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It probably shouldn’t have taken Exxon 46 minutes to shut off a broken pipeline

by Myrna Posted on January 3, 2013

It probably shouldn’t have taken Exxon 46 minutes to shut off a broken pipeline

By Philip Bump

usfwsmtnprairie

Oil soaks the Yellowstone River shoreline, thanks to the fine folks at Exxon.

You can imagine the scene at Exxon headquarters. The team responsible for spill response has just learned that a pipeline near Laurel, Mont., has ruptured. “Wow,” some team members probably said. A few might have said bad words.

In short order, one pipes up: “What should we do?” Someone suggests shutting the line down partially; this is quickly agreed to. Then, for 46 minutes, the team sits around a heavy oak table, stroking chins and mumbling “hm”s. No one is quite sure what comes next. One guy, like that one kid in fifth grade, is only pretending he’s thinking about it; in reality, he’s thinking about the movie Captain America (this is in July 2011).

Then someone says: “Maybe we should shut the control valve?” General agreement, nodding. The valve is closed; the flow of oil stops. Hearty congratulations all around. Backs are slapped. The team retires for the day, spending their  commuting time (in their Hummers) elaborating the story to make it more interesting. “Man,” one guy plans to say upon opening his front door, “you would not believe the day I had.”

Anyway, that’s the scenario I imagined on reading this AP story:

Delays in Exxon Mobil Corp.’s response to a major pipeline break beneath Montana’s Yellowstone River made an oil spill far worse than it otherwise would have been, federal regulators said in a new report.

The July 2011 rupture fouled 70 miles of riverbank along the scenic Yellowstone, killing fish and wildlife and prompting a massive, months-long cleanup.

The damage could have been significantly reduced if pipeline controllers had acted more quickly, according to Department of Transportation investigators.

Well, yes, in theory, Mr. or Ms. Department of Transportation. But in the moment, how was the Exxon team supposed to think of using the “control valve”? How was it supposed to remember to “notify pipeline controllers that the river was flooding?” I mean, that’s some seriously advanced stuff, there. Like, I’m not a pipeline engineer or whatever, but once my house caught fire and it took me about 15 minutes to decide I should stop flinging canisters of gas onto it. In an emergency, the best thing to do is take your time and not do the obvious thing. That’s just what the emergency would expect.

Anyway, Exxon is chastened.

Spokeswoman Rachael Moore said the company will continue to cooperate with Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration and “is committed to learning from these events.”

I strongly recommend a mandatory training session featuring a large poster showing a control valve. Superimposed on that image should be the words “TURN THIS.”

Source

Feds Say Delay Made Oil Spill Worse, Associated Press

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New EPA rules on industrial boiler pollution could prevent 8,100 premature deaths a year

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 21, 2012

New EPA rules on industrial boiler pollution could prevent 8,100 premature deaths a year

By Philip Bump

The tricky thing about trying to reduce pollution is that Americans make so much of it, in all sorts of different ways, and at greatly varying scales. We get why it makes sense to curb pollution from coal-burning power plants; they pollute on a huge scale.

Here’s a trickier one: industrial boilers, the large steam-producing systems used by institutions for heat and power. There are a lot of them, and all together they produce a lot of pollution too. But it’s much trickier politically, since tightening pollution levels from boilers (and industrial incinerators) means imposing costs on hospitals and manufacturers and schools. For a decade, the EPA has been trying to figure out where to draw the line on the issue, how to decide between the huge benefits of reducing pollution and the huge backlash that would come from providing those benefits.

An industrial boiler in Reno.

After reviewing feedback on its initial regulatory proposal, the agency late yesterday released the final standard — apparently deciding to prevent backlash as much as pollution. From The Washington Post:

For the first time, large boilers and cement kilns will face strict limits on mercury, acid gases and fine particulate matter, or soot. But the EPA will give boiler owners three years to meet the new standards, with a possible extension for another year after that, meaning the earliest they will take effect would be in 2016. Cement plants will not have to comply with the new limits until September 2015, two years after they were originally set to take place.

