MOUNT CARBON, W.Va. — Track defects caused fiery crude-oil derailments that forced 1,100 people from their homes in this Appalachian village this year and killed 47 people in a Canadian town in 2013.

In fact, a Dispatch analysis of federal records shows that track defects and human error are to blame for most railway incidents.

Yet U.S. regulators focus on tanker cars instead of the rails that support the cars and millions of gallons of Bakken crude, a highly volatile oil from North Dakota and Montana that crisscrosses the country on the way to refineries each week.

Bakken trains pass through the hearts of hundreds of cities and towns and past millions of their residents — including those in luxury high-rise buildings in downtown Columbus.

After dozens of crashes and spills in the past five years, U.S. rail authorities have zeroed in on tanker cars, propelling regulations that will cost an estimated $1.7 billion in upgrades designed to make those cars safer.

Even rail companies say that’s a good thing because stronger cars are less likely to spill following a derailment.

But a Dispatch analysis of rail incidents shows that cars cause relatively few derailments and other rail incidents. Two-thirds of problems occur because of human error and track defects.

“When I put on my regulator hat, we’re all taught on the first day of regulator class to prevent the accident,” said Brigham McCown, the former director of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Material Safety Administration.

“If the car stays on the track, I’m pretty sure absolutely nothing happens. Whether it’s a coal car, a lumber car, or a crude-oil car, we have to keep the train on the tracks.”

Railroads generally have supported tougher tank-car standards. The expense of replacing or retrofitting DOT-111 tankers falls to shipping firms, which say the cars won’t fail if the trains stay on the tracks.

“If you want to spend someone else’s money, you argue the problem isn’t with you, it’s with someone else,” said Mr. McCown, who now runs a consulting firm and a nonprofit group focused on infrastructure problems.

“The first question you always ask is not how to reduce the consequences of the accident, but how do you keep the accident from happening in the first place. That means looking at what causes the derailments.”

Reports that railroads have fought to keep secret show that 45 million to 137 million gallons of Bakken crude roll through Ohio each week, including as much as 25 million gallons through Franklin County. Trains carrying Bakken crude have derailed in cities across North America, dangling over a bridge in downtown Philadelphia, contaminating water in Lynchburg, Va., and, in one case, killing 47 people and incinerating the downtown in Lac-Megantic, Quebec. After several derailments, The Dispatch began analyzing federal records and reviewing hundreds of reports about crude-train incidents.

Among the findings:

● About one-third of the train incidents in the past 20 years involved track problems, such as a split in the steel or a faulty joint.

● Slightly more than one-third of the incidents were caused by human error, such as a crew member falling asleep as the train cruises past a stop signal or an engineer improperly setting a brake.

● The rest were from mechanical and electrical failures, signal and communication issues, or other causes that the Federal Railroad Administration deems “miscellaneous.”

Although the number of incidents along U.S. rail lines is down overall in the past two decades, the growth in crude-oil shipments has meant more derailments and other issues involving crude.

The Dispatch analysis shows that from 1995 to 2010, crude oil spilled from trains a total of 27 times, at an average cost of about $46,000 a spill to clean up. That has changed dramatically as Bakken crude production has swelled.

From 2010 to July 2015, crude spilled from trains 423 times at an average clean-up cost of more than $109,000.

The cost of cleaning up crude-oil spills this year alone was about $30 million, up from $7.5 million in 2014. The cost for this year was more than the previous 19 years combined.

Some of those derailments and spills have resulted in huge blasts, towering fires, and blankets of toxic smoke that force people from their homes.

Mount Carbon blast

Feb. 16 was a day made for sledding in Mount Carbon, and Chris Sargent and his daughters weren’t going to miss it.

Snow had blanketed the neighborhood along the Kanawha River in the mountains of West Virginia, and more was falling. School had been canceled that Monday, and the Sargent girls grabbed their sleds.

They had just headed outside when the ground shook. Behind them, their house rattled. Then, the sky seemed to split.

“It sounded like a jet plane sliding up the tracks,” Mr. Sargent said. “And then there was a lot of heat.”

A CSX freight train carrying nearly 3 million gallons of Bakken crude oil had derailed, causing 27 of its cars to plow into one another. Nineteen cars caught fire, and the crude they carried shot flames as high as the surrounding mountains.

Mr. Sargent saw his neighbor, Morris Bounds, running barefoot along a frozen creek that leads to the Kanawha River, his house in flames behind him. A derailed train car had been launched into the house and exploded.

Mr. Bounds’ house disintegrated, and black smoke blanketed their neighborhood before spreading across the Kanawha.

Toxic chemicals in the smoke made the air unsafe to breathe, and crude oil spilled into the Kanawha, a primary source of drinking water, making it unsafe for about 2,000 people.

Water advisories were in place for three days. In all, nearly 1,100 area residents had to leave their homes. 

Mr. Sargent said residents were lucky that the train derailed outside town. “If it had come through the village, everyone would have been killed,” he said.

Oil and gas development in the United States is a thorny and divisive issue. The more oil and gas we produce, the less we rely on imports. The industry creates jobs for drillers, pipe-layers, truckers. It can lower oil and gas prices.

But the trains that carry millions of gallons of Bakken crude oil each week to refineries along both coasts have made safety an issue in cities along rail corridors across the United States, including Columbus.

A Dispatch analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation data shows that as more crude oil moves by train, spills are mounting in frequency and expense.

Much of the crude oil moving by train across the United States comes from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota and Montana.

Bakken shale is rich in a type of crude oil that is light, low in sulfur, and needs little refining — all of which make it a hot commodity. But it’s volatile.

