Some Answers About the Panhandle Cornfield Meet of 2016

A “cornfield meet” in railroad parlance is a head-on collision between two locomotive engines.  Needless to say, such occurrences are avoided if at all possible.  But on the morning of June 28, 2016, two freight trains collided head-on in the Texas Panhandle, killing three people and causing an estimated $16 million in damage.  At the time I blogged about it, the only information available was news reports.  A few weeks later, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a preliminary report on the accident.  While the NTSB has not made public any additional data on the accident since then, the preliminary report makes clear that human error was likely at fault.

           

The BNSF line through the town of Panhandle is a single-track line, and two-way traffic is managed with a series of sidings.  The dispatchers, probably in the Fort Worth regional train control center, planned to switch the westbound train to a siding near the town, where it would remain while the eastbound train passed by on the main line.  If the eastbound train arrived in the area of the siding too soon, before the westbound train had time to move completely from the main line to the siding, two signals were set along the main line west of the eastern switch, where the westbound train was going to leave the main line for the siding.  The first signal the eastbound train encountered was solid yellow, which means for the engineer seeing the signal to slow the train to a maximum of 40 MPH and be prepared to stop at the next signal.  The second signal was set to red, which forbids the engineer from moving any part of the train past the red signal. 

So the plan was for the eastbound train to slow down at the yellow signal and stop at the red signal, while the westbound train arrived at the eastern switch and eventually cleared the main line by running onto the siding.

What happened instead was this.  Before the dispatchers had a chance to change the eastern switch from the main line to the siding, the eastbound train passed the yellow signal on the main line going at 62 MPH and the red signal at 65 MPH, heading through the switch on the main line straight for the westbound train.  When the engineer on the westbound train saw what was happening, he managed to jump from the cab.  But his conductor died in the resulting crash, as well as the engineer and conductor on the eastbound train.  The NTSB report somewhat ruefully notes that positive train control (PTC) was scheduled to be installed on this section of track later in 2016, although planned PTC installations have suffered repeated delays in the past.

PTC is a semi-automated system that promises to reduce the chances for human error in train operations.  A PTC system would have figured out that the two trains were heading toward a collision and would have at least slowed them down, if not preventing the accident entirely.  As it stands, the physical evidence points responsibility for the accident toward the crew of the eastbound train, as they failed to respond to the clearly visible yellow and red signals in time. 

We may never know what distracted them, but people make mistakes from time to time.  And some mistakes exact a fearful penalty. 

While even one death due to preventable causes is a tragedy, some context to this accident is provided by a slim volume I have on my shelves:  Confessions of a Railroad Signalman, by James O. Fagan, copyright 1908.  It was written at a time when railroad-related fatalities (passengers and railroad employees combined) were running at about 5,000 a year, a much higher rate per train-mile than today.  Fagan’s concern was that railroad employees of his day had to deal with on-the-job pressures that encouraged them to take risks and shortcuts that flouted the rules, and that the management system was ill-equipped to discipline misbehaving employees. 

While much has changed in railroading since 1908, any system that relies on a human being’s alertness can still fail if the person’s attention flags.  And that seems to be what happened outside Panhandle, Texas on that summer morning in 2016. 

If and when PTC is installed on most stretches of U. S. railways, the hope is that fatal and costly accidents will decline to even lower levels than what we see today.  The limiting factor after that will be mechanical malfunctions, perhaps, or dispatching errors at a high enough level to overrule the PTC system.  In any case, we can expect rail travel and shipping to be even safer than it is now, which compared to 1908 is pretty safe already.

Machines and systems are deceptively solid-looking.  It doesn’t seem possible that thousands of tons of steel rolling stock and rails can change very fast.  But the way it’s used can change, and PTC promises to do that.  Eventually, I suppose that the nation’s entire rail system will be run by computers and will resemble nothing so much as a giant version of a tabletop model train, running smoothly and without collisions or hazards.  Of course, automobile drivers will still manage to stop on grade crossings and people will walk on train trestles, so those types of accidents can’t be prevented even by PTC.  To eliminate those types of accidents, we’d have to tear up the whole system and rebuild it the way the English built their rail systems from the start:  fenced-off railroad property, virtually no grade crossings (tunnels and bridges instead), and other means to keep people and trains permanently separated. 

But I suspect we as a society are not that exercised to eliminate the last possible railroad fatality from the country.  So instead, we will enjoy whatever benefits PTC brings along and hope that we personally can stay out of the way of the trains. 

And modern-day cornfield meets will at last join their ancestors as a historic footnote, a quaint disaster that simply can’t happen anymore.  Like soldiers dying on the last day of a war, the crew members who died in the 2016 accident may be among the last to depart in that singularly violent way.  But for those of us who remain, and whose continued survival depends on our being alert, whether behind the throttle of a locomotive or the wheel of a car, this story is a good reminder to keep awake and pay attention.

Sources:  The NTSB report on the June 28, 2016 Panhandle, Texas accident can be found in the agency’s listing of railroad incident reports at https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/DCA16FR008-PreliminaryReport.pdf.  For those with a certain type of morbid curiosity, there is a collection of silent movies of three or four intentionally-staged cornfield meets between steam locomotives that can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMpdpgZxt78.  Confessions of a Railroad Signalman was published by Houghton-Mifflin. 

The Grenfell Tower Tragedy

In 1974, a new high-rise public housing apartment building opened in West London.  Called Grenfell Tower, it was 24 stories tall and designed to house as many as 600 people in 120 apartments.  Photographs of it taken before a renovation in 2015 show large windows on one side and smaller ones on the adjacent side. 

