trains.

While concerns about grain spills remain, much has been done over the years to mitigate their impacts and get them cleaned up quickly. Grain cars today have better designs that significantly reduce the amount of grain that can be spilled. In the event of a spill, huge vacuum trucks respond to the scene and dispose of spilled grain that in the past was buried on site.

But now the focus has shifted to oil. The thrust of the conversation at last week’s meeting was not so much cleanup but prevention, from lowering speed limits for oil cars to track improvements. Some have suggested that oil tanker cars be separated, so a one mile-long train isn’t exclusively oil tankers, which could mitigate any spill potential.

Spokesman Matt Jones noted that BNSF is open to discussions through the GNESA framework, but the discussion should include all spills, not just oil.

“This is a conversation we want to have going forward,” he said.

Michael Jamison, of the National Parks Conservation Association, said GNESA has a good framework of cooperative agencies and personalities to get a strategy completed.

“That’s the strength of GNESA,” he said.

But GNESA director Dan Vincent noted that GNESA is not an advocacy organization.

“GNESA facilitates the discussions but doesn’t take an advocacy role,” he said.

Vincent pointed out that federal agency leaders on the GNESA board are legally prevented from voting. Still, the spill issue will likely be taken up by a GNESA subcommittee. The conversation promises to continue and will likely tie into other issues along the corridor — most notably avalanches.

Last winter, for the first time in decades, Glacier Park allowed BNSF to use an explosive device to safely trigger avalanches in the John F. Stevens Canyon. The Daisy Bell device hangs from a helicopter and directs a blast from a hydrogen combustion chamber toward loose snowpack.

Natural avalanches along the tracks this past winter forced BNSF to halt train traffic until the danger subsided and snow on the tracks could be cleared.

BNSF creates a significant economic impact in Montana, Jones noted. The company annually moves 2 million carloads of freight through Montana, about 20 percent of all the train freight in the U.S., some 342,000 carloads per year.

BNSF employs 2,300 people statewide, including 250 in Whitefish, and it plans to hire 450 more this year statewide. The company also plans to invest $160 million in its Montana infrastructure this year and has invested $470 million in Montana since 2010, Jones said.

For more information, visit online at www.gnsa.org and www.bnsf.com.