The rules for cement plants are looser and have later deadlines than the EPA had originally proposed. While the rules affect far more boilers than cement plants, the damage cement plants do is far worse, per unit.

There are fewer than 115 cement plants in the United States, but they account for seven percent of the mercury emitted into the air from stationary sources. Mercury contamination gets into the food chain when it enters waterways and soils in the form of precipitation and can cause neurological damage in infants and young children.

Although the most restrictive limits will affect just 1 percent of the nation’s nearly 1.5 million boilers, industry had fought restrictions in the past because these facilities are integral to the operations of hospitals, paper plants and factories. Boiler operators had sought to delay the rules by five years, until 2018.

The measures will deliver significant health benefits and impose major costs on the U.S. manufacturing sector. Meeting the standards for boilers and some incinerators will cost industry between $1.3 billion and $1.5 billion annually, the EPA estimates, and is expected to avoid up to 8,100 premature deaths, prevent 5,100 heart attacks and avert 52,000 asthma attacks each year once fully implemented. The annual cost of the cement rules will run a few hundred million dollars, according to the agency, while delivering billions annually in health benefits.

Only a small percentage of boilers will need substantial improvements.

You know this rule is tilted toward the polluters because the cement industry is just fine with it:

The Portland Cement Association welcomed the revisions. “EPA’s revised rule strikes the right balance in establishing compliance limits that, while still extremely challenging, are now realistic and achievable,” Greg Scott, president of the industry group, said.

And here’s Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), no fan of the EPA, as reported by The Hill:

“We welcome EPA’s revisions to make these rules more workable and achievable. EPA itself acknowledged that its original rules were flawed and rightfully commenced a reconsideration process,” Whitfield added in a Friday statement.

In a press release, the Natural Resources Defense Council called the final standard “a mixed bag.” Earthjustice attorney James Pew told the Post the final regulations were “an avalanche of bad news.”

Any regulation, any restriction on pollution, is better than no restriction. The cost and health savings the EPA estimates are not insignificant. But it’s another foot shuffled forward when environmental and health advocates were hoping for a leap.

If you are looking for something dull and hard-to-parse to read over the holidays, the final regulation is posted online. Enjoy.

Source

EPA imposes new pollution limits on boilers, cement plants, Washington Post

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An oil spill at a bird sanctuary caps Staten Island’s terrible year

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 18, 2012

An oil spill at a bird sanctuary caps Staten Island’s terrible year

By Philip Bump

For some reason, the fossil fuel industry has it out for Staten Island. First, Superstorm Sandy brought a 14-foot storm surge, worsened by warmed, raised seas. And now, an oil spill, just offshore.

From The New York Times:

Oil from a barge spilled into the waters off Staten Island, spreading to a bird sanctuary on an island in Newark Bay, the Coast Guard said on Saturday.

Workers placed a boom on the surface of the water to contain the oil, added absorbent materials and notified the authorities, [Coast Guard spokesman Petty Officer Erik] Swanson said.

The oil was coming from one of the Boston 30’s tanks, which was carrying 112,000 gallons. The barge is owned by Boston Marine Transport of Massachusetts.

According to the Coast Guard’s most recent update, 156,000 gallons of oil/water mixture has been recovered.

Gothamist has more on the birds.

[The spill] has affected at least 15 birds, but authorities say the damage has largely been contained. “Tri-state bird and wildlife experts are walking the beaches on Shooters Island to survey the birds that have been impacted, and so far only 15 out of the nearly 3,000 birds that have been sighted have been stained by oil,” Coast Guard spokesman Mike Hanson said this morning. “The oil might stain the bird, but it has no significant impact on its life.”

Hanson said that the wildlife experts determined that the birds were not affected to the point that they needed to be retrieved and cleaned.

There’s an advantage to having an oil spill — leak, really — within the boundaries of a major city: It’s far easier to swoop in a contain it. (Those 15 birds might be less sanguine.)

