(The following article by Glenna Jarvis was posted on the Madera Tribune website on November 20.)
CHOWCHILLA, Calif. — An early morning fire Wednesday destroyed a 440-foot railroad trestle east of Chowchilla, disrupting Amtrak service to Merced and the rest of the Central Valley.
At 2:28 a.m., the California Department of Forestry was dispatched to the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway trestle at Avenue 27 and Santa Fe Drive that crosses Berenda Slough east of Chowchilla.
The first unit to arrive found the trestle fully engulfed in flames, Battalion Chief Jon Brothers said.
“They started to take action,” he said of firefighters. “But there?s not a whole lot you can do when you have one fire engine and that kind of fire.”
Because of the extreme instability of the structure, firefighters took what Brothers called an indirect approach to fighting the fire to provide as much safety for the firefighters as possible.
“Representatives from the railroad indicated that, with the stress that was placed upon those rails as the fire was burning, and the actual weight of the rails as the bridge was starting to lose its integrity, they warned us that the rails may break,” Brothers said.
Steven Weatherby, general manager for the BNSF Northern California division, said the 20-foot-high trestle which burned usually handles about 60 trains on a daily basis, including Amtrak.
“We?re laying a track around the trestle to get the trains running,” Weatherby said. “Then we?ll go in and rebuild the trestle.”
Weatherby expects the reconstruction job to take about 10 days, but the detour track will be in operation shortly after noon today. Crews would be working throughout the night to get the detour track completed, Weatherby said.
“This causes delays to every train that normally runs these tracks,” he said. “We?ve had to stop some trains, and we?ve detoured some. Others, we couldn?t stop, we could only slow them down. They?re currently sitting on the tracks.”
Firefighters were forced to shuttle water from a hydrant at the nearby women?s prison, Central California Women?s Facility, to fight the blaze. Brothers said they were able to keep water on the fire at a fairly continuous rate.
“But all along, we were basically working in a real safe mode,” he said. “The fire basically got to the point where it was too dangerous to fight.”
As the bridge lost its structural integrity, Brothers explained, firefighters were forced to back away and attempt to fight the fire from the sides.
“We pulled back,” he said, “and allowed the fire to burn a little bit.”
He added that eventually, the bridge collapsed beneath the rails, leaving about 350 feet of steel suspended without any support from beneath.
“There was no way we were going to put someone underneath that to do any work,” Brothers said. “We stayed about 50 feet away.”
Shortly after 2 p.m., railroad personnel came in with torches, Brothers said, and cut the rails out and allowed them to drop to the ground. They then removed the rails with a heavy loader so firefighters could go in and work on extinguishing the fire.
While Brothers said he is not ruling out arson, he also cannot rule out an accidental fire.
“There is no evidence to point in one direction rather than another,” he said. “We are considering it suspicious, but we haven?t ruled out all possibilities for potential cause.”
Throughout the rest of Wednesday afternoon, firefighter crews worked alongside railroad personnel to contain the fire, which was out by about 4 p.m.
Seven fire engines, six water tenders and 30 firefighters responded to the blaze. About 50 construction workers from as far away as Bakersfield and Stockton were brought in to rebuild the trestle.