For the third year in a row, ProRail is the worst performing company in the port of Rotterdam in terms of safety. The company did not meet a deadline to put things in order in the shunting yards for freight trains before 1 January 2023. This is evident from figures from the DCMR environmental service and a letter from Rotterdam alderman Chantal Zeegers (Climate, Building and Housing, D66).
ProRail, which shunts trains with hazardous substances at several railway yards in the port, was sanctioned eight times by the service in 2022. This involved, for example, the lighting in shunting yards that did not work properly, or a tank storage facility that had not been inspected for safety in time. The company also once placed objects in dangerous places on the site, as a result of which the fire extinguishing water supply was no longer accessible, and left an entrance gate to a shunting yard open.
No other company in the Rotterdam region received so much punishment. The sanctions imposed on ProRail, which falls under the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, mainly concern an ‘order subject to periodic penalty payments’: an amount of usually several thousand euros that must be paid if an inspector concludes during a second visit that a dangerous situation has not been dissolved. Some fines have also been collected.
The problems and the safety culture at ProRail have been a concern for DCMR and its client, the Municipality of Rotterdam, for some time now. In 2021, former DCMR supervisory director Daan Molenaars contradicted NRC of a ‘blind spot’ at the rail company, which has been subject to many sanctions for years. According to the authorities, any incident at a shunting yard can have major consequences because the shunting yards are often located near residential areas or so-called ‘high-risk companies’. In 2019 and 2020, ProRail had to stop shunting on a railway yard because the fire extinguishing water supply turned out to be below standard.
According to a 2020 study by Radboud University, the cause of the safety problems is the low priority that the railway yards in the port had in recent years, because ProRail mainly focused on passenger lines. ProRail would also pay relatively little attention to the safety of the surrounding area (unlike that on the railways), and the team that worked on the Havenspoorlijn was overloaded for a long time.
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deadline
ProRail itself has always said that it needed more time to improve the situation and that there were no simple solutions. Nevertheless, the municipality of Rotterdam and the DCMR set a deadline last year: all problems had to be solved by 1 January 2023.
This was not successful, according to a letter from alderman Chantal Zeegers on Monday. The deadline was not feasible for the marshalling yard of Pernis because a new extinguishing system could not be tested there before that date. ProRail has therefore temporarily suspended shunting at Pernis at the end of 2022.
The problems have also not yet been solved at the four other shunting yards – Botlek, Europoort, Waalhaven-Zuid and Maasvlakte. Here, a new extinguishing system did function on time, but another problem arose: during the work for the new systems, a lot of dirt ended up in the pipe network. This can lead to problems when extinguishing a possible fire.
According to the alderman, ProRail needs another four months to resolve this. Until then, in consultation with the fire brigade, “a certain degree of risk” will be accepted, according to the alderman. ProRail has been given a new order subject to periodic penalty payments, which must be paid if the pipes are not flushed at the beginning of April. The amount of the penalty has yet to be determined.
In a comment to NRC says Mirjam van Velthuizen-Lormans, financial director of ProRail, that “hard work has been done in recent years to renew the infrastructure”. “We are happy with the cooperation with the competent authority.” According to her, that does not mean that ProRail is already there, given the orders subject to periodic penalty payments. “We aim to ensure that they are no longer needed as soon as possible.”
The DCMR is one of the few environmental services that discloses of its own accord which companies they have imposed sanctions on, although the exact amounts of money are not always immediately shared due to objection procedures. Nevertheless, it is easy to see which companies in the port of Rotterdam – the largest industrial area in the Netherlands, including large refineries belonging to Shell and BP – are doing poorly in terms of compliance with safety and environmental standards.
In addition to ProRail, the chemical company Emerald Kalama, part of the global chemical group Lanxess, stands out in the list for 2022. This company, which produces substances for the production of perfumes and cosmetics, among other things, falls under the ‘decree on the risk of major accidents’. This means that it is allowed to work with large quantities of hazardous substances and that it is one of the companies with the highest safety risks in the Netherlands.
According to the regulator, Emerald Kalama did not follow maintenance procedures and also discharged industrial waste water in the wrong way. It also failed to provide the information requested by the DCMR. The environmental service has the right to ask for, for example, data on inspections and maintenance of installations.
‘Worrying situation’
A spokesman for the DCMR speaks of a “worrying” situation. In total, the company received an order subject to periodic penalty payments five times in the past year, part of which was collected because the company did not meet the requirements in time. Before January 1, the company had to draw up a plan of action to put things in order. The exact amounts of the penalty payments have not yet been shared due to objection periods.
Emerald Kalama says in a written response that it is aware of the sanctions stated on the DCMR website. The company says it plans further investments to “further improve technical standards and processes”.
The municipality of Rotterdam also imposed a punishment on itself once. When remediating a piece of land, the municipality turned out not to have used the correct ‘waste stream numbers’: a batch of disposed of soil was classified as relatively clean, but in practice was contaminated with copper and zinc.
On behalf of the Board of Mayors and Aldermen, the head of the Department of Spatial Planning, Housing and the Environment imposed an order subject to periodic penalty payments of 3,000 euros on the Board of Mayors and Aldermen.
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