(The following story by Robin Fitzgerald appeared on the Sun Herald website on October 21.)
BILOXI, Miss. — As one official put it, the good news about a train derailment Tuesday in Stone County is that no one was injured after cars containing hazardous chemicals ran off the tracks.
The train, which was southbound, is owned by Kansas City Southern Railway Co. Officials expect it will take several days to clear the wreckage, which will require rebuilding rail beds and rails.
“Once they get that done… , they’re going to bring in four empty tank cars on Thursday and Friday and transfer the chlorine into empty cars and take them out of here,” said Earl Etheridge of the state Department of Environmental Quality.
Seven cars left the tracks around 5:30 a.m. Tuesday. The area is east of U.S. 49 between Perkinston and McHenry.
KCS spokeswoman C. Doniele Kane said an investigation was under way but gave no details on what may have caused the derailment of seven cars.
Four of the cars, which contain chlorine, overturned. A car containing sodium hydroxide left the tracks. Chlorine is the more dangerous of the two, Etheridge said.
“Besides being a corrosive – it eats stuff up – it’s toxic. It will kill you,” he said. “The sodium hydroxide also is a corrosive but you pretty well have to crawl up in the middle of it for it to affect you.”
The tracks run parallel to busy U.S. 49. The derailment site is about 3⁄4 mile east of the highway and north of East Wire Road.
“It could have been a dangerous situation,” Wiggins Fire Chief Jody Hatten said.
Authorities evacuated a quarter-mile radius. Authorities said seven or more homes were evacuated.
First responders, including volunteer firefighters and Emergency Management Agency personnel, set up a command post at Ballpark Road.
KCS employees prohibited the media from getting close to the site until later in the afternoon.
DEQ’s Etheridge said the cars with chemicals didn’t leak at the time of accident and aren’t likely to leak except during the moving of the damaged cars or while transferring the chlorine to empty cars.
“But that’s a pretty controlled situation,” Etheridge said. “There are a lot of safety mechanisms.”