Containment, collaboration key in responding to oil train accidents

Four crude oil trains have derailed and caught fire in as many weeks across the United States. As a neighbor to North Dakota's Bakken oil patch, Minnesota sees many oil trains coming through on freight tracks, headed for refineries around the country. Many trains pass through Coon Rapids, where firefighters have been thinking about and preparing for an oil train accident.

Captain Mark Seaton is with the Coon Rapids Fire Department, which has about 30 full-time firefighters and 20 other on-call personnel. He talked with Morning Edition host Cathy Wurzer about how his city would respond.

Here's an edited transcript of the conversation.

How much oil comes through your town?

It is definitely a lot. It is the highest volume of hazardous materials that run through our county. I have the numbers from 2013 and something like 135,000 rail cars came through our county. And volume wise — when you compare that to some of the other more hazardous that we might be more scared of — the volume is considerably lower, less than 1,000. Crude oil is the number one hazardous material that comes through the county.

What would you do if there was an accident with one of these trains?

It is certainly going to be a large event. It is going to be difficult to deal with. Anytime that a train derails, the first thing that we have to do is that we have to identify what the commodities are that that train is carrying. We have to go through an identification process. All the cars are supposed to be placarded. The engineer is carrying a manifest that has all of the materials on board. The train dispatchers, if I can give them a car number, they can give me what materials are on board. So the first thing we have to do is identify what we're dealing with because there is a wide range of materials that are carried on these trains. And each one gets dealt with differently, even if it is on fire. And then some trains are mixed commodities. But these crude oil trains they are what are called unit trains, so it is all crude oil. It's generally in the ballpark of 100 cars, and they're all crude oil.

Our first order of business is to determine whether evacuations are needed. If evacuations need to take place we'll start working on that in the immediate proximity of the fire. And we need to start cooling operations. And what I mean is that we need to start applying water to cars immediately adjacent to the fire to make sure that they don't rupture. In the first few minutes, I am not going to be able to do much about the cars that have actually ruptured and are on fire. At that moment, I have to keep this from getting bigger. And the way I do that is I started getting water onto the cars that are immediately adjacent to the fire. Fire may be impinging on the car, but that car has not ruptured.

But you can't use water to fight an oil fire?

No. I can use straight water for cooling operations, cooling the metal on the tanks. But that will not extinguish the fire. If anything, applying water to burning crude oil will just spread it because the water does not extinguish it. So what I need is foam. Basically we have to create a foam blanket over burning crude oil. And this is true of any flammable liquid. And the foam separates the fire from the vapors. Because its basically the vapors that are burning. But the caveat is that I can't really just put a foam blanket on part of the fire, because the foam does deteriorate fairly rapidly. It's not much different than soapy water. Its more complicated than that but that is the simple analogy. And that starts to deteriorate over a pretty short period of time. So when you apply the foam, and when you apply it, you have to apply it over the entire spill. Otherwise you're wasting your foam. You have to have enough foam on hand to handle that spill.

Does Coon Rapids have enough foam?

Generally no. Most fire departments carry a small amount of foam, because it's just not practical to have the amount of foam that we need for something like a train derailment on hand. So, what we are going to be relying on, here in Coon Rapids, our immediate department that would have a large quantity of foam on hand would be the Minneapolis St. Paul International Airport. And an event like this is going to take multiple fire departments. Every fire department in the county is going to be at this, maybe some from Hennepin County, depending on the size of the and scope of the situation.

Foam from the airport?

As soon as I make the phone call, it's going to take them a few minutes to get ready to leave and there going to have come up. So this is going to be a long event. Like I said, in the first few minutes, we're going to try to contain it so it doesn't get bigger and then work on the extinguishment when we have all the resources. The other resource for foam will be the railroad company themselves. They have a cache of foam and some additional firefighting equipment that they will bring to the scene. The other thing that the railroad is going to do, is that any cars that are on the track, that are still upright and can be moved, they're going to assist us is moving those cars out of the danger zone. And I imagine that's going to happen quickly.

These are very hot fires. How's that dangerous?

Our number factor that's going to hinder us is the radiant heat. The radiant heat off of these fires can be tremendous. And that is the number one danger. Here in Coon Rapids, there are wood frame structures all along the track. This is a developed area. So any wood frame structure, or combustible structure that's near the track, when one of these fire is happening, we have our work cut out for us making sure those do not catch on fire. So we have the radiant heat issues that are going to affect our personnel attempting to get close to the fire to cool these cars. And then we have the radiant heat issues that are going to start catching other things nearby on fire.

Practically speaking, can a department like yours even fight something like this?

We say these things, but it takes a long time to get these things up and running. You're going to start out in the first minute or two with just a small group of firefighters. And our mutual aid partners, its going to take time for them to arrive and start getting them in place. Evacuations are going to be a challenge if this is going to happen near one of our apartment buildings that are near the tracks. Police are going to help us get that evacuation going. But we need a lot of things done quickly. And even though we immediately request help from other places, its going to take a few minutes to get everybody there and get them working. A fire of this magnitude in a suburban will be a big deal, a big event.

Can you train for something something this big?

We can train for the different components that need to be done. Myself, I have been out to the school in Pueblo, Colorado, that is put on by the railroad, and is now paid for by FEMA. And we go out there and train on props. They have a mock derailment that we get to train on, and use fire and foam, to not just pretend, not just to pretend but do what we would do in this situation. Most of it is very realistic, and very appropriate to what I would in real life. They create actual fires for us, and we have to put out those fires. But they are not to the scale and don't have the radiant heat that the real event would have. So that's the part that's different from training versus the real world. But yeah, the individual components we train on regularly. Applying foam to a flammable liquid spill, that's something firefighters are well trained in. Cooling operations on a tank, that's something that firefighters are well trained on. Getting water supply and hoses to where they need to to fight the fire. We're well trained on that. But this will be on a larger scale. A flammable liquid fire, we deal with that in a car fire. It's just on such a smaller scale. That's the problem with a train. It's a fire that we're used to dealing with but its just on an exponentially larger scale.

Do you think your department is prepared for something like this?

I'm pretty passionate about training, and I always want to do more training, and be more prepared. And for a lot of things, I do believe we are prepared. But this is a large event, and as prepared as anybody or any department or any agency might be, it is still a large event that has potential for a lot of property damage and potentially for loss of life.