Explosive Bakken

In 2014, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued a safety alert about Bakken crude, saying the oil could be more flammable than other types.

The safety alert was just a warning, though, and didn’t force any changes in how it is shipped.

Within hours of the Mount Carbon derailment and blast, the village of a few hundred residents bustled with people.

CSX sent crews. Investigators from the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection arrived to evaluate the spill and determine the contamination level of the Kanawha. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency arrived to monitor air quality. News crews combed the area, reporting the disaster.

CSX officials would not talk about the Mount Carbon derailment.

In a report made public in October, investigators determined that a piece of track had split, causing the train to derail.

Sperry Rail Services, a company that contracts with most major railroad companies in the United States to inspect track, had known about the track problems before the derailment, but it hadn’t gone back to test the track by hand, according to a federal report on the derailment and fire.

Ohio has one of the densest rail networks in the country, with nearly 5,300 miles of track, according to the Association of American Railroads. Only Texas, Illinois, and California have more.

The state also is a way point between the Bakken shale formation and refineries on the East Coast. That means thousands of rail cars carrying millions of gallons of crude oil pass through Columbus and other Ohio cities every week.

Capt. Bill Brobst of the Columbus Fire Division said the department’s biggest fear on the rails used to be ethanol.

A train carrying ethanol, corn syrup, and grain jumped the tracks near the Ohio state fairgrounds about 2:05 a.m. on July 11, 2012, on the city’s north side. One of the 17 cars that derailed punctured and spilled ethanol, which fueled a huge fire. Two other cars carrying ethanol exploded. About 100 people were told to leave their homes.

A federal investigation found a defect in the track caused the derailment.

A study conducted for the Franklin County Emergency Management and Homeland Security departments in 2010 found that gasoline was the most common commodity carried through the area on trains and trucks.

A study finished this year by a county consultant reported that crude oil now tops the list.

The study’s authors watched trains pass at seven locations across Franklin County, including two near downtown, and found that about 14 percent of the train cars carried hazardous materials. Nearly half of those cars carried crude oil by offices, restaurants, apartments, and condos and the Greater Columbus Convention Center.

Wear and tear

The state has a plan to deal with hazardous materials but nothing specific for Bakken crude oil.

Trains carrying 230 carloads of crude oil passed within a few hundred yards of the Miranova condos, home of many of the city’s wealthiest and most prominent residents, while the hazmat study’s authors watched. It was the most active crude-oil site they observed.

Heavy tankers carry more than 30,000 gallons of oil.

“The reason this issue is becoming more prominent is because of the weight of crude oil and ethanol trains,” said Christopher Hart, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates the most serious train crashes. “That’s what is increasing the wear on the tracks and on the wheels.”

Mr. Hart said the focus on hazardous-materials crashes is to prevent derailments, ensure tank cars don’t breach, and prepare emergency personnel for crashes. Since the 2013 Quebec derailment and crash, the U.S. Department of Transportation has issued seven safety advisories, one safety alert, and five emergency orders related to the transportation of crude by rail in the United States.

Alerts provide general information; advisories recommend railroad action, and emergency orders require action.

But the department did not address track defects, such as those that were blamed for the crashes and blasts in Columbus and Mount Carbon.

Federal regulators plan to address problems with track. At a news conference outlining the cause of the Mount Carbon derailment this year, Sarah Feinberg, director of the Federal Railroad Administration, said the agency would renew its focus on track problems.

Railroads say they’re doing their part by studying inspection technology, better detectors to go alongside tracks, and improved communication systems at the Association of American Railroads’ Transportation Technology Center.

At the same time, though, railroads have been slow to install computer systems that would stop trains from running stop signals or switches that are supposed to change their direction.

In 2008, Congress mandated that those systems be installed by the end of 2015, but railroads threatened this fall to shut down service over the deadline. The deadline was extended to 2018, but that could be pushed to 2020 if certain conditions are met.

Those systems would address derailments caused by human error, which — as with all derailments — are decreasing in frequency.

In 1995, railroads reported nearly 2,500 incidents nationwide. In 2004, they peaked at about 3,400. Last year, they dipped to fewer than 2,000, according to a Dispatch analysis of collisions, derailments, and other incidents that railroads report to the Federal Railroad Administration.

About half of the nation’s train incidents occur in rail yards, where trains operate at lower speeds that tend to produce smaller problems. About one-third of the incidents, though, occur on mainline tracks where trains travel at high speeds.

Since 1995, train incidents have caused about $5.6 billion in damage nationwide. More than $4 billion occurred on mainline track.

“You can’t eliminate derailments,” said Allan Zarembski, director of the Railroad Engineering and Safety Program at the University of Delaware. “I’m an engineer who deals in risk. I don’t think we’re going to realistically get to that level.”

At the same time, most trains deliver their cargo without incident, he said, and rail lines have become so safe that it is increasingly expensive to eliminate the remaining derailments.

“It’s not that the big bad railroads don’t care, and therefore if we just give them a kick they’ll make things safe,” Mr. Zarembski said. “They’re doing a pretty good job, and they get 99.9999 percent of all things.

“The problem is the 0.0001 percent. When it’s a crude-by-rail derailment, that’s a big boom.”

Chris Sargent and his family know that all too well. After the Mount Carbon derailment and explosion that cracked his basement walls, his daughters were out of school for three weeks while crews cleaned up. 

He and others have sued CSX.

“My littlest girl now, she’ll take off running when she hears a train coming down the track,” Mr. Sargent said. “Once this lawsuit is final, we’re leaving.”

Dispatch Library Director Julie Fulton contributed to this story.

First Published December 20, 2015, 5:00 a.m.