It's been decades since the last one, so now is the time for Wisconsin's governor to appoint another commission to review the state's procedures for handling hazardous chemical spills and other industrial accidents.
Justification for this call is a recent series of toxic spills involving train derailments -- two within Wisconsin, one right over the border in Illinois that involved a train that came through the Badger state. The incidents have spurred calls for more vigorous regulation of such shipments and of freight-rail shipments in general. Other recent spills in Wisconsin -- such as one from a ruptured oil pipeline -- don't add to the state's sense of well-being and security.
Despite other calls to action, no one in my awareness has called on the governor to appoint a commission to take a broad look at this issue. That suggestion here and now comes from me. If you don't remember history, as George Santayana said, you're doomed to repeat it, and that may be what's happening in Wisconsin and some other states. Penny-pinching, deregulation and just plain laissez-faire approaches in general are not the way to better prevent accidents, much less deal with them on the spot when they do occur. In numerous ways, it is true, Wisconsin and the nation overall probably are better prepared in this regard than we were back in February 1980, when I wrote a front-page series for The Milwaukee Sentinel, entitled "CAUTION: Chemical Cargo." Those reports [which can only be found online at the hard-to-use Google News Archive] detailed a number of bad shipping accidents in Wisconsin, including some that just barely avoided tragic outcomes. The series told how the authorities were reacting to a rapidly growing number of hazardous waste spills. "Trucks, railroads, pipeline, airplaces and boats carry more than 1,600 types of hazardous materials through Wisconsin every day," I wrote. "Federal statistics show that 10% of interstate trucks and about 4% of railroad cars carry hazardous materials. Sometimes, they have accidents." Unfortunately, reaction to the series itself by public policymakers was relatively muted. Even then, when efforts to improve emergency response were on the upswing, no one seemed particularly eager to upset the citizenry. Everything was under control. Except it wasn't, and to some extent it still isn't. Spurred by a series of spills, some causing serious injuries and fatalities, governments local, state and federal were in the late 1970s beginning to awaken to the crisis in private materials shipments by rail, truck, airplane and pipeline. The crisis grew as America's economy and population grew, and as demand for raw materials grew in turn. This increase was happening even as investment in rail infrastructure was in decline and highways became more overcrowded while serving bigger trucks. Governments began more top-down, formal planning for such disasters and imposed new regulations to oversee such shipments. States set up emergency government units to deal with natural disasters, but also in part because of the dangers inherent in such spills. In my series, I quoted State of Wisconsin emergency government officials who suggested that with help from federal inspectors, the state probably could manage an adequate program to inspect railroads if it had two full-time inspectors of its own. Yet today, 35 years later, the state has only one such inspector. On the upside, tank cars and other hardware are designed to be more crashworthy these days, and the federal government is considering even more stringent standards. Bear in mind that a lot of older, less safe equipment still rides through Wisconsin and other states. Despite safety and regulatory improvements, terrible accidents continue. Take, for example the derailment of an unattended, 74-car freight train on July 6, 2013 in the Quebec city of Lac-Mégantic, spilling highly volatile Bakken-formation crude oil, followed by an explosion and inferno in the community's downtown area. Forty-seven people were killed. Nearly 70 buildings, roughly half the downtown area, were destroyed or so damaged they had to be torn down. The blast radius was one kilometer. Domestic Bakken oil comes from Montana and North Dakota and is produced by environmentally dubious methods, including hydraulic fracking and horizontal drilling. It is shipped to refining plants mostly east of the Mississippi, and mostly along the nation's northern border, across multiple states and through major population centers. This is a relatively new threat as the quest for more oil drives high demand. The Association of American Railroads told the Associated Press that U.S. oil shipments by rail jumped from 9,500 carloads in 2008 to 500,000 in 2014, driven by the Bakken boom. By the end of 2010, 70 percent of the half million barrels of Bakken oil produced daily were heading out by rail, as production outstripped pipeline capacity. That increased traffic has led to increased accidents. The Obama administration has reacted by considering rules to further regulate such shipments. Federal rules already mandate reporting of scheduled crude-oil shipments by rail. However, in mid-2014, Bloomberg News reported that when the U.S. Department of Transportation ordered railroads to start giving state emergency response teams basic information about trains hauling crude oil through their cities and towns, the private carriers balked, asking states to sign strict non-disclosure agreements promising not to share information with the public. Some states have complied with that railroad request. Others, like Wisconsin, have not. Meanwhile, however, Wisconsin's current Republican governor and legislature have sought to weaken state open records laws, which couldn't help the situation. Nationally, the