Only 13 more days in 2012, Staten Island. Here’s looking forward to putting a bad year behind you.

marc-flores

Sunset over Staten Island

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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The real gun crisis is in America’s urban sacrifice zones

by Myrna Posted on December 17, 2012

The real gun crisis is in America’s urban sacrifice zones

By Susie Cagle

Friday’s shooting at an elementary school in sleepy suburban Newtown, Conn., may have rekindled our national conversation about gun control, but that conversation consistently ignores America’s real gun crisis. Suburban rampage killings are on the rise, but they are not the country’s scourge. The vast majority of the guns are in the cities, they are neither big nor particularly scary looking, and they are killing a lot of people, old and young, every day.

pfeyh

On Friday, President Obama said, “Our hearts are broken.” On Saturday, Bob Herbert wrote, “Our hearts should feel broken every day.”

But let’s start here: Over the past few years, violent crime has gone down, way down, across the country. The national murder rate has dropped to mid-1960s levels, and total violent crime is about at the early ’70s. In the intervening decades, Americans fled the cities with a renewed vigor, seeking a safe life for their kids in the suburbs (it’s part of why some demographers think young people will do that again). But this new drop was not due to the safe suburbs. Major cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, and New York, experienced big crime reductions.

Why? No one can agree on exactly how it happened: strict policing, blight reduction, violence intervention, and youth programs, or just old-fashioned gentrification? “America and its biggest cities are becoming unquestionably safer, even in the face of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression,” Richard Florida wrote at The Atlantic last spring. “That’s news we can all celebrate.”

The Brookings Institute noted: “While cities and suburbs alike are much safer today than in 1990, central cities — the big cities that make up the hubs of the 100 largest metro areas — benefitted the most from declining crime rates.”

Safer, healthier cities draw and keep new residents away from the unsustainable suburbs and exurbs. But while the numbers point to positive trends on the whole, they also reveal our sacrifice zones: Cities that have not been revitalized in this recent wave, where we have allowed poverty and violence to concentrate, out of sight and mind — cities that go unmentioned in the wake of mass murders like the one in Newtown, though they are actually our mass murder capitals.

While violent crime rates are down nationwide, they’re up in these places. Depending on the day, the murder rate in Oakland, Calif., where I live, is between No. 3 and No. 5 in the country. Spurred in part by the Newtown shooting, a gun buy-back in Oakland and San Francisco this past Saturday was expected to yield about 600 working weapons. But critics say it’s like “trying to empty the Pacific with a bucket.” That same Saturday morning, there was a shooting just a couple blocks from the Oakland buy-back.

Oakland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Baltimore — these are places we are looking to, in many ways, to lead us into a new future for America’s urban centers. Where things are broken, there’s a greater possibility of building new, smarter, and more sustainable infrastructure. But they are plagued. Oakland is one of America’s greenest cities — it’s No. 5 in the country for bicycle commuters, and home to a burgeoning local gourmet food movement. But Oakland’s most vibrant urban farms are yards away from its hottest killing zones.

They are, in fact, zones. The problem is contained to a poor, urban, black and brown demographic, and usually a young male one at that. It’s often brushed off as “thug on thug” crime. This is what we expect of cities, and so long as the blood spilled just doesn’t trickle out, we accept it.

Though they constitute 15 percent of the child population, black children and teens make up 45 percent of total youths felled by guns. On the whole, an average of five to six children and teens are murdered with guns every day. About 40 percent of inner-city residents may suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, though it’s really perpetual traumatic stress disorder. At some points, American urban violence has been so dangerous the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised entire communities not to go outside. These communities are terrorized on a daily basis.

But until gun violence touches quiet suburbs like Newtown, described often by shocked residents and reporters over the last few days as “quiet” and “quaint,” we allow it.

“Death by gun clearly reflects the class divides which vex America, being substantially more likely in poorer, less advantaged places,” writes Florida. “And this concentrated nature of gun violence makes it easier for those in more affluent and sheltered places to ignore its consequences.”

In 2001, Tim Wise wrote of suburban rampage shootings: “What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long.”

