Front Burner - Is more oil on rails safe for Canada?

Episode Date: February 4, 2019

Oil is being put on trains and moved across Canada in increasing numbers. Today on Front Burner, Winnipeg Free Press reporter Dylan Robertson explains why a lot of people are attributing this to a lack of pipeline capacity and breaks down what he's learned about how safe it is to transport oil by rail.

My name is Graham Isidor. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short Sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Jamie Pueso. There's this old neighborhood in Winnipeg called Lord Roberts. People like living there. But recently, there's been a lot of new development. My name is Beth Pike. I live in Lord Roberts' neighborhood.

Beth is a community advocate, and she recently gave one of our colleagues a tour. Lord Roberts is an old neighborhood, again, of 4,000 people. all leagues a tour. Lord Roberts is an old neighbourhood again of 4,000 people. What they want to do, the city, is park 5,000 more people on these old rail yards. But there's a serious issue for Bev, one she's been thinking about all the time. The neighbourhood is right next to 12 rail tracks,

and recently there's been a lot more train traffic. There's 12 active tracks. We see the trains running all day and all night every day of the year. Oil is being put on trains and trucked across the country in increasing numbers. A lot of people are attributing this to a lack of pipeline capacity. And it's causing problems in this Winnipeg neighborhood. This number of tracks, there's a lot of vibrations, so people's houses have lost their level. Their doors won't shut, there are cracks in the foundations, their windows are breaking. Bev is worried about something else, something much scarier. Oh, our biggest fear as a result of all this heavy train traffic with the toxic waste

is there'll be a massive lac-mé-qu'-en-tique here. Oil on trains. It's something we just don't talk about very much. But it's a big side issue in Canada's pipeline debate. Dylan Robertson is a reporter for the Winnipeg Free Press who's written a whole series about transporting oil on Canadian railways. He's here with me now from Ottawa. This is Frontburner. Hi Dylan. Hi. Thanks so much for joining us. Dylan, we just heard from Bev Pike. What's that like for her? I'm really struck by some of that sound. It feels like she's directly beside

these trains. You kind of are surrounded by this in Winnipeg. There's always been rails everywhere in the city, but to see these sorts of black cars, it's gone up at a staggering rate, and people are just sort of noticing it now. You have trains that go over the highway multiple times. You have trains that go right downtown at the forks. You know, people are skating on the river, and there's a big black car just kind of rolling up on top of you. You have people in residential neighbourhoods like Bev Pike who, you know, the way she puts it, she could put her arm out and she says, almost touch a train, that's a slight exaggeration, but it's right there, you feel it kind of rumbling along.

And it's kind of always been this way in Winnipeg. They've been trying to build a bit more with a buffer zone, but there's still a lot of infrastructure that's right up to the rail yards and the railways. Especially lately, there's questions about if there's oil and it's more volatile than just grain or supplies going through, you know, is there enough in place to kind of mitigate that risk? So there are people in Winnipeg like Bev Pike who are concerned there's more rail traffic coming through. Is she right? We know that there's more oil going by train in Canada. We know that there's been a doubling as of September in the amount of oil that Canada's sending to the states nationally. And when you actually pull up the U.S. statistics,

the increase in the prairies is sort of dramatic. So if you look at the Midwest states, we've gone from, you know, 850,000 a month in August to, you know, more than doubling to 2 million the month after that, up to 2.5 million the month following. So there is a huge uptick in oil by rail. And do we have a sense of why that's happening? The pipelines are sort of not really going anywhere. We've got protests. We've got court decisions that have thwarted the path of getting these pipelines built. Federal Court of Appeal has handed some Indigenous groups an important victory and it means a huge setback for the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. The project is now stalled pending what the court says should be more meaningful consultation. But there had already been development being done that had been years in the making

for one of these pipelines to come through. And we've had four projects that sort of are sorted at one end or another. And so the train is sort of what stepped in. We saw the same thing in the States, in the Dakotas, when there was the boom in the Bakken oil field. And where is all of this oil headed? Most of it is crossing from BC and Alberta South. But it seems like those lines might be tapped out because we're seeing an increase in the routes that go down from Saskatchewan, Manitoba and

northwestern Ontario into the States. So is the idea here that there's probably a lot of oil going through BC as well, but also these other routes that are finding their way through Winnipeg. Let's talk about the danger here. Justin Trudeau was at a town hall a couple of weeks ago, and he said that oil traveling by train is more dangerous than a pipeline. Is he right? I think so. I think there's sort of a consensus around that point. We know inherently that there's more risk in sending oil by rail.

