Interesting read, especially on the history of the car. Pictures of the crack and the car in the link to the article at the bottom. By Jeff Jenkins in News | October 17, 2016 at 5:09PM NEW MARTINSVILLE, W.Va. — The tank car that leaked approximately 17,000 gallons of chlorine on Aug. 27 at the Axiall Plant loading facility in New Martinsville had undergone a five-year interior inspection at a Pennsylvania facility along with repair work just a few months earlier, a preliminary report on the chemical leak from the National Transportation Safety Board said. The report, released Monday, said tank car 1702 had been at Rescar Companies tank car repair facility in Dubois, Pa., from January to June for interior cleaning, thickness testing, weld buildup and other work. The jobs were necessary after inspectors found “numerous corrosion pits in the bottom section of the tank shell” after the tanker car arrived, the NTSB report said. The tank car was returned to Axiall for its first postrepair loading in June. After the August leak that sent liquefied compressed chlorine, which formed a large vapor cloud along the Ohio River valley, NTSB investigators found a 46-inch long “circumferentially-oriented crack” on the bottom of the car. Investigators also found buckling of the tank shell and several areas where the tank had been previously repaired where the shell measured below the minimum allowed thickness, according to the preliminary report. The entire 90-ton load of chlorine leaked from the tank during the 2.5 hour Aug. 27 incident. The NTSB’s investigation, which has been on scene in New Martinsville and at Rescar in Pennsylvania, will continue at NTSB headquarters in Washington, D.C. The tank car was constructed in 1981. Similar cars with the same type of underframe have had a history of cracking problems, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. Eight workers, five Axiall employers and three contractor workers, were treated for exposure injuries and released following the chlorine leak. Two people were hospitalized. http://wvmetronews.com/2016/10/17/ntsb-releases-preliminary-report-on-axiall-chlorine-leak/
You'd think on a 35 year old tank car, that Rescar would have found the crack back in June when it was still at their shop. If this specific type of tank car has a history of cracking, and the design is 30+ years old, maybe the FRA will ban them from interchange? That Axiall plant lies along the CSX Ohio River Subdivision, cars travel to and fro from the west on the same Subdivision or from the east on the Shortline Sub and utimately the old B&O West End. What if the car ripped apart in St. Mary's, WV? (Ohio River Sub runs down main street) What if the car ripped apart west of Clarksburg, WV on the US 50 overpass?
http://www.fra.dot.gov/eLib/details/L18383 https://app.ntsb.gov/investigations/summary/HZB9804.html http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/rail/1997/r97d0253/r97d0253.pdf Apparently this really is a big problem.
And that was just the first three hits. I had recently read of one where a big percentage of one class had improper welds...maybe that's in one of those reports. Poor penetration. I think it was covered by the one where they did an emergency epoxy patch to stop the leak.
It is interesting that some of these issues were noted as far back as 1972, but corrective action not even considered until 1986. The Canadians found the (then) proscribed hydrostatic testing may have contributed to one failure, and removed hydrostatic testing from welded cars. So many classes of tank cars, so many failures, so many related to poor, improper, or missing welds...