Cities are our future, but they’re dying in more ways than one. This is not, in a word, sustainable.

Where do the solutions lie? As America is grappling with the Newtown massacre, semi-automatic rifles seem like a reasonable scapegoat. But they’re responsible for fewer killings than knives. The vast majority of urban murders are perpetrated by handguns obtained illegally. If our response to gun violence is simply an assault-weapons ban like the one that lapsed in 2004, we will make no impact on America’s real murder epidemic.

Massacres like the Newtown shooting are unusual in puncturing our own national desensitization and paralysis when it comes to gun violence. A conversation about gun control which only addresses the rampage killings in the suburbs and ignores the death in the cities — this is a conversation we can no longer afford.

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Feds predict end times for Colorado River water

by biglermyrta910 Posted on December 15, 2012

Feds predict end times for Colorado River water

By Susie Cagle

Add another item to the list of things in peril due to climate change: the entire American West.

According to a new study from the federal Bureau of Reclamation, the Colorado River won’t fare well over the next 50 years. Climate change, drought, and population growth all add up to far greater demand for water than the river will be able to supply by 2060.

oldmantravels

A large portion of the American West, especially its cities, rely on the Colorado. Almost 40 million residents of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming depend entirely on the river’s water.

“This study should serve as a call to action,” said Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. But some of the possible actions outlined in the report are, well, nuts. From the Los Angeles Times:

The analysis lists a range of proposed solutions, including some that Interior officials immediately dismissed as politically or technically infeasible. Among them: building a pipeline to import water from the Missouri or Mississippi rivers and towing icebergs to Southern California.

But Salazar said a host of practical steps could be pursued, including desalination of seawater and brackish water, recycling and conservation by both the agricultural and urban sectors.

For states draining the Colorado’s Upper Basin — Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico — there is a less insane option, according to National Geographic.

The Bureau of Reclamation study also highlights an opportunity to help water users in the Upper Basin (WY, CO, NM and UT) save water for use in extended droughts while at the same time improving conditions essential to the $26 billion river recreation industry. An Upper Basin water bank is the kind of modern river management that can ensure prosperous farms and ranches, thriving cities, and healthy river flows.

At risk of stating the obvious, predicting the future is hard! Even for the federal government. Some critics said the report overestimates population growth in unsustainable desert towns like Phoenix and Las Vegas that have seen recent real estate and population collapses. From the L.A. Times:

“Some of these demand projections are absurd,” said Michael Cohen, who is based in Colorado and is a senior associate with the Pacific Institute, an Oakland think tank.

He was nonetheless encouraged by the report’s discussion of the potential for conservation by cities and farms. “Those kinds of options are already in practice in the basin and they are cheaper and faster” than building major infrastructure projects such as desalination plants, he said.

Agriculture uses most of the developed water supplies in the West and the future is bound to bring more transfers of water from farms to cities, Cohen said. But that could be largely accomplished by selling the water that is conserved through more efficient irrigation practices rather than by retiring farmland, he said. “There’s a lot of waste in the system in the ag end and the urban end.”

The river’s main allocation goes to California’s Imperial Irrigation District, a chunk of desert and farmland in central southern California. Right now the water barely maintains the area’s toxic Salton Sea, keeping it from drying up and becoming an airborne mass of sand and botulism. Which, yay! But the water will soon be diverted to San Diego, away from the Salton and the area’s agriculture (mainly citrus and dates).

The transfers have been controversial in the district, and Kevin Kelley, the agency’s general manager, warned that carrying out such agreements can be tougher than planning them.

He also worried that his district would come under pressure to make more transfers. “We don’t want to get into a zero-sum game in which one category of user wins and another, chiefly agriculture, has to lose,” he said.

With California agriculture and 40 million people relying on the Colorado, this insatiable demand for water won’t dry up overnight. But there are some changes we can make on the road toward 2060. Might I humbly suggest we start first with dismantling the Palm Springs golf courses?

millerm217

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Different breeds of urban agriculture duke it out in Detroit

by Myrna Posted on December 12, 2012

Different breeds of urban agriculture duke it out in Detroit

By Susie Cagle

On Tuesday, the Detroit City Council voted to sell about 1,500 city-owned lots to the Hantz Woodlands project to plant trees as a beautification effort.