In 2014, as reported in this blog, the 63-story Address Hotel in Dubai, United Arab Emirates went up in flames as aluminum-clad foam-plastic panels called architectural cladding or sandwich cladding on its exterior caught fire and quickly spread the conflagration to most of the outside of the building.  Amazingly, no one died in that fire, due to a quick evacuation order by the authorities and the failure of the fire to spread to the interior of the hotel rooms.  But this was only one of numerous exterior-cladding fires that have resulted from the use of flammable architectural materials on buildings that are too tall to be reached conveniently by fire ladders.

In 2015, the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organization, the bureaucracy in charge of public housing in the Grenfell Tower district, decided to do a renovation, possibly to improve the structure's insulation and lower heating costs.  New windows were installed, thermal insulation was added, and to cover these changes, sandwich cladding panels were installed to cover the four exterior side walls. 

Some, perhaps most, of the cladding was made by the U. S. firm Arconic, which sells various types with different kinds of plastic between the outer aluminum sheets.  A cheaper type uses polyethylene plastic, but is not recommended for structures over 10 meters (33 feet) tall.  A slightly more expensive type is fire-resistant, as was the thermal insulation used underneath the cladding.  But even fire-resistant plastic can burn under some conditions.

When constructed, the building had no sprinkler system, but the apartments were piped for gas cooking and gas lines were present throughout the building.  Each apartment had fire detectors, but a residents' organization called the Grenfell Action Group has voiced complaints to authorities over the past few years about outmoded and non-functional fire extinguishers, flammable clutter in hallways, and other fire-safety issues, with little apparent response.

Residents of the Grenfell Towers, as were most other residents of London, had been instructed in case of fire to remain in place to be rescued by firefighters, rather than attempt an escape on their own.

In retrospect, the Grenfell Towers fire was a disaster waiting to happen:  an aging, open-style building without a sprinkler system but full of gas lines, covered with apparently flammable sandwich cladding outside potentially flammable insulation material, crowded with up to 600 residents who had been told to stay in their apartments in case of a fire.  And in the early morning hours of June 14, 2017, a fire broke out, reportedly in a kitchen on the fourth floor.

No sprinkler system or fire extinguisher succeeded in stopping the blaze before it ignited the exterior cladding, which in a matter of a few minutes spread the flames upward and eventually completely around the structure.  Many survivors got out by disobeying the orders to stay in place.  As of this writing (June 18), the estimated death toll is 58, and is expected to go higher.  If this is confirmed, it will be the largest number of people to die in a single fire in London since the Blitz of World War II.

Fires that kill lots of people at once are not that uncommon, but usually they happen in crowded single-room venues such as nightclubs where fireworks or other sources of ignition catch flammable materials on fire.  The spectacle of an entire high-rise building going up in flames because of flammable exterior cladding is something that is not supposed to happen in modern "fireproof" structures.  But the invention of a cladding material that is light, inexpensive compared to concrete, solid steel, or aluminum, and reasonably durable has led to its use and abuse throughout the world.  And as numerous cladding fires have shown, you can take the most fireproof building in the world and surround it with thin, flammable sheets exposed to a lot of air, and what you get is a giant Roman candle waiting to be set off. 

The Grenfell Towers fire may become a turning point in the politics and regulations of exterior cladding, similar to the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that killed 146 garment workers in 1911.  Like many of the residents of the public-housing Grenfell Towers, most of those who died in the 1911 fire were poor immigrants, though they died on the job amid flammable clothing materials, not at home surrounded by flammable architectural panels.  The Triangle fire had the good result of inspiring calls for improved fire-safety building codes and regulations, which if implemented can prevent tragedies like this.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, already in a politically weak position, has been jeered and attacked for what many saw as her inadequate response to the tragedy.  She and other politicians could turn this situation to the benefit of their country by leading a thorough investigation into the causes of both the Grenfell Towers fire and other similar fires in which flammable exterior cladding has played a role.  Then, they could take vigorous and definite action with regard to both existing and future architectural cladding that has any significant chance of short-circuiting fire safety by enabling the spread of a fire on an otherwise fireproof structure's exterior. 

It is ironic that after making people suffer for centuries the hazards of living in wooden structures that were chronically prone to burn down, nineteenth-century architects thought they had solved the problem of fire with concrete-and-steel structures, only to torch their triumphs in the last few decades by using what amounts to cheap window-dressing materials that burn like fireworks.  If I were an architect, I would be afraid to show my face in London after the Grenfell Towers tragedy. 

The most basic ethical requirement of a profession is that the professionals look out for the interests of those average citizens affected by their professional activities, citizens who have no way of knowing what hazards they could be subject to and how to avoid them.  I would be surprised if more than a few residents of Grenfell Towers knew anything about sandwich cladding, or the fact that under the right circumstances it would burn.  Well, everyone knows now.  And I can only hope that this knowledge gets applied to similar dangerous situations, and we do whatever it takes to keep another Grenfell Towers fire from happening anywhere, ever again.

Sources:  I referred to news reports about the Grenfell Towers fire carried by the Australian Broadcasting Company on June 17 at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-17/grenfell-tower-panels-not-suitable-for-tall-buildings/8627790, the Canadian Global News at http://globalnews.ca/news/3536188/grenfell-tower-fire-death-toll/, and the Wikipedia articles "Grenfell Tower fire" and "Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire."  My blog on the Address Hotel fire in Dubai appeared on Jan. 4, 2016.

