Bnsf Should Be Made To Abide By Regulations

We’ve been had, my friends, and we don’t even know it yet.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the Burlington Northern Sante Fe plans to build a 500,000-gallon refueling depot near Hauser next year, but the latest comments offered by the officials of BNSF have me worried.

Opponents of the depot are concerned about locating this facility over the aquifer, and rightly so. A major spill could have disastrous consequences for our water supply. Minor spills done over the course of time could lead to problems with diesel leaching into the aquifer located below “geologic materials that are highly porous and loosely compacted,” according to the petition filed with the federal Surface Transportation Board by Friends of the Aquifer.

This refueling depot is not qualitatively different than the hundreds of Coeur d’Alene and Spokane area gas stations and each one of these stations has thousands of gallons of gasoline and diesel in underground tanks right above the aquifer.

So why should we be more concerned about Burlington Northern’s refueling depot and not about these hundreds of individually owned tanks sitting above the aquifer?

The answer is really quite simple.

On the surface, if we oppose BNSF’s depot, we should have opposed each of these gas stations or, at the very least, made each of them abide by regulations similar to the 33 conditions the Kootenai County Commission attached to its approval of the BNSF facility, right?

But the fact of the matter is that the state of Idaho, in cooperation with the federal Environmental Protection Agency, passed the Petroleum Clean Water Trust Fund Act in 1990, and it has been an unqualified success, according to the EPA’s Web site.

Owners of underground and above-ground fuel storage tanks can apply for insurance underwritten by money collected by the state as a result of the act. But the tanks have to meet strict state and federal laws and regulations and pass a tightness test to qualify for the insurance.

If a tank doesn’t meet these criteria, the owner can apply for a subsidized Small Business Administration loan to upgrade the tank.

The result? The environment is protected with minimal government interference, and underground storage tank owners are insured against spills.

Burlington Northern Sante Fe agreed to voluntarily submit to the 33 conditions “imposed” on the depot by the county commissioners, but now the company is busy making sure everyone knows that neither the local government nor federal agencies have any controlling authority or oversight when it comes to the depot.

This is worrisome.

Is Burlington Northern playing the pea-in-the-shell game? Friends of the Aquifer think so. They believe that BNSF agreed to go along with the 33 conditions as a way of deflecting attention away from the fact that the company can essentially do whatever it pleases since Congress removed all state and local government oversight in the 1996 Interstate Commerce Commission Termination Act.

In essence, all that happened with the 33 conditions “imposed” by the county commissioners is that we put a little lipstick on the bulldog. It may look prettier, but it’s still a bulldog.

The company is now loudly proclaiming that not only does the county have no regulatory authority over the depot but that it only went through the local process as a show of good faith. In other words, the 33 conditions are nonbinding, and the county is powerless to do anything should BNSF fail to comply.

What about the STB? According to BNSF, even the STB has no jurisdiction over the Hauser facility.

Who will oversee the depot then? Burlington Northern might like it if no one had any oversight.

Is the company setting us up? Have we been had?

Given the company’s past record of environmental disasters, I would say so.

Go talk to someone from Livingston, Mont., and they’ll tell you about the fact that you can’t drink water from the aquifer sitting below their town anymore thanks to diesel fuel contamination provided by Burlington Northern.

Or talk to someone from Mandan, N.D., where BNSF has assumed the financial responsibility of cleaning up an estimated one million gallons of diesel fuel floating around in the aquifer below the city.

According to Friends of the Aquifer, BNSF has spent $275 million in cleanup costs in the past six years, $67 million last year alone.

My question, then, is this: With the amount of time and money BNSF has spent to clean up its past spills, why are they so afraid of a little bit of oversight?

Burlington Northern is risking an unmitigated public relations disaster if the company thinks it can get away with skirting local and federal regulations, even if it is not legally required to abide by them.

We all benefit from our efficient railroad system, and undoubtedly BNSF believes the Hauser facility is the optimal location for its depot. But at the risk of contaminating the water supply for 400,000 people?

What it comes down to is this: If local gasoline station owners abide by regulations designed to keep our drinking water safe, then why should BNSF be exempt? Especially when the tanks Burlington Northern will be using are many, many times larger than the storage tank at your local gas station.