An oil train containing the explosive power of three atomic bombs will soon return to Bennington neighborhoods.
Updated from 2022 article in Bennington Banner
In the early hours of February 3, 50 train cars derailed near East Palestine, Ohio, causing a massive fireball, billowing smoke, and releasing a toxic chemical called vinyl chloride into the air, soil, and water. Up to 2,000 residents were impacted by the disaster, and those within a mile of the crash site were evacuated. The long-term effects of the leaked chemicals remain to be seen.
In a few months, train cars containing a similar, dangerously explosive chemical will roll through North Bennington before being parked less than one mile from Bennington College.
For the past five years, July has brought an unwelcome gift: a long string of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) tankers parked on neglected rail lines next to homes on Rice Lane behind Lake Paran. Each DOT 112 tanker contains approximately 33,700 gallons of “pressurized, non-odorized liquid petroleum,” an extraordinarily explosive gas. According to Earth Justice, the sixty LPG tankers in Bennington contain the explosive power of roughly three Hiroshima atomic bombs.
Although Vermont Rail seems to hope no one will notice this immense risk to the community, residents living near the train are alarmed by its presence. As one resident of Rice Lane commented, “If anything’s going to happen, it’s going to happen to us.”
Scott Foucher, another resident, voiced his frustration with the oil tankers sitting at the edge of his property. “I think there’s plenty of tracks where they could be, where it wouldn’t bother us. I don’t even understand [the point] of having them here. I mean, what if?”
The “what if’s” are far from hypothetical. In the past few years, two oil trains derailed in our region: one on the outskirts of Hoosick Falls in 2019 and one near downtown North Bennington in 2020. Both incidents narrowly averted sending fully loaded LPG tankers careening down steep embankments.
So far, our community has avoided the inferno of a ruptured LPG tanker. Other communities have not been so lucky. The East Palestine accident is part of a long history of train cars containing hazardous materials derailing, often with disastrous results.
Just before midnight in June 2009, a train containing 14 LPG tankers derailed while entering the Italian village of Viareggio. After one tanker flipped over, LPG poured into the village for a few moments before the petroleum cloud ignited. The blast leveled two city blocks and, according to investigators, incinerated children. Although only two of the 14 LPG tankers exploded, 32 people were killed, and many more were severely injured.
The Viareggio incident left scientists perplexed by the instantaneous enormity of an LPG blast: “There is no time to apply any protective emergency plans/actions.”
Although accidents involving LPG-laden DOT-112 tankers are infrequent, when they do occur, the resulting disaster overwhelms emergency responders. As firefighters learned when they rushed to the scene of an LPG derailment in rural Pennsylvania in 2017, there is no way to fight an LPG tanker fire, let alone extinguish it. Cascading explosions prevented efforts to establish an incident command center, so firefighters focused instead on evacuating residents, leaving the fire to burn itself out over the course of several days.
The profound difficulty of containing LPG fires is well known. In 2019, local Bennington residents asked Vermont Secretary of Transportation Joe Flynn what plans were in place to effectively respond to a ruptured LPG tanker. “We don’t have a plan for that. That would be catastrophic,” Flynn responded.
According to the Association of American Railroads, the amount of oil and petroleum products shipped on trains rose fiftyfold in the past decade. This exponential uptick of oil trains has strained aging railway infrastructure and outdated regulations for shipping hazardous materials.
The risks of oil trains were not widely publicized until the Lac-Mégantic disaster in 2013, when an oil train derailed in a Canadian village. The explosion flattened much of the downtown area and killed 47 people.
Although Lac-Mégantic seized headlines, very little changed. From Casselton, ND to Montgomery, WV, to Custer, WA, oil train derailments and explosions have rattled the continent with an alarming frequency every year since. In 2015, the federal government said it anticipates roughly ten oil train derailments a year until 2034.
Considering these risks, many environmental groups now refer to these oil tankers as “bomb trains.”
Why are these dangerous trains allowed to remain in our community? The answer lies in a loophole in transportation laws called “federal preemption.”
Federal preemption prevents cities and states from passing laws that can interfere with the movement of goods across state borders. Trains on rail lines are considered “in-transit,” meaning they are under the exclusive jurisdiction of the federal government. For oil trains, this means that cities and states are unable to address the new risks oil trains introduce to their communities.
For example, after an oil train derailment and explosion narrowly avoided incinerating a middle school, Washington State mandated new safety requirements for oil trains moving through densely populated areas. Federal lawyers quickly overturned this policy, stating that “a state cannot use safety as a pretext for inhibiting market growth.” In other words, profit from interstate commerce outweighs protecting the public.
Since the East Palestine disaster, there have been widespread calls for increasing railway safety regulations. As residents push for the rail industry to be held accountable for the disaster in Ohio, Bennington students are organizing to prevent a similar disaster in our community.
In November, Bennington student Isabel Harper joined by professor David Bond and a group of students, presented to the North Bennington Select Board, urging them to ban the Bennington oil tankers. Harper noted that when LPG cars are legally considered in storage, they are subject to strict regulations, “Having it on these trains in our community bypasses those regulations for safety.”
However, she also emphasized that these cars may not qualify as in transit, which would make it possible for the Select Board to regulate the contents of the train cars, saying, “We feel there are common sense solutions that can be implemented.”
If efforts to remove these tankers from Bennington succeed, it could create a model for other communities to ban these dangerous trains in towns across the U.S.
The disaster in East Palestine has shown us the urgency of removing this danger from Bennington. As Bond told the board, “Every year the trains are allowed to be parked in our community is another year that we risk a catastrophic accident.”
Students interested in getting involved should contact Isabel Harper, David Bond, Malvika Dang, August Schnell, or Clio Riznyk.
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