CBS12 Investigates: Bomb Trains and Terrorism Concerns

VERO BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — In February and last week in our I-Team Special, CBS12 News reported that Florida is one of only two states in America where liquified natural gas is transported on trains.

In a federal lawsuit, the group Earthjustice warns a string of those LNG tankers have the same explosive potential as an atomic bomb.

Since CBS12 News' initial report, the I-Team has discovered U.S. Intelligence is on alert and has been since 9/11 over terrorists weaponizing LNG transports.

While the companies involved in LNG production and transportation have repeatedly refused CBS12 News' requests for an interview – one executive did make time to object to the term “bomb train” because, he said, LNG doesn’t burst into flames like diesel fuel.

So the I-Team looked into that claim and found some eye-opening research conducted by the Martin County Fire Rescue Department.

The Martin County study about a potential LNG incident focused on the gaseous cloud that could be leaked from a 4-inch hole in one rail car. The study concluded it could ignite even hundreds of yards from the scene.

The I-Team noted there are three potential impact zones, yellow, orange and red.

According to the 2015 report, if a single tanker car explosion happened at Southeast Cove Road and Dixie Highway in the area of St. lucie Inlet State Park, 396 people and 164 homes would be in the red zone.

That means life-threatening conditions.

“Fires like this are fires that no fire department can put out. People think, ‘Oh the fire department will show up and put out the blaze.’ Well not if you get a few cars going up, you’re not, and not if you get secondary ignition,” said Charles “Sam” Faddis.

Faddis is a former counter-terrorism officer at the CIA. He says the energy sector loves LNG so much, it’s ignoring blatant vulnerabilities.

“I don’t want to detail the specifics of how to derail a train, but I’ll put it this way: It isn’t all that hard and it's not like terrorists haven’t figured this out yet. That’s silly, all of this is well known, well documented and folks have been focused on this, so this is not a theoretical thing. This is a real world thing, a ‘it could happen tomorrow thing,'" Faddis said.

Some of the scenarios Faddis is talking about can be found in the wave of studies published after Sept. 11.

“This threat has not gone away, the groups have not gone away, ISIS did not vanish, Al Qaeda did not vanish, the other groups and that’s before we get to the potential of any domestic activity,” Faddis said.

In 2008, The Institute of Analysis for Global Security released a report on LNG attacks, they warned “there exists no relevant industrial experience with fires of this scale from which to project measures for securing public safety.”

“Under the right circumstances, and I mean that from a bad guy’s perspective if you will, if you attack a train carrying 100 tanker cars of LNG, the fire department will respond, emergency services will respond, but all they’ll be able to do is evacuate within a half mile of the site, then maybe a mile, control the situation that way, but it is not humanly possible to put out the fire that will result,” Faddis said.

To that point, the study by Martin County Fire Rescue concluded, in part: “Such emergencies can exceed local response capabilities.”

“You need to be aware of the issue and engaged and fully cognizant of the nature of this threat,” Faddis said.

That’s part of what motivates Vero Beach resident Paul Wescott, a member of the citizen watchdog group the Alliance for Safe Trains. Wescott has gone to Tallahassee, calling on state leaders to stop LNG trains. He’s been told what the I-Team has been told -- this is a federal issue.

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“The state defers to the Federal Railroad Commission on just about all of these facets. They say, it’s not our problem [to address],” Wescott said.

Wescott’s work sometimes brings him to the old Vero Beach Court House. Across the street, there’s a park and shuffle board courts. It’s a nice place for lunch, right alongside the train tracks. Wescott says rather than moving LNG by rail, we’d all be a lot safer if LNG flowed through underground pipes, which are already in place.

“We have pipelines and Florida is a very good place for pipelines because we don’t have earth quakes. What’s more, cars don’t run into pipelines, pipelines don’t run into cars. There are already corridors and infrastructure that could be used,” Wescott said.

Earth Justice, the group fighting bomb trains in Washington DC, agrees. They also argue concerns about terrorism unfairly leave citizens in the dark about the danger.

“There is a really frustrating element to this as well. If you take the terrorism concerns very seriously and try to keep secret the routes this would be taking, then you are subjecting whole communities to this without getting their consent or giving them that awareness,” said Earthjustice Associate Attorney Jordan Luebkemann.

Earth Justice wants to end the use of fossil fuels altogether, but they tell the I-Team there may be a major rule change coming from the new Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, either restoring limits on capacity and the number of LNG cars per train, or possibly even banning rail transport of LNG completely.