(The following article by Bruce Nolan was posted on the Times Picayune website on September 19.)
NEW ORLEANS — More than 100 residents of a Gentilly neighborhood were forced to leave their homes for four hours Saturday after a railroad car carrying chemical waste began to stink.
The waste proved not to be hazardous and in hindsight never posed a health or environmental danger, New Orleans Fire Superintendent Charles Parent said.
But after they began a cautious, complex process for dealing with a potentially dangerous substance, officials elected to stay with the procedure to the end, even after it became apparent there was no imminent danger, he said.
Parent said the parked tank car was largely empty, having been emptied on Sept. 10 of polymeric methylene diphenyl diisocyanate.
He described it as a relatively safe chemical residue. Tank cars must carry plaques alerting authorities to the identity of dangerous chemicals inside. But the leaking car’s cargo “is not dangerous enough to get a plaque,” he said.
Sitting in Saturday afternoon’s hot sun, the improperly sealed car began to stink of “rotten garbage,” he said. That prompted calls, which mushroomed into a full-scale local evacuation that tied up dozens of police and firefighters and kept scores of residents out of their homes from about 3 p.m. to the all-clear at 7 p.m.
Police ordered people out of the homes in an area bounded by Peoples Avenue, Eads, Sage and Abundance streets.
Parent said the car was not properly sealed. But Adam Hollingsworth, a spokesman for CSX Transportation, said the car was venting normally and that it was releasing carbon dioxide, an odorless gas. CSX was hauling the car for the Canadian National Railroad, he said.
A CSX hazardous materials team and an environmental contractor examined the site and the car before it was moved to a company facility for closer inspection, Hollingsworth said.
He said the railroad would conduct a full review of the incident, including whether the car was functioning properly and whether it was fully emptied.
He confirmed that the car’s cargo was not hazardous. While the railroad supported the Fire Department’s call, “at no time was the neighborhood in any danger,” Hollingsworth said.
But residents flushed out of their homes were skeptical, partly from living with years of noise from railroad operations, and partly from recent history.
The neighborhood, near the intersection of Interstate 10 and Interstate 610, lies near CSX tracks. Many residents remember a 1987 incident nearby in which a chemical car exploded and burned for a day and a half. More than 1,000 people were evacuated that time.
Larry Laurent, a retired postal worker who lives at 3440 Peoples Ave. next to the track, described living in a chronically tense relationship with the railroad. Train engines idle noisily for hours at a time at night on the switching track, he said. When they back into cars to couple them, “it’s knocked dishes off the shelf,” said a neighbor, Jamie Young.
Laurent keeps a list of railroad numbers in his wallet and calls so frequently he knows CSX supervisors by name, he said.
The evacuation forced 100 or more displaced people to wait for hours in the parking lot of Tabernacle of Prayer Church at Franklin Avenue and Abundance Street.
Police and fire authorities called in three Regional Transit Authority buses to provide air conditioned seating out of the afternoon sun.