County plans for rail disaster with limited resources

Vic White knows how situations can change in an instant. He knows disasters, and it’s his job to plan for the unexpected.

As Lincoln County’s emergency management director, White knows the volatility of the sweet crude cargo on the railroad tracks that skirt Libby and Troy.

“We know the number of (rail) cars coming out the Bakken oil fields has doubled in the last year,” White said. “It’s significant, from about 180,000 cars to almost 400,000.”

Those cars spoke out from the hub that has become a boom for the upper Midwest. For security reasons, Burlington Northern Santa Fe officials do not reveal departure times, but trains with cars exceeding 100 are commonplace in Lincoln County as they make their way toward terminals on the West Coast.

“Half of the cars coming through Lincoln County are empty,” White said. “But the vapors can be every bit as volatile as the fuel.”

To date, White and his EMA Assistant Lisa Oedewaldt have conducted a rail-disaster training course for firefighters and law enforcement, the last coming in November, shortly after the fiery derailment in Canada last summer that killed 47 and a month before the Dec. 30 accident in North Dakota that exploded while pulling 104 cars of Bakken crude.

“The BN people have been great with all their help,” White said, displaying a 60-page BNSF Railway training booklet for railroad emergency response procedures for hazardous materials. “We had about 30 people attend that session, and we’ve got another scheduled for late winter or early spring.”

Still, White knows his staff and county agencies have their limitations.

“We don’t have the people or the equipment to respond to a large disaster,” White said. “If we have three cars, yes, we could handle that until help arrived. But if your’re talking 100 cars, no. We’d need a lot of railway and federal assistance from FEMA.”

Sheriff Roby Bowe agreed with White.

“We’d probably deal more with evacuation. With something of that magnitude, we would be coordinating the evacuation. Federal officials, FEMA, would be on top of that.”

Libby Volunteer Fire Department Chief Tom Wood said his department’s capabilities are narrow.

“I don’t even know about the three cars, maybe two,” Wood said. “The foam would probably have to come from the airport or Kalispell. I think we’d be more involved with evacuation. We’d do whatever we can.”