Supporters say it’s just what Detroit needs: large-scale blight removal and reforestation to reinvigorate the post-industrial wasteland with urban innovation. Detractors say it’s a land grab that jeopardizes a local fast-growing urban farming movement and stands to displace low-income residents of color.

ThisisAGoodSign

One of Detroit’s already-thriving urban farms.

Multi-millionaire money manager John Hantz now has a deal to purchase the lots from the city for $300 each – about eight cents a square foot, which is very, very cheap, even for beleaguered Detroit.

From The New York Times:

A Web site set up by Mr. Hantz, a wealthy entrepreneur, to advance his proposal says the farm would return the city “to its agrarian roots.” The repurposed lots — cleared of blight and planted with roughly 15,000 hardwood trees — would establish an economic zone, raise property values and return vast tracts of abandoned land to the city tax rolls, according to Mike Score, the president of the venture, Hantz Farms. Ideally, the enterprise has signaled, it would eventually become a major source of local food …

Saunteel Jenkins, a City Council member who favors the proposal, argues that the city needs to think in new ways. “Farming will be one of the many things that be part of Detroit’s reinvention,” said Ms. Jenkins, chairwoman of the council’s Planning and Economic Development Committee. “The auto industry used to be our bread and butter, but now we have to diversify.”

But In These Times reports that about 100 people still live in the areas that Hantz plans to demolish, clean, and plant full of trees by next spring. And some Detroiters object to the plan for other reasons:

Local organizers believe the devil is in the details. “Hantz is definitely linked up to the gentrification of the waterfront,” says Lottie Spady, associate director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council. The land up for grabs is adjacent to Indian Village, a white upper middle class neighborhood filled with grand Tudor and Beaux Arts homes, where former auto barons once made their home. (Incidentally, it’s also where Hantz currently resides.) It’s also a mile away from the Detroit International Riverfront, which underwent development to become a tourist destination and now hosts waterfront luxury condominiums. “A major city planning effort underway shows a green way running through the land to connect to the river,” adds Spady, “Hantz and the city are in cahoots, and the people are losing out.”

City Council member Kwame Kenyatta told The New York Times: “Just because we have vacant land doesn’t mean we should turn Detroit into a farm.”

But many Detroit residents who are far less wealthy and well-connected than Hantz want to do just that, except without the kicking-out-poor-people bit. Community land grabs, not millionaire land grabs!

Detroit’s community garden and urban farming scene is positively blooming, and it stands to grow even more in 2013. Last week, the city’s Planning Commission approved a new zoning ordinance that would officially recognize the city’s gardens and farms, as well as create new ways forward for creating larger farms and reusing vacant buildings. The new rules would also allow for sale of the goods and produce grown. The City Council will vote on the new rules in January.

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The 2012 Arctic report card: We’re going to need some summer school

by Myrna Posted on December 6, 2012

The 2012 Arctic report card: We’re going to need some summer school

By Philip Bump

Each year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration releases a “report card” for how the Arctic is doing. This year, the Arctic gets an incomplete and a notice to be signed by its parents stating that it will require tutoring.

Warning: sad polar bears.

The report focuses on two primary findings. First, that the year’s record ice loss comes despite a relatively unremarkable year, temperature-wise.

A major finding of the Report Card 2012 is that numerous record-setting melting events occurred, even though, with the exception of a few limited episodes, Arctic-wide it was an unremarkable year, relative to the previous decade, for a primary driver of melting — surface air temperatures. From October 2011 through August 2012, positive (warm) temperature anomalies were relatively small over the central Arctic compared to conditions in recent years (2003-2010). Yet, in spite of these moderate conditions, new records were set for sea ice extent, terrestrial snow extent, melting at the surface of the Greenland ice sheet, and permafrost temperature.

