After a Decade, Debbie Ortega Still Fighting to Put Railway Safety Back on Track

“I started noticing more and more flammable rail cars moving through the city and parked in the Central Valley, under our viaducts and near downtown, Ball Arena, Coors Field, and Mile High Stadium,” Ortega says.

In the February 21 Land Use, Transportation & Infrastructure Denver City Council committee meeting, representatives from the Denver Department of Transportation & Infrastructure and Denver Community Planning & Development presented on rail safety in the city based on preliminary results from a study conducted by HNTB, a consulting firm, in partnership with DOTI and CPD.

David Krutsinger of DOTI said incidents related to hazardous materials carried by trains are rated as medium risk. Draft findings from the study indicate there were more than 100,000 hazmat rail car shipments in Denver in 2021.

In February 2022, a BNSF Railway train derailed, sending three cars into the South Platte River. Luckily, Krutsinger noted, those cars were not carrying hazardous materials.

The planned Uinta Basin Railway, which would carry oil from Utah through Colorado, will cause a fourfold increase in freight cars with hazardous materials traveling through Denver. Currently, about 280 cars with hazardous materials travel through the city daily.

That, in addition to the recent train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has made train safety even more pressing in Ortega’s eyes.

“I don’t want to wait for an incident to occur in our city and see catastrophic impacts if there are things we could be doing today to mitigate that impact,” she says.

Ortega introduced an ordinance in September 2022 that would require those looking to develop property near railways to show that they have mitigated for the impacts of potential railway incidents before receiving permits. That recommendation came out of a 2016 report from a working group on railroad safety that Ortega had assembled the previous year.

“There was a new check-off box that was put on the [permitting] form, and it was intended for this to be a voluntary program,” Ortega said at the meeting. “Fast-forward, we asked for the data and found out that nobody had been doing anything. … What we learned was the agencies didn’t feel like they had the authority to ask the developers to do anything, and the developers had not done anything to address the issue.”

Ortega expects the ordinance — which was put off because other members of city council wanted to the results of the study before implementing any bill — to come back on March 14 once the report’s findings are finalized. Currently, only developers who choose to do so voluntarily accommodate considerations of the risks of proximity to railways. The idea behind the ordinance is to require them. Ortega says there are a variety of options available to developers, and it is not designed to prevent development.

“Part of what the report does is have a menu of options that the developers can choose from, and these are options that should not add to the cost of a project,” she says. “This has never been about stopping development in our city. It’s been about making sure that the development has been built to ensure the safety of the people in those buildings.”

Most rail regulations come from the federal level, so the city can control only land use and emergency response, though Ortega notes she is using her voice to advocate for improved braking regulations at the federal level.

“We can try to get [railroads] to work with us,” Ortega says. “They’ve been part of these conversations going all the way back to 2016, but we have no authority over them.”

Another struggle for those looking to learn more about railway safety is that, unlike with passenger routes, there is not publicly available information about what materials freight trains carry or when and where they carry them.

The reason people know about the hazardous materials in Denver is often through personal observation.

In 2022, GreenLatinos, an environmental advocacy organization, published, “Who Bears the Cost? North Denver Environmental Justice Report and Data Audit,” finding that although official data wasn’t accessible, residents in North Denver reported seeing open coal cars passing through the community.

“It’s disturbing, the lack of information that’s available to the public,” says Ean Thomas Tafoya, Colorado director of GreenLatinos.

Denver has both passenger rail and freight rail.

RTD

Ortega herself has seen many trains carrying petroleum products through the city, and has seen them parked in freight lots for days.

“Until or unless there is ever a move to relocate the central mainline, we will continue to have these products come through our city, and it is not uncommon,” she says.

At the committee meeting, Ortega asked what level of data will be available to the public in the final report, and was told that the broad information about the amount of cars carrying hazardous materials presented to city council represented the data that will be in the final report.

Despite the study identifying risks, city officials repeatedly described the risk level as low compared to other risks faced by the city.

“A critical piece that we consider is evaluating the cost benefit of some of the recommendations that are there,” said Matt Mueller of the Denver Office of Emergency Management. ”There are things that can be done that are extremely expensive that could be effective, but we also want to sort of consider what the city’s responsibility is versus our federal government, as well as our railroad partners.”

At the meeting, Ortega noted that the study will help Denver be able to access federal dollars to help with railway safety costs. Mueller suggested further study of the costs versus benefits of the study’s recommendations.

“It feels like it’s been ten years almost that we’ve been working on this, and for them to say we needed to do more study, I was like, ‘Well, haven’t we just been studying?’” Tafoya says.

Ortega also wishes the process would move a bit faster, but she’s committed to seeing it through collaboratively, discussing the ordinance with rail companies and her fellow city councilors to see what changes might be needed.

Krutsinger indicated that Union Pacific and BSNF, the two main freight companies with tracks through Denver, are willing to collaborate on some of the solutions identified in the report regarding improving high-risk locations. The report identified a total of twelve to fifteen locations that could benefit from upgraded signs, signals or barriers to increase safety. Those locations tend to be near multi-family developments that are strategically placed along passenger rail corridors to promote growth in tandem with transit. They are also in industrial areas.

“There is where many of our high-risk crossings are located, as well as some of the origins and destinations of hazardous materials with different petroleum refineries and fueling stations in or near Denver,” said David Gaspers of Community Planning & Development.

The study also suggested more training for first responders, examinations of site densities when considering new developments near freight corridors, and more safety barriers.

“Freight rail risk is a part of larger Vision Zero goals,” Gaspers said. “We’re trying to reduce these deaths to zero, and a part of it is freight railroad risk.” Three or four deaths from rail incidents happen in Denver each year, according to the presentation.

According to Tafoya, GreenLatinos has found that people who live near railways want a stronger voice when it comes to decisions about those railways. They’re concerned not just about derailment or direct incidents between people and trains, but also sound, vibrations and air pollution.

Tafoya notes that the climate impacts of railways didn’t seem to be factored into the city’s risk calculation when it should have been.

“Air quality is part of Vision Zero, because Vision Zero’s main premise is that things are dangerous by design,” Tafoya says. “We’ve designed infrastructure that operates off of combustion engines and, as a result, these are the outcomes. I don’t see how that’s any different than, ‘We don’t have the right timed light here,’ or ‘We didn’t make the sidewalk wide enough.’ It’s all dangerous by design, and when we allow zoning next to places that are dangerous by design, there’s risk and impacts to public health.”

Tafoya is glad Ortega is pushing for consideration of rail safety and hopes the conversation continues. As he sees it, the train hasn’t quite left the station when it comes to solutions on railway safety in Denver.