Gasoline tanker-truck accidents usually kill only a few people at a time, but they can be among the best remembered and disruptive highway accidents because they can close roads for months. The reason, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, is bad design.
But the Transportation Department, which regulates tanker trucks, is resisting any change, because of tax laws.
The tanks on gasoline tanker trucks are pretty tough, but their loading lines, the pipes through which they are filled and emptied, are not, and they are at just the height to be struck by automobiles, according to the NTSB.
The board issued a report in May on an accident in Yonkers, N.Y., in which a sedan ran a red light and hit a tank truck under an overpass. The car driver was killed, and the ensuing fire caused $7 million in damage to the overpass, which had to be closed for six months. “The significant element of this crash is not its cause as much as its severity,” the NTSB said.
The overpass was partly melted when the thousands of gallons of gasoline in the tank burned, but that gasoline would probably not have ignited, experts say, but for the approximately 28 gallons in the loading lines, which ruptured and poured into the car’s hot engine compartment. The board lined up 12 passenger-car models near the loading pipes of a tank truck and found that all were at the right height to hit the lines.
The Transportation Department’s Research and Special Programs Administration proposed more protection of those lines in 1985. But when the rule took effect in 1990, an exception was made for petroleum products.
One possible solution mentioned by the board would be to drain the gasoline from the lines and pump it back into the tank.
The problem with this, however, is that states tax the gasoline as it leaves the tank and enters the pipes, and if that gasoline were put back into the tanks, it would be taxed twice, said William Vincent, director of policy at the hazardous-materials office.