Learning from the Kolkata Overpass Collapse

On Thursday Mar. 31, around noon, the busy Rabindra Sarani-KK Tagore Street crossing in the city of Kolkata, India (population 4.5 million) was crowded with shoppers and people having lunch in open-air eateries.  Crowds that a Westerner would consider to be a mob scene are routine in the Indian subcontinent, and the density of street-level shops makes many thoroughfares almost impassible by automobile.  To alleviate this congestion, in 2008 the Hyderabad-based construction conglomerate IVRCL won a bid to construct an overpass that would carry vehicular traffic above the existing street.  Construction began in 2009 and was due for completion in 2012.  But the firm ran into financial and land-acquisition difficulties, with consequent project delays, and so last week one of the last parts of the projected 2+ kilometer-long overpass was still under construction above the street.

By Wednesday, Mar. 30, a long straight section of the overpass was complete, and concrete was poured that night for a section next to a turn at the crossing, where steel girders already were suspended above the road.  At about 12:25 PM Thursday, some 300 feet (100 meters) of the overpass collapsed onto the street below.  As of Apr. 2, the death toll stood at 27, but more were missing and over 100 people were injured. 

While the cause of the collapse is under investigation, the IVRCL firm has been charged with culpable homicide and three members of the firm have been arrested.  This is after one firm representative termed the collapse "an act of God."

The construction phase of any large civil-engineering project is fraught with hazards that only good planning and expert supervision at all times can avoid.  As a civil-engineering professor interviewed about the tragedy pointed out, right after a poured-concrete structure is set in place, the weight of the newly poured material must be supported by temporary scaffolding before the concrete sets.  In contrast to the finished product, which office-based engineers can design at their leisure to withstand known stresses, temporary scaffolding is erected onsite in an ad-hoc way, and may have hidden defects that would require more engineering knowledge to avoid than the onsite construction workers and supervisors have.  It was apparently one such defect that led to the disaster in Kolkata last week.

From videos shot during the collapse, it appears that few if any pedestrian or vehicle barriers were in place to keep people away from the construction site.  Admittedly, this would have been difficult, like temporarily shutting down Times Square in New York City for construction.  And businesses on the street undoubtedly would have complained if large sections of the surface street had been blocked off, impairing access to some shops.  But events have proved that the tradeoff would have been worth it, if excluding traffic from under the most hazardous parts of the overpass during construction would have saved lives.

While some commenters on Indian news sites complained that such things are never allowed to happen in the so-called First World, only a year ago I reported in this space about a similar but smaller-scale accident involving overpass construction, right here in Texas.  While a prefabricated-concrete-beam overpass was being built over the busy I-35 freeway near Salado, Texas, a truck carrying an overheight load struck one of the beams before it had been firmly fixed in place.  It shifted and knocked down several other beams, one of which killed the driver of a pickup truck.  Again, this accident could have been prevented by diverting traffic from underneath the overpass, but the result would have been permanent miles-long backups on I-35 that might have provoked angry citizens to mount a protest march at the Texas Department of Transportation. 

Any complex engineering project is a series of compromises with safety, expenses, schedules, personnel, and other resources all in the mix.  In the West, a relative abundance of resources has led engineering organizations to err on the side of more money traded for more safety.  In India, as the comparatively poor track record of fatal building and construction collapses attests, getting the project done cheaply sometimes takes priority over getting it done safely.  India is a democracy, and it may be that the current level of construction safety reflects an increased urgency to solve the nation's civil-engineering needs faster and with fewer resources than Western-style engineering would allow.  It is bad enough when a privately-owned building collapses.  But a public-works project such as an overpass inherently affects more people, and carries more potential for harm.  This is why most public-works project specifications require licensed professional engineers to supervise the design phase.  But the best designers in the world will be unable to prevent onsite accidents if the people who actually do the construction are not capable of understanding the hazards and engineering challenges involved.

At least three members of the IVCRF firm have been arrested in connection with the tragedy and charged with culpable homicide.  The degree to which they are responsible is now going to be determined by the legal process, which may take months or years.  Regardless of the fate of the engineers and managers involved in this accident, to prevent future tragedies like this a sea change will have to take place in the entire construction industry in India. 

I have mentioned before a simple safety code that was once emblazoned on bronze plaques in Bell System telephone exchanges throughout the U. S.:  "No job is so important and no service is so urgent—that we cannot take time to perform our work safely."  That was back when the Bell System was a monolithic nation-like organization, and it could afford hundreds of bronze safety plaques.  But everyone working in a business that creates potential hazards for its own employees, and especially for innocent bystanders, can afford to make the Bell System safety creed their own.  And something like this could go a long way toward making Indian construction sites and buildings safer places to be.

Sources:  I referred to reports on the Kolkata overpass collapse carried on the National Public Radio website at http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/02/472797620/after-overpass-collapse-in-kolkata-firm-charged-with-culpable-homicide, ABC News at http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-02/indian-authorities-arrest-three-more-over-bridge-collapse/7294848,

the Times of India at http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/kolkata/Kolkata-flyover-collapse-Its-an-act-of-god-says-builder/articleshow/51634766.cms, The Week at http://www.theweek.in/news/india/what-caused-kolkata-flyover-collapse-experts-speak.html, and The Wire at http://thewire.in/2016/03/31/photo-gallery-after-the-kolkata-flyover-collapse-26961/ and http://thewire.in/2016/04/01/kolkata-flyover-collapse-18-dead-over-60-injured-26907/.  My blog article http://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-bridge-too-close.html,

"A Bridge Too Close," about the I-35 accident appeared on Mar. 29, 2015. 