It's important to state that we haven't had a Lac-Mégantic incident since the actual Lac-Mégantic. But there's incidents that happen quite regularly. We had one last month in Portage-le-Prairie where these two oncoming trains collided. One of them was carrying dangerous goods. The point of collision wasn't where the actual explosive fuel was. Of course, Lac-Megantic is a town in Quebec where a horrible, horrible event occurred in July of 2013. A rail car carrying fuel rolled down a hill into the town and burst into flames. 47 people died. It raised a lot of questions about substandard rail safety procedures. The yard is gone.

Planes, RJ, are 200 feet high. It's incredible. You can't believe it here. From the river right to the station. What the f*** happened? I don't know. I don't know. Prime Minister Stephen Harper echoed the comments of witnesses who described the scene as resembling a war zone. How likely is it for something like this to happen again, Dylan? I'd say we don't know. There have been some major

improvements done to Canada's rail infrastructure. They've phased out some of the most dangerous cars. They've stepped up some of the auditing. But a lot of the advocates say it's nowhere near enough. Bruce Campbell is the author of the Lac-Megantic Rail Disaster, Public Betrayal, Justice Denied. My view is that the lessons of Lac-Megantic have not been learned, that the window for a repeat of history is still open. The government is more involved in the States in regulating the railways. In Canada, the companies set their own plans based on a criteria, and then those plans are audited. So of the staff who look at safety management.

So effectively, you know, these plans are audited on paper, but there's not as much inspection being done. There's not as much scrutiny as pipelines. There's not as much scrutiny as pipelines. There's not as much records available. And so it's sort of harder to dig into this issue. So this gets a lot of play in Quebec because Lac-Mégantic is so much more alive in people's minds. Aside from that, in English Canada, it doesn't reverberate that much. You have some advocacy groups in Canada that look at the states and they say, why don't we have this sort of technology? Why don't we have more regulation? You have a system

that will slow down or outright stop a train when it's going too fast, when it's a runaway train. In Canada, we have similar systems on public transit and light rail, but it's a very expensive technology that they're still sort of figuring out. And so the regulation seems less of a scrutiny in Canada and more of a sort of assisted rule crafting. Given the increased amount of oil that we're now seeing being shipped by rail, are you seeing an increased concern by anybody, any advocacy groups or any politicians? I'd say there's more of a grassroots concern in that writing this article, we found one group in Toronto, and we found two people in Winnipeg that had raised these

sorts of concerns. After that article, you know, people across the country were writing in that they've noticed this themselves. They've looked online for stuff. There's a certain code that can go on a black tank car if it's carrying gas, gasoline. And people look for this red square on the tank cars and start counting them themselves. Every time we have something like a derailment, like a leak that happens on a train, we do get more and more people sort of writing into the free press and elsewhere asking about this. Can you tell me more about what you mean when you say counting cars? on a train, we do get more and more people sort of writing into the free press and elsewhere asking about this. Can you tell me more about what you mean when you say counting cars? Sure. So the black tank cars that everyone kind of knows, they're not always carrying dangerous goods.

They can carry other stuff. Sometimes they're empty. But when they're actually carrying a flammable liquid, there's a placard on the side. It's a diamond, and it's red, and it says a few numbers on it. And that will tell you this is carrying gas. And that's sort of your only way of knowing that this is a petroleum product that's being transported on the rail line. What the companies do is publish this information in an app, and the app is only available to first responders. So if there's a collision, they can come to the scene and they know it's actually on the train. But for the public, they say there's a safety concern

if we told everyone what every rail car was carrying, and so that information isn't really public. How would I know if I was sitting in Winnipeg and there was a train filled with oil driving through Winnipeg? Well, you could look out your window quite often because the trains are just that close and you can see the black cars. And if you see that placard with the red square

and the numbers on it, then you can kind of tell, well, this one's carrying petroleum. Okay, the next guy is. Okay, that one's empty. Got it. You've also found that there have been complaints that exhaustion is setting in among rail workers. How serious is that problem? Fatigue is a huge issue in the railway sector. The Transportation Safety Board's been raising this for years.