A reminder: Here’s how this year’s ice melt compared to the past.

Pettit Climate Graphs

Click to embiggen.

The unusually severe melt despite non-unusual temperatures is in part due to the feedback loop of melt itself.

A major source of this momentum is the fact that changes in the sea ice cover, snow cover, glaciers and Greenland ice sheet all conspire to reduce the overall surface reflectivity of the region in the summer, when the sun is ever-present. In other words, bright, white surfaces that reflect summer sunlight are being replaced by darker surfaces, e.g., ocean and land, which absorb sunlight. These conditions increase the capacity to store heat within the Arctic system, which enables more melting — a positive feedback.

The other main finding is that the melt of ice in the Arctic region is affecting the food chain.

A second key point in Report Card 2012 is that changes in the Arctic marine environment are affecting the foundation of the food web in both the terrestrial and marine ecosystems. …

For instance, new satellite remote sensing observations show the near ubiquity of ice-edge blooms throughout the Arctic and the importance of seasonal sea ice variability in regulating primary production. These results suggest that previous estimates of annual primary production in waters where these under-ice blooms develop may be about ten times too low. At a higher trophic level, seabird phenology, diet, physiology, foraging behavior and survival rates have changed in response to higher water temperatures, which affect prey species.

Changes in the terrestrial ecosystem are exemplified by vegetation and mammals. The tundra continues to become more green and in some locations above-ground plant biomass has increased by as much as 26% since 1982.

That change in surface vegetation has caused the lemming population to drop, which, in turn, has done the same to the Arctic fox, a species near extinction. At the same time, red foxes are migrating north, providing additional competition for shrinking food supplies.

So: That’s grim.

The report is loaded with graphs featuring lines that typically start at the upper left corner and then plummet down and to the right. It also contains interesting graphics like this one, showing the effect that an August storm had on ice breakup and melt near Alaska.

NASA

Click to embiggen.

It’s probably not really accurate to call this document a report card. It’s far more of a crystal ball, sort of an SAT gauging how the future might look. And it doesn’t look very good.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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New Jersey train derailment dumps chemicals into waterway

by Myrna Posted on November 30, 2012

New Jersey train derailment dumps chemicals into waterway

By Philip Bump

One of the reasons that Keystone XL has faced so much opposition is the threat of a leak. Nebraska forced TransCanada to reroute vast stretches of the proposed pipeline to avoid a key aquifer.

But no pipeline doesn’t mean no leaks. As our Lisa Hymas noted yesterday, oil companies have massively increased rail use to bring oil to market. It’s more costly, yes (think Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood), but it gets the job done … until those trains fall in waterways.

From the South Jersey Times:

Four railroad tank cars have been dumped into the Mantua Creek and are leaking vinyl chloride after the train bridge collapsed at about 7 a.m.

Ambulances are being sent to the Paulsboro Marine Terminal where approximately 18 people are reported to be experiencing breathing difficulties at 7:40 a.m.

Initial responders report seven cars overturned and derailed near the 200 block of East Jefferson Street, between North Delaware Street and the creek.

On the plus side: Vinyl chloride is a gas, so it is unlikely to contaminate Mantua Creek, which connects to the Delaware River and then the Delaware Bay. With petroleum or tar-sands oil, the long-term effects could be much worse.

We’ll note, too, the other problem at fault here: infrastructure. The bridge over which the train was running appears to be this one:

It’s an odd bridge, one built almost a century ago. It looks as though it’s incomplete in the image above, but it’s not. It’s open. The bridge, in a process described here, swings open and shut to allow boats to pass by. It’s easy to imagine how such a system, if imperfectly re-aligned, could result in a derailment like the one seen today. In images of today’s disaster, you can see that the accident occurred at the point where the bridge swings open.

A 2008 coal train derailment in Decatur.

So we have toxic chemicals being moved over century-old infrastructure built to cross a waterway that connects to a major river. And, increasingly, we have the same thing happening across the Plains States. While pipelines are generally safer than trains, they’re still infrastructure, bound to degrade over time.

