In 34 years with the Oak Park fire department, Chief Tom Ebsen says there has never been a freight train derailment on the Union Pacific line that runs as a spine through Oak Park along the North Boulevard embankment. But he acknowledges that concerns about derailments have spiked in recent years both nationally and regionally.
The boom in domestic oil production, especially in North Dakota, and a lack of pipeline capacity has pushed crude oil transport onto railroad tankers with occasional derailments resulting in spectacular and deadly outcomes that have led critics to call these “bomb trains.”
Tens of thousands of railcars travel through Oak Park and River Forest every year, and the frequency of those carrying toxic and explosive material in black tanker cars is increasing. Murray Snow, the village government’s emergency preparedness and response manager, said Union Pacific records indicate 7,000 to 9,000 rail cars travel through Oak Park annually carrying hazardous materials.
The possible derailment of a freight train on the Union Pacific line carrying highly volatile crude oil could have the same effect as a bomb exploding in the downtown area.
This issue has reached a fevered pitch with environmentalists, who have dubbed the volatile freight as “bomb trains,” due to recent derailments that have ended in disaster. Many point to a derailment in Lac-Megantic, Quebec in July 2013 that killed 47 people and destroyed nearly three-dozen buildings.
Ebsen acknowledged that such a disaster could happen in Oak Park, but he says police, fire and other emergency responders are ready if it does.
Ebsen tells Wednesday Journal that the so-called blast zone for a crude oil spill is a half-mile radius from North Boulevard. If a railcar carrying oil derailed at Oak Park Avenue, for instance, the blast zone would run from Chicago Avenue to Madison Street, from Harlem Avenue to Ridgeland Avenue, Ebsen said.
He said it is conceivable that metal from the explosion could travel that far, and as many as 20,000 residents would have to evacuate.
Ebsen said he does not get information from Union Pacific as to how much hazardous material travels through Oak Park each day – particularly highly flammable oil from the Bakken oil field in North Dakota that was involved in the Lac-Megantic derailment.
“We’re aware of the risk and we train and we prepare and we do drills and we have the systems in place if, god forbid, it did happen. We know procedurally what we would do. We just hope that it never happens,” he said.
Ebsen said every firefighter is trained as a hazardous material first responder, and five members of the department belong to the Division 11 Hazardous Material Response Team, a regional team that includes Oak Park, River Forest, Forest Park, Berwyn, Cicero, North Riverside and Stickney.
OPFD firefighters also have attended Union Pacific derailment training seminars in Pueblo, Colorado, where they learn how to uncouple cars and handle emergency shutoffs on railcars, among other emergency response techniques in a derailment scenario.
Murray Snow, the village of Oak Park’s emergency preparedness and response manager, said “it would be a bad day in Oak Park” if a train carrying oil derailed, but echoed Ebsen’s position that the village is ready to deal with such a disaster.
Snow said that within the last couple of years the village conducted an oil train derailment emergency response exercise, involving the police and fire departments, Union Pacific representatives and other village managers.
“We cannot predict when or where (a derailment might happen) or what’s going to be involved,” Snow said. “What we do is assume the worst and practice our response to that.”
He said the training scenario challenges emergency responders to deal with the derailment, while organizing the evacuation of residents.
Snow said he believes the village would fare better than the city of Lac-Megantic because such a disaster would trigger response from the so-called Mutual Aid Box Alarm System, which rallies emergency response resources from the city of Chicago and its suburbs.
Roughly 7,000 to 9,000 railcars carrying hazardous material travel through the village every year, Snow said, about a third of which are classified as flammable liquids. Snow said he receives an annual breakdown from Union Pacific on what materials travel through and at what volumes, acknowledging that the amount of hazardous material transported by rail has steadily increased in recent years.
“As the economy improves the rail traffic is going to increase,” he said.
Mark Davis, a Union Pacific spokesman, said in a telephone interview that the railroad does not release the information to the general public but makes it readily available to government officials upon request.
“We believe there’s no real benefit for that information to be provided to the general public,” he said.
He emphasized that the railroad is focused on derailment prevention and will spend $1.74 billion this year alone on infrastructure replacement. Davis noted that along with the track improvements the railroad conducts millions of electronic track inspections a day. And in case there is a derailment, the company has trained roughly 45,500 emergency responders at its facility in Pueblo since 2003.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time a car makes it to the destination without incident,” he said. Davis noted that train derailments have dropped 23 percent over the last decade, but declined to give the number of derailments that happen every year.
The lack of details available to the public is a problem for environmental activist Debra Michaud of Tar Sands Free Midwest.
Michaud and other activists held a demonstration earlier this year in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, demanding answers on what they refer to as “bomb trains.”
Michaud said the group wants the railroads to release the train routes for Bakken oil, which she said is more volatile than other oil. The group also wants information on blast zones and what the city of Chicago is doing to prepare for potential explosions. She said residents of suburban communities should be equally concerned.
She said that if a train like the one in Lac-Megantic exploded in Chicago, “You would probably have thousands of deaths. You can’t even imagine the casualties. It would be like a bomb being dropped in the city.”
Ebsen said that while the threat of a derailment is always present, he believes that it is unlikely to happen in Oak Park. He said there has never been a derailment on the village portion of the track in the 34 years he’s served on the fire department.
“In Oak Park it’s just a straight run through town; we don’t have switching yards,” Ebsen said. “Most derailments happen in rural areas because the track isn’t maintained very well or in switching yards where the trains are moving from one track to the other.”