(The following story by J.R. Gonzales appeared on The State website on January 10.)
AIKEN, S.C. — On the fourth day, progress.
A damaged rail car was patched Sunday, essentially stopping a chlorine leak that claimed nine lives and displaced thousands of residents in nearby Graniteville after a moving train struck a parked train.
“We consider that a major step,” said Robin Chapman, Norfolk Southern spokesman.
Officials had suspected there might be a second hole in the tanker, but none was found, said Debbie Hersman, a spokeswoman for the National Transportation Safety Board.
Also Sunday, all employees with Avondale Mills were accounted for, authorities said. The textile facility is near the crash site.
Despite the news, emergency crews did not expect to lift the evacuation order encompassing a one-mile radius surrounding the crash site.
Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt said residents in the area might remain out of their homes “until at least Wednesday.”
Today, officials plan to remove the chlorine from the other two tankers, Chapman said.
Red Cross shelters that had housed evacuees were all closed as of Sunday, as those staying there have made other arrangements.
Federal and state emergency vehicles were the only signs of traffic in the evacuated area Sunday afternoon, when The State newspaper was allowed escorted access into the area, accompanied by officials from the Aiken County Sheriff’s Department and a toxicologist.
A funeral home parking lot was converted into what one environmental health expert called an “air monitoring forward command center.”
There, officials with the Environmental Protection Agency and other groups keep track of the various air-quality monitors throughout the town.
One monitor hung on a nearby utility pole, displaying chlorine levels every few seconds. An alarm would sound if the monitor picked up certain levels of chlorine.
On this stretch of Main Street Sunday, the air monitor detected no chlorine.
Nearby, a dump truck deposited railroad ties that will be used to repair the damaged rail line.
A dusk-to-dawn curfew for the one-mile evacuation area remains in place. Two men, Greg Gantt, 26, of Aiken, and Kevin Tunstall, 39, of Brooklyn, N.Y., were arrested early Sunday morning and charged with failure to obey a police officer.
“They need to understand, we’re serious and we’re going to put them in jail and make a charge against them,” Hunt said.
More work at the crash site remains. Work crews Sunday were removing chlorine vapors from the leaking tanker. That was done by pumping sodium hydroxide into the tanker, which combines with the chlorine to produce bleach. The bleach is pumped out of the tanker and trucked out.
When enough of the bleach is removed, the tanker will be shifted to allow workers to put a permanent patch over the tear.
But before crews can remove the patched tanker, they will have to rotate it into a position where they will have better access to the tear, Chapman said.
Soon, crews will move the patched tanker out of the way, repair damaged rail lines and remove chlorine from the two remaining tankers, Chapman said.
A rail car carrying sodium hydroxide was emptied Sunday and cleared from the area.
Another 16,000 gallons of sodium hydroxide was being removed from another damaged tanker.
The preliminary estimate of damage to railroad equipment was $1.7 million, not counting the lost chlorine, Norfolk Southern reported to the NTSB.
The NTSB would like to interview the conductor of the train that struck the parked train, but he is hospitalized and in “bad shape,” Hersman said.
The NTSB had received reports Saturday of 10 victims returning to hospitals for further treatment, but no more Sunday.
Chapman said a private company, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, was putting together a team that would monitor homes for chlorine residue.
“They’ll go in, they’ll do their testing and give them a written report and make recommendations,” he said.
Specific details were not available yet, but Chapman said it would be a free service “to enable citizens to return to their homes with confidence.”
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., visited with emergency officials Sunday and praised their work.
“The response is probably gonna be viewed as a model,” he said. “This particular county is very sensitive to potential problems dealing with volatile materials, nuclear materials and, in this case, chlorine gas.”
Graham said the response to Thursday’s crash showed that getting technology to rural communities in the name of homeland security works.
“It’s not just about New York, it’s just not about Washington or Los Angeles. We have seen the benefit of having a homeland security regime that looks after rural America.”