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Re: Lac Megantic? $#it Happens?
Author: Dr Zarkoff
Date: 09-05-2014 - 22:07
>My main concern about the bill is still the requirement for notice prior to movement of trains carrying Bakken or Canadian oil - just those specific sources. Is there a similar requirement for trains carrying hazardous chemicals? I doubt it - see those in trains every day, and wrecks involving evacuations (though rarely, for some reason, casualties) due to chemical releases seem to occur somewhere in the U.S. several times a year. Incidentally, as noted in the article (or one of them that I saw, anyway), state law apparently already requires considerable information from the receivers of oil trains (which I think is legitimate) that could easily be used by OES staff to estimate traffic patterns and volumes (though not the location and schedule of individual trains).
Let me see whether I follow you: it's OK for the State to require those receiving this stuff cough up this info but not OK for the shipper to have to do so?
> I was on the San Joaquin last week and we passed several merchandise runs on sidings. We were taking it slow and easy and I noticed numerous strings of tanker cars with "UNODORIZED LIQUIFIED PETROLEUM" stenciled on their sides.
The paraffin series of hydrocarbons, which start with methane (house gas) and progress up through propane and butane (the contents of those FCG cars) and octane (simple gasoline) on up to paraffin (candle wax) are all colorless, odorless, and tasteless. So when they are used in your gas stove or water heater, they are odorized so it's easy for you to detect leaks. The most common odorant is vinyl mercaptin. All mercaptins are highly odiforous, so it doesn't take much added to the gas for the human nose to detect them. Skunk juice is a mercaptin.
> How is it that a string of these cars are considered less remarkable than some carrying "explosive" Bakken crude?
They aren't (and BTW, the stuff in those unodorized cars are use to polymerize the stuff you use as gasoline in your car). The media's constant carping on "Bakken Crdue" isn't all that much different than Chicken Little running around screaming about falling sky, which any normal person recognizes as wind -- air, sometimes hot, sometimes cold.
Let me see whether I follow you: it's OK for the State to require those receiving this stuff cough up this info but not OK for the shipper to have to do so?
> I was on the San Joaquin last week and we passed several merchandise runs on sidings. We were taking it slow and easy and I noticed numerous strings of tanker cars with "UNODORIZED LIQUIFIED PETROLEUM" stenciled on their sides.
The paraffin series of hydrocarbons, which start with methane (house gas) and progress up through propane and butane (the contents of those FCG cars) and octane (simple gasoline) on up to paraffin (candle wax) are all colorless, odorless, and tasteless. So when they are used in your gas stove or water heater, they are odorized so it's easy for you to detect leaks. The most common odorant is vinyl mercaptin. All mercaptins are highly odiforous, so it doesn't take much added to the gas for the human nose to detect them. Skunk juice is a mercaptin.
> How is it that a string of these cars are considered less remarkable than some carrying "explosive" Bakken crude?
They aren't (and BTW, the stuff in those unodorized cars are use to polymerize the stuff you use as gasoline in your car). The media's constant carping on "Bakken Crdue" isn't all that much different than Chicken Little running around screaming about falling sky, which any normal person recognizes as wind -- air, sometimes hot, sometimes cold.
