Last week, we talked about how conspicuously absent pipeline advocates were in the wake of the huge oil spill on the coast of Santa Barbara County. It seems that tens of thousands of gallons of crude befouling a tourist hot spot caused wiser voices in the pro-pipeline cohort to go silent, rather than prove themselves to be as tone-deaf as they are science-averse.
Even so, there were still enough die-hards in the Big Oil camp ready to say, albeit more quietly than usual, “Pipelines are safer than trains.” There’s no disputing it, they said. It’s just a fact.
Except, it’s not. It falls into the annals of “lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
You see, the rules regarding oil spills on railroads are extremely strict. Every spill has to be reported, no matter how small it is. Pipeline standards are more lenient– only leaks of more than 19 liters, or just over five gallons, have to be reported. So if you’re only counting incidents, it seems trains are slopping oil all over the country all the time, while pipelines are almost sanitary by comparison. Looking at the scale of damage done, however, it’s not even a contest– pipelines are fleas carrying bubonic plague, and trains are ants at a picnic.
Rob Wile of Fusion looked into the issue in great depth in February, after a West Virginia train derailment got the pipeline crowd all hot and bothered for Keystone XL again. What he uncovered is how a misleading statistic– number of spills– has perverted the conversation around pipeline safety.
(He also noted that train derailments tend to produce fires, which are photogenic catnip for news media, but are a poor criterion to judge damage done. For example, the Lynchburg, Va., spill in April 2014 captured media attention for its huge flames and black clouds. But in the aftermath, the state determined only about 390 gallons were released into the environment.)
Peter Goelz, former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, has been particularly attentive to the misuse of statistics to corrupt the pipeline debate. He took Fraser Institute– an ultra-conservative Canadian think tank, similar to the Heritage Foundation and funded by many of the same corporate interests, such as the Koch brothers– to task for its faulty report that proclaimed pipelines safer than trains.
Goelz had a simple answer to that claim, which he says rehashed a similarly debunked report by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank also tied to the Koch brothers:
Both pipelines and railroads deliver better than 99.5% of their crude oil product safely. They are both safe. [...] The big environmental issue for pipelines, and the one that Fraser does not want to acknowledge, is that when pipelines have a problem it is almost always a big one. This was demonstrated most recently in North Dakota where a pipeline leaked over 20,600 barrels (865,200 gallons). This, the largest inland pipeline spill in recent US history, was not discovered until a farmer noticed the oil in his fields. Even the pipeline company cannot explain how long the leak was active, let alone what caused it. In comparison, when a railcar is involved in accident, the environmental impact is almost always limited. The capacity of today’s tank car is between 25-30,000 gallons (just over 700 barrels) and the overwhelming majority of rail spills reported by the Department of Transportation involve amounts of less than 5 gallons. (Emphasis added.)
The 2013 North Dakota spill Goelz references has projected
cleanup costs of more than $20 million. Which, if it can be done for that amount, would be a comparative bargain. The Mayflower, Ark., oil spill of 2013 racked up more than
$44 million in cleanup costs in the first four months. Families had to be evacuated, and
many homes were bought outright by ExxonMobil, rather than pay for ongoing emergency shelter and lingering health care costs. The company also recently agreed to pay more than
$5 million in fines and penalties for the 134,000-gallon leak.
All of that sounds like a lot, until you remember the Kalamazoo River spill of 2010. That cleanup has totaled more than $1.21 billion. And it’s not done yet, even after five years.
By way of comparison, the total dollar amount of damages caused by train spills involving all hazardous materials--including but not limited to crude oil-- for the ten years from 2005 to 2014, was $177 million, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. That's less than 15 percent of the cost of Kalamazoo alone. The annual average of $17.7 million a year is less than half what Mayflower incurred in just four months.
Dollar-for-dollar, train spills-- and again, we're talking about trains carrying ALL hazardous materials, not just oil-- are laughably less significant than oil pipeline leaks. It's also worth remembering that because tar sands oil is considered an "unconventional oil," pipelines that transport it are exempt from the federal insurance fund that covers cleanup costs beyond a pipeline company's ability to pay. Keep that in mind as you ponder the wisdom of Keystone XL running through the largest freshwater reservoir in the country.
Despite these facts, pipeline supporters keep saying over and over how pipes are safer than trains. That doesn't make it true, but it makes it truthy, as Stephen Colbert might say. Once it gets into the echo chamber, it feeds on itself until people who should know better quote it like scripture and preach it like gospel.
But a lie repeated is still not true, no matter how many people believe it. Pipelines have an awesome failure rate, averaging more than one pipeline leak per day (nearly two per day in 2014), and their failures are often of the catastrophic variety. The company responsible for the Santa Barbara spill has an extensive list of violations and structural problems. It is part of an industry that relies on decaying infrastructure and lax regulatory oversight to keep its profits churning.
Are trains the solution to oil transportation? Not necessarily, though trains are getting safer. The only foolproof solution to oil spills is to stop transporting oil. A national commitment to building a cleaner, greener economy could make that happen, but until Washington shows the spine to stand up to Big Oil, we're going to have to fight one pipeline or one trainload at a time.
For more on this and other issues surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline and other Big Oil boondoggles, see PipeLIESExposed.org.