At the heart of it, the problem isn’t the system of transport. The problem is that we want to shuttle toxic chemicals around at all. Until we solve that problem, we will undoubtedly see spills like today’s happen again — but with potentially far bigger repercussions.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Why New York ran out of gas

by Myrna Posted on November 27, 2012

Why New York ran out of gas

By Philip Bump

China Ziegenbein

When Sandy hit the New York metropolitan area, the first thing to go was the electricity. The second thing to go was the gasoline.

Reuters has a lengthy look at how one of the busiest regions of America suddenly found itself short on fuel, leading to shuttered gas stations, price spikes, and rationing that only ended in New York City last week.

The storm’s destructive powers were bad enough — knocking out equipment and power at oil terminals and other energy infrastructure, while disrupting shipping for days because of debris in the harbor. But a series of decisions over recent years had also made the region much more vulnerable. The shuttering of regional oil refineries, decisions by companies to keep low fuel stocks because holding extra supply has become expensive or unprofitable, a recent government downsizing of emergency reserves, and the heavy reliance of fuel terminals on a vulnerable electric grid all played into the supply squeeze.

New York Harbor plays a key role in the area’s fuel infrastructure. So for Commander Linda Sturgis, who leads emergency prevention at the Port of New York, the effects of the storm were immediately obvious.

Live feeds from military cameras in secret locations allowed Sturgis to watch Sandy raise sea levels by as much as 14 feet. That, she knew, would submerge low-lying zones, with frightening implications for residents. But Sturgis, who also holds a business degree in supply chain management, recognized another threat too.

“When I saw that surge, I knew it would impact oil supplies,” she says. “The public probably doesn’t realize how critical the harbor is. It’s the epicenter of fuel distribution for the whole Northeast.” …

Sturgis said Phillips 66, operator of the 238,000 barrel per day Bayway refinery in Linden, New Jersey, reported that a 13-foot surge of corrosive saltwater had inundated parts of the plant. Its power was out, and the plant — known among oil traders as “the gasoline machine” because it produces enough fuel to meet half of New Jersey’s demand — had no timeline for restarting.

Another low-lying Harbor refinery, Hess Corp’s 70,000 barrel-per-day plant in Port Reading, New Jersey, was also incapacitated by power outages. Along the coast, two dozen major fuel terminals were inoperable. Tanks at the terminals store and blend oil to ship around the region.

Supplies in the region were already depleted from people buying fuel in preparation for the storm. (Reuters notes that, according to MasterCard, fuel sales in the area were 65 percent above normal before Sandy hit.) But when the water receded, and barges with fuel would normally move in to resupply gas stations, they discovered that the harbor wasn’t operational. Power outages and lingering effects of flooding meant it couldn’t process the deliveries.

Thousands of fuel truckers were forced to improvise. One national shipper, Mansfield Logistics, diverted trucks for hundreds of miles in every direction, bringing fuel from as far as North Carolina to northeastern customers, some located just a few miles from the harbor’s tanks.

The crunch was worsened because many regional filling stations lacked generators and couldn’t dispense gasoline. …

Government officials tried several fixes. The Environmental Protection Agency eased clean fuel standards, allowing emergency vehicles and generators to run on dirtier fuel oil, and federal officials approved Jones Act waivers to lure fuel cargoes on foreign-flagged tankers usually barred from transiting between U.S. ports. BP Plc diverted a Liberian-flagged ship to the harbor, but only a few other cargoes arrived quickly.

The damage was so widespread that there was only one sure-fire solution to the problem: time. Gas stations and the port slowly powered back up; damaged refineries came back online, each on its own timeline.

The Reuters report suggests that there are places that can provide guidance in avoiding this problem in the future: namely, Texas and Holland. The latter says it is prepared “even for the storm that only happens once every 10,000 years.”

Confidence in preparation is one thing. What actually happens in the aftermath of an unprecedented event is something else entirely.

Source

Insight: Sandy gives New York oil supply lesson, Reuters

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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