Rising Waters Are Drowning Amtrak's Northeast Corridor

By the middle of this century, climate change is likely to punch a hole through the busiest stretch of rail in North America. Parts of Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor route, which carries 12 million people each year between Boston and Washington, face “continual inundation.” Flooding, rising seas, and storm surge threaten to erode the track bed and knock out the signals that direct train traffic. The poles that provide electricity for trains are at risk of collapse, even as power substations succumb to floodwaters. “If one of the segments of track shuts down, it will shut down this segment of the NEC,” warned members of Amtrak’s planning staff. “There is not an alternate route that can be used as a detour.”

That was the conclusion of a three-volume, multi-year climate study undertaken with first Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. and then Stantec Inc. Although the report was completed in April 2017, its conclusions were kept private until this November, when a partially redacted version was obtained by Bloomberg through a public records request. Titled “Amtrak NEC Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment,” the document outlines the severe threat facing one 10-mile section of the 457 miles of track, much of which runs perilously close to water.

On a recent afternoon near Wilmington, Del., the danger already seemed imminent. North of the city, the distance between the tracks and the Delaware River was alarmingly narrow, even at low tide. Closer to downtown, puddles dotted the West Yard Substation, which powers this section of rail, as well as the Wilmington maintenance yard, one of the few in the country that can repair electric locomotives. Only a slender cobblestone footpath separated Amtrak’s Consolidated National Operations Center, which monitors and controls traffic along the corridor, from the edge of the Christina River. The single access road leading to Amtrak’s only training center for engineers was underwater on a day with no rain.

The climate threat certainly isn’t limited to Delaware. Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, has projected which portions of the corridor will experience what she calls “chronic inundation,” defined as flooding an average of at least twice a month. Dahl provided Bloomberg with data showing when chronic inundation is expected to reach portions of the Northeast Corridor.

The authors of the climate risk report wrote that they chose to focus on the section of track in Delaware because of its low elevation, its proximity to the two rivers, and its concentration of critical facilities. They called moving or elevating the track “extreme.” Instead, they recommended building temporary flood barriers that can be installed along the river before a storm, and then removed “to maintain aesthetics and passenger views.” Those walls would require 12 to 30 days to put up, and would cost $24 million per mile of track.

Most important, the authors of the climate report recommended that the same detailed calculations be performed on the rest of the Northeast Corridor, and that the company begin working with state and local governments to prepare for the risks they described. More than a year and a half later, Amtrak, a private company whose stock is primarily owned by the federal government and which depends on congressional funding to operate, has yet to repeat its analysis for the network as a whole.

Amtrak has since de-emphasized the threat of climate change in its public documents, even scrubbing the phrase entirely from its most recent five-year strategic plan. “We don’t see any fundamental risks to the integrity of the corridor,” Stephen Gardner, Amtrak executive vice president and chief commercial officer, said in an interview in November.

Christina Leeds, an Amtrak spokeswoman, said in an email: “Elevation or relocation of the infrastructure is likely to be expensive, disruptive, or impractical, and given the current levels of federal and state funding for Amtrak and the Northeast Corridor, well beyond our means.” She added that the company already faces “$40 billion worth of pressing—largely still unfunded—basic state-of-good-repair risks.”

The report’s authors estimated the initial cost of protecting the study area to be $78 million, based on the premise that water levels around Wilmington would rise 2 feet by 2050. That reflects the median of possible warming scenarios, according to Climate Central, a research group in Princeton, N.J. Other estimates are almost twice as high.

One of the redacted portions of the report is an analysis of the full costs and benefits of protecting the corridor against climate change, making it impossible to know if the company has determined it would save more money by keeping the corridor open than it would have to spend to save it. The disclosure of that information “could possibly cause public confusion,” the company said in a statement explaining its redactions. And anyway, says Allan Zarembski, director of the railway engineering and safety program at the University of Delaware, built-out urban environments leave little land available. “The cost of relocating the track is not the big issue,” he says. “The big issue is, where do you relocate it?”

Amtrak kept the report from Wilmington Mayor Mike Purzycki, Delaware Governor John Carney, and the Northeast Corridor Commission, whose role, according to its website, is “facilitating collaborative planning” among Amtrak, the federal government, and states along the corridor. After inquiries from Bloomberg about whether Amtrak had distributed the report, Amtrak sent a copy to the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, which received it earlier this month, according to spokesman Michael Globetti.

Talking about climate doesn’t work with Congress, says Sarah Feinberg, former administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, which has oversight of Amtrak. “There are enough problems in the Northeast Corridor that you do not need to lead with climate change,” she says.

Not long after it received the results of the climate report last year, Amtrak released its five-year strategic plan; the first item, under “threats,” was “environment/climate change.” This year’s edition made no mention of climate change. Amtrak also submits annual reports to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a nonprofit clearinghouse for the risks climate change poses to companies. Its latest report, dated this May, cited half as many risks as it had in the three previous years. Gone were the threat hurricanes would pose to demand for train service, the effect extreme temperatures would have on operating costs, and the expectation that sea level rise would require increased capital.

Leeds attributed the removal of climate change from the five-year plan to an “editing error,” (Following Bloomberg’s inquiry, Amtrak added “environment/climate change” to that plan’s list of threats.) She also said Amtrak’s decision to identify fewer climate impacts in its carbon disclosure “was based on how resource-intensive the CDP reporting process is and does not represent a decrease in potential impacts.”

Gardner, the Amtrak executive, says the company is taking a piecemeal approach to managing climate risk. “This is about, as we recapitalize those assets, how do we put them in a resilient position for the future,” he said. But if the Northeast Corridor starts to go underwater, Gardner added, Amtrak won’t be the only entity with an issue. “We’re in the heart of all our cities,” Gardner said. “If there’s a risk, there’s a risk to much more than us.”