Tianjin Tragedy: A Painful Lesson

Last Wednesday, Aug. 12, people living near the coast of Bohai Bay, in the southeast part of the port city of Tianjin, were awaked by the sound of sirens and the flickering of a fire.  A chemical warehouse on the bay was ablaze, and several residents got out their smartphones and videoed the impressive conflagration as it illuminated nearby apartment and office buildings.  At 11:30 PM, eyewitnesses saw a blinding flash as a huge detonation went off, followed a few seconds later by an even bigger one that registered 2.3 on the Richter scale of seismographs many miles away.  Acres of new cars awaiting shipments were incinerated, huge shipping containers were tossed around like matchsticks, and

as of this writing (Sunday Aug. 16), the confirmed death toll from the explosions has reached 112, with 90 more reported missing.  Hundreds have been injured, many seriously, and evacuations and property damage have rendered several thousand residents temporarily homeless.  Sodium cyanide, a highly toxic chemical, has been detected in the port's sewer system and the sewage outflow leading to Bohai Bay has been cut off. 

At this point, there are more questions than answers, as reporters who attended a news conference called after the tragedy learned before officials abruptly ended the conference.  Why was such a dangerous collection of chemicals stored within 2,000 feet of a residential area?  What was in the warehouse that exploded?  And last but not least, how can such a tragedy be prevented from happening again?

A chemical fire is one of the firefighter's worst nightmares, even when the nature of the chemicals is known.  The warehouse that exploded was owned by the Rui Hai International Logistics Company, which was unable to provide officials with a complete inventory of what was in the building when it caught fire.  Records indicated that the firm had a license to store calcium carbide, which produces highly flammable acetylene gas when it gets wet.  And sodium cyanide is not something you want to spread around either—an amount the size of a single small pill can kill you.  If there is enough left of the warehouse and its records to investigate, we will probably find out that there was a lot of something—ammonium nitrate, perhaps—stored in one big pile that went off all at once.  Sadly, many of the fatalities were in the ranks of the first responders who approached the warehouse with fire hoses after the first alarm was turned in.  Some of their bodies may never be recovered.

Years ago, in the late 1980s, I visited Tianjin during a trip related to my research activities.  My first impression of the city came as we emerged from an underground railway station into a square which was dominated by a strange assortment of suspended wires that I recognized immediately as a shortwave transmitting antenna.  This was back when shortwave radio was one of the main ways that people in totalitarian countries could get news that wasn't controlled by the government.  Accordingly, the government erected local shortwave jamming stations that tried to cover up Voice of America broadcasts with racket that sounded like a battle between two buzz saws.  Control of outside information is a lot harder nowadays because of the Internet, and the government of China has quit trying to suppress undesirable information completely, as the aborted news conference proves.  But just knowing how awful an accident is doesn't guarantee that something will be done about it.  Can we expect this horrific disaster to lead to any improvements in safety?  That depends.

One thing that is clear beyond a doubt:  people all over China and the rest of the world know how bad this explosion was.  And at a minimum, the residents of Tianjin are going to demand changes in the way the port operates and keeps track of hazardous materials.  Sometimes local politics in China is a lot more quasi-democratic than you would expect from a nominally totalitarian government system, in that incompetent heads roll and genuine reforms can take place if public pressure is great enough. 

The larger question is whether the Tianjin explosion will create a drive toward safer operation of industrial facilities in general across China.  The pollution problems in Chinese cities are notorious, with one expert estimating that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China.  Lacking a formal means of influencing their government through meaningful elections, the Chinese people have taken to mounting lots of protests, and one Chinese Communist Party official estimated that in 2012 alone, about 50,000 environmental protests took place.  This is evidence of a great deal of frustration on the part of the country's citizens, who have enjoyed tremendous economic growth in the past few decades, but have paid the price by living in overcrowded, polluted, and increasingly dangerous cities.

There isn't much that is nice about a totalitarian government, but you can say this—once the people in power make up their minds to do something, they can go ahead and do it without a lot of compromises and political bargaining.  If Beijing wants to enact much stricter regulations about the types of chemicals stored in port warehouses such as Rui Hai's, they can do so tomorrow.  But regulations alone aren't enough.

Tragedies similar to the Tianjin explosions here in the U. S., such as the fertilizer-plant explosion in West, Texas in April of 2013, have emphasized how important it is for accurate inventory information to be available at all times to first responders, who in turn need to be educated about the various dangers and appropriate techniques that should be applied in case of a chemical fire.  Ideally, the Rui Hai warehouse would have been constructed and equipped with sprinkler and alarm systems so that it wouldn't have caught fire in the first place, or at least the fire could have been extinguished before it got out of control.  But despite the best precautions, chemical fires sometimes get out of hand.  In that case, fire departments need to know when to try to fight a fire, what to fight it with, and when to look at the online inventory and decide, "Let's issue an evacuation order and clear out ourselves too—this is too dangerous."  But there has to be an accurate online inventory and first responders who are trained to know what to do and when to do it.

These things are not rocket science, but they represent a change in the way people do things.  Let's hope that not only in Tianjin, but all across China, the sad lessons of last week's explosions lead to safer ports and better information exchange in the future. 

Sources:  I referred to news reports on the disaster carried by CNN at http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/15/asia/china-tianjin-explosions/, the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/world/asia/rising-anger-but-few-answers-after-explosions-in-tianjin.html, NBC News at http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/tianjin-china-explosion-area-evacuated-over-sodium-cyanide-fears-n410371, and the Wikipedia articles on "Tianjin explosions" and "Environmental issues in China."

