What would you say if the government knowingly sanctioned the transport of tons of TNT through your town on a daily basis?
They don’t do that, but they do allow railroad companies to drag around 90-ton tanker cars full of chlorine, the deadly chemical that was eliminated from warfare after World War I because it can’t be controlled once it is released.
President Bush, who now admits he’s got more experience downing hurricanes than dealing with them, is no more prepared to deal with a potential attack on a toxic train or chemical plant than he was before 9/11, as Greenpeace activists so graphically demonstrated the other day.
And as the Washington Post suggests (citing statistics from the Navy's Research Laboratory), an attack on a single railroad tank car of chlorine traveling through the nation’s capital could:
•Kill or seriously harm 100,000 people within an hour.
•Set off a toxic plume that could extend over 40 miles.
•Leave a deadly core area of about 4 miles by14.5 miles.
“It is also true,” the Post added, “that while the D.C. government has enacted a law to deal with the issue, the federal government has taken no serious steps to prevent chemicals that are toxic if inhaled from being shipped through the District. What’s more, the Justice Department and CSX Transportation Inc., rather than supporting D.C. legislation that sought to regulate the transport of ultra-hazardous materials through the city, instead obtained a court order to stop the district from enforcing its law.”
If anyone thinks toxic trains are not a significant target, they’re forgetting the March, 2004 attacks on the Madrid commuter railway, and the fac that Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackings, asked about a chemical plant and water reservoir when he flew over Tennessee in 2001 in a light airplane. Justice Department officials say several individuals with links to the September 11 hijackers fraudulently obtained or attempted to obtain hazardous materials transportation licenses and iIn 2003, an Ohio-based Al Qaeda operative was arrested for providing material support to terrorists including plotting to collapse a bridge in New York City and derail a train in DC. He has since pled guilty.
Troy Morgan, an FBI expert on WMDs, told Carl Prine, a Pittsburgh reporter who wrote a 2003 series of articles on chemical plant security: “You’ve heard about sarin and other chemical weapons in the news. But it’s far easier to attack a rail car full of toxic industrial chemicals than it is to compromise the security of a military base and obtain these materials.”
Even many in the chemical industry will also admit that they are a fat target.
"We might as well face the fact that security at a 7-Eleven after midnight is better than that at a plant with a 90-ton vessel of chlorine," says John DePasquale, a former Georgia-Pacific Corp. security chief who now consults with industry. "A guy with a suitcase full of explosives can kill tens of thousands of people, and we're not doing anything about it."
Over 83 million tons of hazardous materials are shipped by rail each year on the 170,000 mile railroad network that criss-crosses the U.S The Government Accounting Office (GAO) reports that 59 percent of the “toxic-by-inhalation” gases like chlorine produced in the U.S. are shipped by rail to their ultimate destination. Since rail shipments of chlorine are typically transported longer distances, they comprise 95 percent of “ton-miles” transportation of chlorine.
Millions are vulnerable at any time.
“These types of trains run on tracks through the hearts of our cities,” a group of mayors from 51 cities (including Chicago, Baltimore, Las Vegas, and Providence) wrote to Homeland Security Department Secretary Tom Ridge shortly after a January train wreck accident in South Carolina, which killed 9 residents.
“90,000 shipments of chlorine alone are transported across the country each year…Our citizens should have a reasonable expectation that hazardous materials are being shipped in the safest manner possible and that local first responders are aware of such shipments in advance,” the mayors wrote. But the Department of Homeland Security opposes such notification on the grounds that it would be impractical and could compromise security.
The Department of Homeland Security estimates that an attack involving a chlorine tank explosion could cause as many as 17,500 deaths and 10,000 severe injuries.
Earlier this year, Richard A. Falkenrath, President Bush’s former Deputy Homeland Security Advisor, told Congress that “toxic-by-inhalation industrial chemicals present a mass-casualty terrorist potential rivaled only by improvised nuclear devices, certain acts of bioterrorism, and the collapse of large, occupied buildings… [yet] To date, the federal government has made no material reduction in the inherent vulnerability of hazardous chemical targets inside the United States.”
Instead, the Department of Homeland Security has a pathetic rail security plan that relies on the use of surveillance cameras along CSX’s tracks. In other words, rather than prevent a suicide bomber from accessing the tracks, “It would only record the bomber doing the dastardly deed.”