railroads continue to be grudging in how much information they share, and lawmakers arguably haven't moved fast enough to break the code of silence. Thanks to federal reports, we do know that nearly 40 trains carrying millions of gallons of explosive Bakken crude pass through Wisconsin weekly. It was national news when, on March 5, 2015, a BNSF Railway train carrying crude derailed and caught fire near Galena, Ill., just after leaving the Badger state. Twenty-one tankers derailed. The same number of tankers derailing in a major urban area might have led to another Quebec-level holocaust. The City of Milwaukee is among communities expressing alarm over the threat. One Bakken-carrying train, operated by Canadian Pacific, regularly rolls through downtown Milwaukee on a nearly century-old, high trestle bridge tightly packed into a high-density area of shops, offices and apartments. City officials along with citizens groups view the condition of the bridge with suspicion. Amazingly, the railroad declined to supply the city with information on the firm's own inspections, although the firm later announced it would strengthen the bridge. Milwaukee is not unusual. An estimated 25 million Americans live within the one-mile evacuation zone that the U.S. Department of Transportation recommends in the event of an oil train derailment. Of course, Bakken crude spills are just the newest, fastest-growing threat. Wisconsin has been fortunate to avoid serious injuries and losses of life from many spills on the move. However, spills continue to threaten public health and the environment. On July 17, 2012, some 55,000 gallons of gasoline spilled from a pipeline occurred in the Town of Jackson in Washington County. Water samples from private wells located near the spill detected gasoline compounds above health advisory levels. Similar spills happen regularly across the U.S. Also in 2012, in Grand March, Wisconsin, an Enbridge of Canada pipeline ruptured, leaking more than 1,000 barrels of oil into a field. Enbridge owns a major pipeline running across the state, a line it plans to greatly expand past the capacity of the controversial, now-canceled Keystone XL pipeline. When authorities in Dane County, home of the densely populated state capital of Madison, tried to legislate tougher insurance liability requirements for the portion of the line running through its jurisdiction, the Republican-controlled state legislature simply erased the county's enforcement power. That Enbridge incident came almost two years after a ruptured Enbridge line badly fouled part of the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. State officials there also worry that an Enbridge pipeline deeply submerged in the Straits of Mackinac might burst, creating a massive oil leak that would quickly pollute large areas of the freshwater Great Lakes. Like mass gun shootings, such incidents are so regular they come and go with alarming speed both in news coverage and the mass consciousness. But we simply can't let this issue fester. In 1980, when my Sentinel series ran, Wisconsin ranked eighth among all states in the number of railroad accidents involving hazardous cargo, and yet the state, like others, didn't yet have a fully realized emergency response plan nor had local emergency responders, in those days almost exclusively fire departments, been properly trained. The good news was that, in the late 1970s, Gov. Martin Schreiber created a task force on hazardous materials safety issues that led to reforms. The state soon moved to equip 17 larger fire departments around the state with emergency gear, set up an emergency clean-up fund and began staging mock exercises in which toxic spills threaten communities. Much more has been accomplished in the succeeding decades. In Wisconsin and across the U.S., emergency protocols and training have since widened to smaller communities and multiple responders. Regular drills at commercial nuclear power plants are an example of how emergency government is now patched into the possibility of major industrial accidents. That sort of protocol didn't, however, prevent Japan's Fukushima disaster. Too often the tendency among elected officials and business leaders seems to be reactive, not proactive, treating programs more in terms of cost than value. Prescient was Perry Manor, who back in 1980 was Wisconsin's emergency spill coordinator, and who for my newspaper series told me: "We've been very lucky, but I think we're just living on borrowed time." Arguably Wisconsin and the nation still are. Technology regularly moves forward, so regulation must adapt. Which is why, among all states, Wisconsin shouldn't just rely on federal government -- which the current political regime professes to mistrust when it comes to other programs. Arguably it will take another governor's task force to assess exactly how much progress Wisconsin really has made. Just one full-time state position to inspect rails today when, in the '70s, with far fewer hazardous-materials shipments, the recommendation was for two? In some respects the state's effort may have stalled or slipped backwards. Lawmakers, the press and the public need to find out, and to be on the same page. Silence is a not a solution, it's part of the problem. Wisconsin's lack of fatal accidents should not be accepted as a sign we're doing everything necessary. We've had too many close calls over the years, and too much lasting health and environmental damage. As I said, today’s conservative lawmakers, with their animus toward transparency, are pinching pennies and deferring to businesses at every opportunity. But they should remember that It takes only one incident on the level of that enormous tragedy in Quebec before heads start rolling and political chaos reins.