West Two Years Later: The Cause Above Everything

Today, impossible heroes and implausible villains are to be found mainly in video games, but back in the 1930s, one of the largest-selling series of adventure books for boys was based around a young inventor character named Tom Swift.  Great literature it was not, but there was plenty of action, the good guys were always good, and the bad guys were really bad, although sometimes it was hard to tell what they were being bad about.  I particularly remember the closing scene of one book in which, after Tom foils a complicated attempt by an evildoer to wreak havoc on an entire city, the bad guy is led away in handcuffs muttering, "The Cause!  The Cause above everything!"  The reader was left in the dark as to what the Cause was, but it didn't matter—it was merely a placeholder, an unnamed motivation so that the bad guy could move the plot along.

In Texas, fiction sometimes becomes reality more than we'd like it to.  For example, who would have the nerve to write a book in which the president of the Texas Ag Industries Association would be named—I kid you not—Donnie Dippel?  But that's his name.  It's right here in the paper, the Austin American-Statesman for Friday, April 17, a date which marked the two-year anniversary of the ammonium nitrate fertilizer explosion that devastated the town of West, Texas, killing 15 and causing an estimated $100 million in damage.  After the explosion, the accident was thoroughly investigated amid outcries for tighter regulation of fertilizer storage facilities, of which there are dozens all over the state. 

As you might expect from a blast that was so strong it registered on seismographs hundreds of miles away and dug a crater ten feet deep, any evidence as to what caused the fire that led to the explosion was pulverized and scattered almost beyond recognition.  The official investigation by the Texas State Fire Marshal's Office listed the cause as "unknown," which is true in a technical sense.  But what is known is that somehow, a fire started in a wooden structure housing around 270 tons of ammonium nitrate, which can detonate in milliseconds under the wrong conditions.  And many of those conditions—such as storage of the chemical in wooden bins, lack of adequate automatic fire control systems such as sprinklers, and keeping flammable materials such as fuel, batteries, and seed grains near ammonium nitrate stocks—still prevail in many of the other fertilizer facilities in Texas.

But no, we cannot say with iron-clad certainty exactly what started the fire that made the ammonium nitrate explode at West.  And for Mr. Dippel, it's the cause above everything.

The twisted logic he seems to be following goes like this:  If you don't know the cause of an accident, you can't place the blame, and if you can't place the blame, you can't take actions such as legislation to improve the safety of fertilizer facilities.  That's the only way I can see that a person of otherwise sound mind could come up with the following statement, which I quote exactly as it appears in the paper: 

"We don't know what happened at West, and we wish somebody could determine what happened so we make sure to correct what happened so it never happens again."

But unless somebody determines what happened, the official position of the Texas Ag Industries Association is that they do not want a bunch of new rules about how to store ammonium nitrate.

No one determined "the cause" (in Mr. Dippel's sense) of the fire aboard the cargo freighter Grandcamp, which was carrying 2,300 tons of ammonium nitrate when its cargo detonated, wrecking most of the port of Texas City and killing over 500 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.  This was back in 1947, sixty-six years and a day before the West explosion.  But the absence of an exact known cause didn't stop the port of Texas City from banning the transportation of ammonium nitrate in any form through its port facilities two years after the disaster. 

One definition of "cause" is that state of affairs which, if removed from a situation, would prevent the effect from occurring.  A lot of dangerous circumstances prevail in cities and towns where ammonium nitrate is stored, and if those circumstances are removed, the effect of another such explosion is less likely to happen.  If the owners of the plants and the first responders in their surrounding communities won't voluntarily take new safety measures (a few have, but many haven't), maybe changes in laws will.

In this year's Texas legislative session, several bills have been introduced to help prevent another West-style fertilizer disaster.  One of the most sensible, filed by Texas Rep. Kyle Kacal of College Station, would give the Texas State Fire Marshal authority to inspect locations where ammonium nitrate is stored.  At the very minimum, information shared from these inspections would help local fire departments plan for firefighting and evacuation, if necessary, in the case of fires at these facilities.  Other bills, such as the one by Rep. Eddie Rodriguez, would go farther and increase the mandatory amount of liability insurance carried by such plants.

To my mind, the single worst failing in the West disaster was lack of information.  The first responders apparently didn't know how dangerous the West Fertilizer Company fire was.  And the town had no plans for evacuation in case of a fire at the plant.  A similar fire in College Station led to the evacuation of a large area of town, fortunately without an explosion occurring.  Two simple measures—allowing inspections, and sharing information and training with first responders—could have prevented most of the loss of life and injuries at West, but not the millions in property damage.  To make sure such explosions don't happen in the future, fertilizer firms that store ammonium nitrate will have to clean up their act with improvements that will cost them money. 

One test of a society's ability to function is to watch how it deals with major disasters, and how well it acts to prevent them in the future.  Texas and Texans have dealt with major tragedies successfully in the past—hurricanes, tornadoes, oil-refinery explosions, and many other natural and self-inflicted messes—and I like to think that we come together in the aftermath to do the right, sensible, and just thing.  Perhaps this is a foolish hope, but I hope that suitable legislation is passed to make the West, Texas tragedy the last ammonium-nitrate disaster that Texans ever experience.

