CONNOR HOFFMAN
Staff Writer
Did you know there’s a highly dangerous substance being transported right near the university? And as we all celebrate Earth Day, a train is carrying this material, which is not only hazardous to the environment, but also to human health and safety.
This substance is called Bakken crude and is being transported on the Dunkirk railroads. These same railroad tracks also go through Buffalo, so it’s not just Fredonia and Dunkirk that are in danger.
In North Dakota there is a huge oil field in the Bakken region. With the increased use of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling technologies, it has led to a huge boom in the Bakken region.
According to the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Bakken region is projected for the month of April to produce 592 barrels of oil per day.
Bakken crude has gained much attention in the news lately due to the fact that it is quite dangerous to transport because of how flammable this substance is.
On Jan. 2, 2014, the Pipeline and Hazardous Safety Administration (PHMSA) issued a warning that informed the public of how “crude oil being transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude oil.”
The Bakken crude is more flammable than normal heavy crude oil because it contains more natural gas, which makes its vapor combustible at a much lower temperature according to online news source The Week.
This danger is nothing hypothetical, because there already have been accidents caused by trains transporting the Bakken crude.
One of the most famous examples of this was the explosion in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, in 2013. This accident caused a huge explosion that resulted in the death of 47 people in the small Canadian village. In this accident, an unmanned 74-car freight train carrying Bakken crude rolled downhill, derailed and exploded.
“Usually it’s just a traffic accident — you have a tanker that rolls over or a train gets derailed or some type of leak from [a] damaged container or [an] offsite leak from when the water is returning,” said Michael Mendez, a computer science professor at Fredonia who used to work with Chautauqua County Emergency Services as a Planning Technician.
Since this Bakken crude is being transported by railroad, it eventually travels on the local Dunkirk railroads. This has caused worry among some community members due to the accidents that Bakken crude has caused.
Some worry just how prepared Chautauqua County is if this dangerous Bakken crude were to ever explode. The Chautauqua County government, along with many governments in the US, has disaster plans ready for multiple disaster situations.
“At all levels, the different organizations do threat assessments. Which threat, in this case, doesn’t just mean terrorism. It means natural disasters, tornadoes, hurricane, anything that’s going to impact the community, and then we kind of analyze how it would affect the community, what the risk is, how much danger it could cause and take all of that in account when we’re planning,” said Mendez when explaining how disaster plans are created.
From an explosion down to an oil spill, there are a variety of circumstances that could be initiated by the transportation of Bakken crude oil. In a region that boasts an ecosystem as big as the one supported by Lake Ontario, a huge oil spill could be catastrophic. Fortunately, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the most recent data available indicate that railroads consistently spill less crude oil per ton-mile transported than other modes of land transportation.”
So if a disaster ever did occur in this area, exactly what would happen?
“You start with the local emergency manager. Every town, village, city, municipality, what have you is responsible for identifying in their structure [who] is the emergency point of contact for that area. It might be the mayor, it might be the fire chief, it might be the police chief, and it’s really at their discretion. That person is responsible for bringing the necessary people together to have these discussions,” said Mendez.
Despite its potential risk, Mendez did not list Bakken crude as the highest threat in the area.
“I will say that the crude is probably not the most threatening thing that crosses through the area,” commented Mendez. “There are certainly other hazardous materials that have higher burning temperatures, more risk of explosive force under stress, like an engine fire or something like that. I just think about things like gasoline or liquid propane.”