We've gotten documents that suggest that people are sleeping on the ground at some of the guest houses. So you have these bunk houses. In this case, it was a CN bunk house in Rivers, Manitoba, near Brandon, where people are doing a cross-country trip. It takes a few days. They're taking a rest at this bunk house and they get there. And because the scheduling is so tight, there's nowhere to sleep because maybe a train was late or something like that. So they don't actually get their own room. They're sleeping on the couch. They're sleeping on the floor. We've had people billeted to hotels where the amount of time it takes, you know, the 90 minute

drive back and forth to Brandon is being counted as part of the sleep time, so they're not actually resting. So the people who are responsible for driving and operating these trains are possibly sleep-deprived? Well, yeah. We've got people who, in one case, a guy fell asleep while he was in the cabin of a train at the Symington Yard in Winnipeg. Someone else was manipulating the controls to get it to move. He was sort of doing the oversight and he was in the cabin. And some of his colleagues came over and saw that he was actually asleep at the chair. What is Transport Canada saying about all of this? They have done a lot since Lac-Mégantic happened. The question is, is it enough? They have done phasing out of these rail cars. They recently, just last month, the Minister of Transport put out a notice to the company saying you have to

beef up your fatigue regulations. It's the first major overhaul since 2012. It does say the types of changes to make, but it doesn't actually prescribe anything. It says, look at the following studies. Is anyone saying that everything's okay? The railways will say that they haven't had any sort of a major incident since Lac-Mégantic, and that is notable in a place like Winnipeg. There's all kinds of rails yards nearby. That being said, the main point for a lot of people is that they can't actually assess this. They don't have the data. They don't get any of the documents when there's a major change to the train policy.

And so they're not able to give this as much scrutiny as some of the airlines, as pipelines. It just sort of happens. It seems like the main issues that you found here is that there's clearly way more train traffic, more oil being transported on rails, and not enough people to track it and also to accommodate it. So how do you fix this problem?

I'm not quite sure how you fix this sort of problem. One of the main issues is just there's so many people who are using rail cars now. One of the issues here, even with that fatigue, is that you have so many trains going down these lines, it seems like they're sort of maxed out. And you have to find a place to house these people when there's any sort of slight change to the schedule. You've got to call in people who they're being brought in for a shift that evening, but they woke up in the morning and they've been alert and awake most of the day. It just seems really tight. And the train companies themselves say it's difficult for them to find enough people to train and put into these positions.

Do you see the government trying to do anything to address some of these issues right now? Or do you have a sense that there's a concern here, that this could be a potentially very dangerous situation? It's certainly on their radar. This past spring, there was a review of the Rail Safety Act, and they pointed out the fact that people don't trust the railway companies, that Lac-Mégantic put a major sort of pall over how people see this industry, that people are skeptical of Transport Canada. And in that report, they actually say the sort of outcry around pipelines could be copied for oil by rail because people see this

kind of thing, and it freaks them out. So they are trying to change the system. The way that I hear the approaches from the people at Transport Canada is, we'd rather sort of craft the framework and have the railroad companies actually do the changes themselves, make up their own rules, and we'll audit them because that way they're not going to complain about it. They won't try to weasel out of it. They set their own rules. And in Transport Canada's mind, that will make them more likely to actually follow those rules. A lot of the safety advocates say it's the complete opposite. Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. Thanks for having me.

We'll be back in a second. A whole new way where stories are brought to life by powerful performances from renowned actors and narrators. With the free Audible app, you can listen anytime, anywhere, whether you're at home, in the car, or out on a jog. The first 30 days of the Audible membership are free, including a free book. Go to www.audible.ca slash cbc to learn more. We reached out to Transport Canada for this story on Sunday afternoon, and we didn't hear back in time for this episode. Speaking to the Winnipeg Free Press, though, Transport Minister Mark Garneau said rail safety was his number one priority. Transport Canada says it has made the rail system safer in the years since LACMA-Gantique. For example, Ottawa has stopped companies from staffing

single-person trains and phased out certain high-risk tank cars. The government has also brought in mandatory video and audio recorders for investigating safety breaches. Aside from that, last October, the Transportation Safety Board removed transportation of flammable liquids by rail from its watch list, saying there had been safety progress by companies and the government, with the addition of more risk control measures. That's it for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. It's 2011 and the Arab Spring is raging. A lesbian activist in Syria starts a blog.

She names it Gay Girl in Damascus. Am I crazy? Maybe. As her profile grows, so does the danger. The object of the email was, please read this while sitting down. It's like a genie came out of the bottle and you can't put it back. Gay Girl Gone. Available now.