Sources:  The Austin American-Statesman carried the article "Despite West blast, industry crackdown unlikely," in its Friday, Apr. 17, 2015 print edition on pp. A1 and A8.  (The online edition is accessible only by subscription.)  I also used information from The Texas Observer's online article "West, Texas Blues" at http://www.texasobserver.org/west-tragedy-little-progress-ammonium-nitrate/.  The Texas City disaster is described in impressive detail by Bill Minutaglio in his 2003 book (HarperCollins) City on Fire, and the Texas City ban on ammonium nitrate is reported in that book on p. 270.  I also referred to the CNN article www.cnn.com/2013/04/23/us/texas-explosion/ for the size of the crater and to the Wikipedia articles on the West Fertilizer Company explosion and the Texas City disaster.

West One Year Later: Will It Happen Again?

On April 22, the U. S. Chemical Safety Board held a news conference to present its recommendations about how to prevent another disaster such as the one in West, Texas that killed fifteen, injured over 200, and caused millions of dollars of property damage on April 17, 2013.  So far, not a lot has changed in terms of federal or state regulations pertaining to ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer chemical that exploded on that fateful day.  But a fertilizer trade organization has issued a set of recommendations that, if followed, will go some distance toward reducing the chances that another disastrous accident involving the chemical will happen again.

As long ago as 2002, the Chemical Safety Board recommended that ammonium nitrate be included in OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) and EPA (Environmental Protection Administration) regulatory programs, but these agencies have not yet chosen to act on these recommendations.  Ammonium nitrate falls in a gray area between chemicals such as nitroglycerin or TNT that are clearly dangerous, and others such as sand that are harmless.  Under most circumstances, ammonium nitrate can be handled with little or no risk.  But under certain combinations of heat, pressure, and/or shock, the chemical detonates, transforming many tons of solid matter into hot gases that expand explosively, as they did in West. 

In response to the West accident a trade organization called The Fertilizer Institute issued a fourteen-page booklet to its members last February with the title "Safety and Security Guidelines for the Storage and Transportation of Fertilizer Grade Ammonium Nitrate at Fertilizer Retail Facilities."  The title does not promise exciting reading, though the legalese and lengthy definitions of different types of ammonium-nitrate fertilizer are enlivened by color photos of fertilizer manufacturing and handling installations.  The pamphlet summarizes most of the precautions which, if followed, would have gone a long way toward preventing the West disaster. 

These measures fall into two categories: (1) ways to prevent ammonium nitrate from exploding in the first place, and (2) ways to avert death and destruction if a fire breaks out where ammonium nitrate is stored, and the stuff explodes anyway.  The prevention measures are more or less what you'd expect:  things like storing the material in non-combustible bins, rather than wooden ones as were used in the West firm; installing sprinkler systems or other fire-prevention and fire-fighting facilities; and treating places where ammonium nitrate is stored like flammable-material storage areas (no-smoking signs, no sparks or flames nearby, etc.).  Because an exact cause of the fire at West that led to the explosion may never be found, we cannot know for certain if these precautions would have prevented the tragedy.  But obviously, they are good things to do, and if fertilizer retailers around the country follow these prevention guidelines, the chances of another such accident will be reduced.

The second category of recommendations is more problematic.  It involves informing the wider community, including first-responder agencies, that ammonium nitrate is stored in the facility and should be treated with extra caution.  By the nature of the business, many fertilizer retailers are located in semi-rural or thinly populated areas.  These locales are often served by volunteer fire departments, and while volunteer firemen theoretically should be trained as well as full-time paid firefighters, the reality is that their training may be on the sketchy side.   The Chemical Safety Board concluded that the first responders in West did not know of the dangers presented by the large quantity of ammonium nitrate stored at the plant where they responded to what appeared at first to be an ordinary fire, and were much too close for safety.  Consequently, when the plant exploded, most of the people who died were firefighters.  The guidance handbook says "The rule of thumb is if outside emergency responders are necessary, do not fight AN [ammonium nitrate] fires.  For fires that have engaged AN, plans should focus on evacuation of the area."  In other words: don't fight, run. 

While the trade-association brochure's advice is good, it has no legal standing, and firms are free to adopt its recommendations or ignore them.  Simply as a matter of asset protection, I would hope that fertilizer retailers who sell ammonium nitrate are at least considering an upgrade of unsafe storage facilities, and the brochure provides good guidelines as to how to carry this out.  However, the informational side of the recommendations may be harder to implement.  A business owner may feel some reluctance in volunteering the information to local authorities that his facility harbors material that might reduce a wide swath of his neighborhood to rubble.  Nevertheless, there may be courageous and conscientious owners who will do such things. 

Both the Chemical Safety Board and various other authorities have called for tighter compulsory regulation of ammonium nitrate storage and transportation.  This is a political as well as a technical and ethical matter, and politics these days tends to go to polarized extremes.  On the one hand are those who favor centralized uniform federal regulations for all sorts of things, including ammonium nitrate.  On the other hand, a prominent plank in the Tea Party platform is the idea that government regulations have gone too far and are stifling free enterprise and economic growth.  The regulations contemplated with regard to ammonium nitrate vary from rules about how the stuff is stored to rules about notification and training of local first responders.  It seems to me that sensible regulations requiring the exchange of information, perhaps implemented by some sort of web-based registry, would be the least costly way to make sure that at a minimum, any firefighters responding to an ammonium-nitrate fire would know what they are dealing with and would take appropriate precautions. 

One way of dealing with this information problem is by the use of fire codes.  However, the state of Texas has a strong history of anti-regulatory bias.  In fact, counties with low population density in Texas are actually prohibited by state law from enacting fire codes at all.  So around July and December, you see roadside fireworks stands popping up for a few weeks with nary a concern for any safety beyond the immediate self-preservation of the owners in case a customer drops a burning cigarette. 