The amazing thing is that this problem is totally preventable, if they would just reroute the trains away from populated areas as D.C. and potentially many other cities wish to do. At the same time, the fact that there is ultimately no totally safe way to use or transport the stuff points to the need to phase it out of use entirely.
In fact, that recommendation was made well over a decade ago by various groups and leading policymakers, including Republican Gordon Durnil, the author of The Making of a Conservative Environmentalist, who was appointed by Bush Sr. to head up the International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes. Durnil and his colleagues at the IJC, who have been joined in their call by the American Public Health Association and other groups, recommended that chlorine be phased-out of industrial use back in 1992, mostly because the chemical is also the root source of a majority of the worst toxic pollutants around.
Of course that hasn't happened because the chemical industry, whose ties to Bush run deep, have gassed any proposal to even study the issue any time it's been raised.
In “It’s My Party Too” the former E.P.A. chief Christie Whitman said that chemical industry lobbyists thwarted the reasonable safety rules that she and the Department of Homeland Security tried to impose. After Senators Corzine (D-NJ) and Jefforts (I-VT) proposed legislation to promote safe chemicals, the American Chemistry Council met with top Bush political advisor Karl Rove and the White House Council on Environmental Quality in September 2002. Rove told the chemical industry lobbyists that the White House “share[s] your concerns regarding S 1602, the Corzine-Jeffords Bill.”
Given the obvious threat since 9/11, “it is striking … how much has not changed in the three and a half years since nearly 3,000 people were killed on American soil,” the New York Times noted in a recent editorial. “The nation’s chemical plants are still a horrific accident waiting to happen. … But the chemical industry, a major Bush-Cheney campaign contributor from the start (at least half a dozen industry leaders were Bush Pioneers in 2000), has bitterly fought needed safeguards.”
Since no one denies the possibility of a terrorist attack – even Fred Webber of the American Chemistry Council said two months after 9/11 that “’No one needed to convince us that we could be-and indeed would be-a target at some future date.’ ” -- the industry's tack has been to debate proposals that are criminally cosmetic. One industry PR hack recently proposed that the industry adope a kind of 4 G’s program – "Guards, Guns, Gates and Gadgets.”
Others more familiar with the behind-the-fenceline engineering and safety -- whose lives are put at risk already, are much less glib.
“The first solution to a process safety problem should always be to get rid of the hazard, not control it,” Dennis Hendershot, a senior engineer with Rohm and Haas, told Chemical & Engineering News in 2003.
That’s exactly what the Blue Plains Sewage Treatment Plant in Southwest Washington DC did – eliminating seven on-site chlorine gas rail cars within 8 weeks of the 9/11 attacks. Because beefing up security to prevent intruders would have been very costly (even the most extensive security would likely not be sufficient), the plant managers and engineers decided to replace the source of the problem – chlorine gas –with a safer substitute.
“We had our own little Manhattan Project over here,” Jerry N. Johnson, general manager of the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority, which runs the plant, said. “We decided it was unacceptable to keep this material here any longer.”
And in the long run, the change might prove to be even more cost-effective. Steve Nugent, general manager of the Carmichael, CA Water District said that while sodium hypochlorite cost $1/gallon compared with $.35/gallon of chlorine, “overall we found it less expensive to switch because we didn’t need to get the extra equipment” necessary to contain, house and monitor the chlorine.
According to a 2003 report by Environmental Defense (ED), more than 19 million Americans remain at risk from facilities that continue to use chlorine in heavily populated areas. Six facilities could each affect over one million nearby residents in the event of an accident or attack, and another 39 could affect over 100,000 residents. The good news, ED reports, is that twelve wastewater facilities that posed a threat to 100,000 or more residents have already converted to safer alternatives since 1999.
Meanwhile, several cities besides the District of Columbia, including Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are considering legislation to reroute freight trains carrying large quantities of hazardous chemicals through densely populated areas.
Federal legislation has also been introduced to address security issues around the transport of hazardous chemicals by railcar and the use of safer alternatives. These efforts include bills by Representative Markey (D-MA) and Senators Joseph Biden (D-DE) and Jon S. Corzine (D- NJ).