So far, the only concrete public action toward preventing more ammonium-nitrate fertilizer disasters has been the Fertilizer Institute's brochure.  While they deserve credit for their efforts, only time will tell whether enough has changed to keep another fertilizer plant from blowing up, or to save lives if it does.

Sources:  The news conference in Dallas on Apr. 22, 2014 held by the Chemical Safety Board was summarized by a UPI report at http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2014/04/22/US-investigators-Better-regulation-could-have-prevented-deadly-fertilizer-explosion/4731398190424/.  The Chemical Safety Board's own statements at the conference can be downloaded at http://www.csb.gov/assets/1/16/Statement_-_News_Conference_(Final).pdf.  The Fertilizer Institute recommendations can be found at http://www.tfi.org/ammonium_nitrate_guidelines.  And I blogged on the West explosion previously on Apr. 22 and May 20, 2013.

Being Green Takes Green: Europe Rethinks Renewable Energy Standards

For the past decade or more, as Al Gore and the majority of climate-change scientists have insisted that the world is speeding headlong toward an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions, European countries have adhered to stringent emission controls in order to lessen their dependence on fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.  And the strictures have been in place long enough to have a significant effect;  Germany, for example, now routinely gets a quarter of its electricity from renewable sources.  But as economist Stephen Moore points out in a recent article in National Review, treading so lightly on one's carbon footprint has a price:  higher energy costs.  A kilowatt-hour in Europe currently costs up to twice as much as it does in the U. S., and European manufacturers who use lots of electricity are starting to take notice.  Companies such as the chemical giant BASF are planning new operations in the U. S. rather than Europe.  As a result, the European Union recently announced that it was dropping its mandatory emissions standards for its member nations, letting them burn more coal and oil, if they can find it.  And one of the places they are most likely to start looking is—you guessed it—the U. S.  New exploration technologies, primarily fracking (hydraulic fracturing), have put the U. S. on track to be a net exporter of energy in the near future, and it looks like Europe will now be a prime customer, their disdain for old-fashioned carbon-based fuels notwithstanding.

Engineers made it possible for Germany to achieve the impressive feat of running a quarter of a modern economy on renewable energy alone.  Engineers also have made it possible for the U. S. to increase its oil and gas production in recent years beyond the wildest dreams of everyone but a few farsighted oil-exploration entrepreneurs.  In the absence of government controls or restrictions, customers for energy will buy the cheapest convenient fuel available.  Everyone agrees that except for a few isolated localities, there are no strictly economic reasons to build lots of renewable-energy sources into a large-scale power grid.  A fossil-fuel power plant is much cheaper to build, its output is more reliable, and the continuing cost of the fuel is often more than offset by the construction, maintenance, and other costs associated with the relative unreliability of wind and solar energy. 

But such a strictly economic analysis ignores a cultural and political factor:  the perceived virtue of using renewable energy as opposed to the use of fossil fuels.  In the moral universe in which many government and science leaders live, burning fossil fuels is as close as you can get to a mortal sin against future generations, and against those living now who may be harmed by the consequences of anthropogenic global warming.  The desire to avoid this sin is so great that, at least in Europe, it led to the European Union's mandatory emissions standards which effectively imposed renewable-energy quotas on its member nations.  But even the bureaucrats of the EU can recognize impending economic disaster when they see it, and as the costs of living with a renewable-energy grid began to pile up, they and their constituents saw the consequences of idealism in their power bills.  And it got to be too much.

This is not the place to debate the truth, falsity, or somewhere-in-betweenness of the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.  What is of more immediate concern is the public's perception of the issue, and how that perception (or rather, spectrum of perceptions) influences governmental policies and laws.  For whatever reason, the EU, with its relatively opaque governing structure and increasingly centralized power over its member nations, responded promptly and vigorously to the perceived threat of global warming with practical measures that had significant negative economic effects.  The fact that the same leaders are now backing off on these measures in the face of rising energy costs says volumes about their real priorities, which turn out to be similar to those of politicians in other parts of the globe.  The slogan "The economy, stupid" was part of Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign that brought down George H. W. Bush's presidency, and while Brussels bureaucrats do not face the same sorts of political pressures that U. S. presidential contenders do, they appear to have more sense than they sometimes get credit for. 

In a free society, individual members can try to live off the grid entirely, or buy three Hummers and take cross-continental trips in them, or anything in between.  But things like national power grids are, by necessity, creatures of politics, policies, and law.  And any society which wants to pay the price for eschewing fossil fuels may do so. 

The problems come when an elite leadership that is persuaded of the evils of fossil fuels tries to implement its expensive energy tastes, however virtuous, on the backs of a populace that has to pay for it.  That experiment has been tried in Europe, and we are witnessing its failure, to a great extent, although Europe will probably continue to rely on renewables to a greater degree than the U. S. does for some time to come. 

It may come as a surprise to some of my readers that in good old "ahl-bidness" Texas, where much of the technology of hydraulic fracturing was developed, and where petroleum is regarded roughly in the same light as mother's milk, we lead the nation in wind-power generation.  In fact, on a particularly windy day in 2013, for a short time Texas surpassed Germany in renewables use,  because for a short time more than a fourth of the total electricity being consumed was supplied by wind power.  As in other parts of the world, the growth of renewables didn't happen without a substantial government incentive, namely a guaranteed purchase price for wind-generated electricity that encouraged the construction of huge wind farms in West Texas.  But this shift to wind was achieved without the penalty-laden restrictions on the construction of conventional fossil-fuel plants that the EU emissions standards imposed.

Decades, if not centuries, will elapse before the whole story of fossil fuels, global warming, and all that can be written.  In the meantime, billions of people on this planet want and need, the advantages that cheap, reliable electric power can provide.  Other things being equal, most of them would probably want to save the planet rather than cook it for breakfast, but things are not equal—not economically, not politically, and not culturally.  And in this inequality lies the complexity of the ethics of energy policy today.

Sources:  Stephen Moore's article "Europe's Green Collapse" appeared in the Feb. 24, 2014 issue of National Review.  The record 28% of electric power generated by wind in Texas occurred at 7:08 PM, Feb. 9, 2013, and was reported in the Abilene Reporter News at http://www.reporternews.com/news/2013/mar/01/texas-wind-energy-sets-record-grid-expansion-in/.  The report that Texas leads the nation in installed wind-power generation capacity is taken from the website of the American Council on Renewable Energy at http://www.acore.org/files/pdfs/states/Texas.pdf.

Don't Drink the Water In Charleston, West Virginia

Charleston is the capital of West Virginia and its largest city, although its population barely exceeds 50,000.  It's a safe bet that nearly all 50,000 residents were in various states of annoyance ranging from ticked to furious as they learned last Friday, January 10, that the water supply for not only their city, but nine surrounding counties as well, was unsuitable for anything except flushing toilets.  How come?  A little-known industrial chemical used for washing coal had leaked into the Elk River just above the main intake pipe for the city's water supply.  Exactly how this happened, and whether it's a cause for serious concern or only a transient inconvenience, are questions that we don't have answers to yet.  But the incident has already revealed problems ranging from inadequate protection from leaking storage tanks to inadequate knowledge about obscure chemicals.

Large tanks of stuff have been rupturing and spreading death and destruction ever since engineers learned how to build large tanks.  Perhaps the most famous disaster involving an industrial storage tank rupture was the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919.  A two-million-gallon tank filled with molasses for the manufacture of alcohol used in munitions gave way, and sent a 25-foot-high wave of goo at speeds up to 35 miles an hour racing through downtown Boston, killing 21 and injuring 150.  It was such incidents that inspired the practice of surrounding large tanks with containment dikes, which can be seen at most tank farms around the country.  The idea of a containment dike is that if the tank lets go, the contents will at least be slowed down by the dike, if not contained altogether.  I am not familiar enough with the regulations governing tank construction to know whether containment dikes have to be sealed with impervious layers of rubber or tar, a precaution often taken in landfill construction.  But it is obvious that the containment dike at Freedom Industries failed to stop about 5,000 gallons of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol (MCHM) from getting into the Elk River and thus into the West Virginia American Water Company's pipes.  Once that happened, the whole water system had to be flushed, which could take days.  In the meantime, you will have trouble finding bottled water in Charleston, because it vanished from the shelves as soon as the water company announced the problem. 

The chemical, which reportedly smells like licorice (its strong smell was how the leak was originally found), is not known to be hazardous, but on the other hand, no extensive toxicity tests have apparently been made on it either.  Determining toxicity to humans in a way that would satisfy the U. S. Food and Drug Administration is a costly business, and so for chemicals that will probably not end up in food or otherwise in close contact with humans, chemical companies don't bother to investigate it unless there are obvious hazards.  Every chemical sold has to have a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), but the information on these sheets comes from various places and is not up to the FDA standard.  Because washing coal is clearly not a consumer-type application, nobody has done a study on whether the licorice-smelling compound in question can harm humans.  Probably the best data we can get will come from future demographic studies in the area served by the Charleston water supply utility.  In the meantime, it is worth considering whether the old Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 should be updated.  Right now, all a chemical company has to do to legally sell a new chemical is to notify the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency of the chemical's composition.  The EPA resorts to computer modeling to guess whether the new compound is hazardous, and either lets it go or regulates it, depending on the result.  No actual safety tests are required.  Certainly there is food for legislative thought here, but Congress seems to have other things on its collective mind recently.

The West Virginia American Water Company did the right thing in promptly notifying its customers not to use the contaminated water.  Similar precautions are called for on a smaller scale quite frequently when supply-line breaks result in contamination with ground water.  In those cases, residents can safely use water for drinking purposes after boiling it, but boiling wouldn't get rid of MCHM, so bottled water is the only alternative for a few days. 

Another lesson to be learned is how a system with no backup water source can be especially vulnerable.  Apparently the water utility had only one set of intake pipes, and no wells or other sources.  At the least, this situation would call for heightened scrutiny of any chemical plants a few miles upriver from the intake pipes, with perhaps added safety precautions above and beyond the usual ones required for plants that could leak into the river just above the intake site.

Monday-morning quarterbacking is easy, and I'm not having to go out and hunt down the last gallon of bottled water on the shelves until the water coming out of my kitchen faucet no longer smells like licorice.  (I predict a steep decline in licorice sales in West Virginia, by the way.)  But given the unfortunate circumstances, the authorities in West Virginia's capital appear to have handled the situation reasonably well, and hopefully there won't be any consequences worse than the inconvenience of using bottled water for a while. 

Sources:  I referred to an article by Deborah Blum at http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/01/chemical-guesswork-in-west-virginia/

and a New York Times article by Trip Gabriel on the accident at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/11/us/west-virginia-chemical-spill.html.  I also used Wikipedia articles on Charleston, West Virginia, and the Boston Molasses Disaster.