(Knight Ridder circulated the following article by Sammy Fretwell on January 9.)
NEWBERRY, S.C. — The crash knocked conductor William Wright to the floor of his train after it ran off the main track at Avondale Mills early Jan. 6, 2005.
Wright remembers pain shooting through his shoulder and leg as engineer Chris Seeling radioed a dispatcher for help. Then the two waited, figuring emergency services workers would arrive soon enough to rescue them.
But deadly chlorine gas began seeping into their compartment. They had to flee.
“We were basically just running for our life,” Wright said.
In his first public interview since the Graniteville crash that killed nine people, Wright described his struggle through the toxic chlorine cloud and the legacy of the injuries he suffered that day.
The 42-year-old railroad conductor has damaged lungs from inhaling chlorine, and leg and shoulder injuries from the crash impact. He is believed to be the only surviving witness to the country’s deadliest railroad chemical accident since 1978.
The train Wright was aboard ran onto an industrial spur, slammed into a parked locomotive, and spewed a cloud of chlorine gas from a ruptured tank car. The National Transportation Safety Board blames the crew of the parked train for failing to flip a safety switch when they parked their locomotive on the industrial spur a day earlier.
Wright’s and Seeling’s families recently received settlements from Norfolk Southern to cover their injuries and suffering.
Hobbled by his leg injury, Wright followed the bloodied Seeling through the murky chlorine fog as they jumped from their train and ran across a yard toward the Avondale Mills textile plant.
They began to realize the magnitude of the chlorine spill.
Wright remembers talking to someone driving a pickup truck but doesn’t remember the driver.
Graniteville Fire Chief Phil Napier has said he encountered Wright and Seeling at one point in the post-accident chaos.
By then, the chlorine fumes were taking their toll on Wright. They burned his lungs and stung his eyes. He couldn’t catch his breath.
Wright fell beside the railroad track and began to lose consciousness. He thought Seeling was somewhere ahead of him.
The next thing Wright remembers is mill workers putting him into a truck and leading him away from the chlorine cloud.
From the mill, they were driven to a home, where they were transferred into a van and taken to the hospital.
The Pomaria native and former textile worker said he was unable to speak for more than a week after inhaling the chlorine gas.
When he regained full consciousness about 10 days after the accident, he thought he was in his native Newberry County instead of a hospital near Graniteville.
He didn’t know Seeling had died until he was ready to leave the hospital about three weeks after the accident.
That’s when his family and doctors felt it was proper to tell him.
“I went through feelings of why I made it and he didn’t, after we went basically through the same thing,” said Wright, a married father of two daughters, one of whom lives at home.
Wright’s attorney has advised him not to comment about Norfolk Southern or the cause of the crash.
Today, Wright spends many days on the couch, watching television and nursing his injuries.
His throat still burns. His surgically repaired shoulder aches, and his knees are so creaky he walks with a cane that someone gave him years ago.
It’s frustrating, Wright said, because he was a fitness buff before the wreck.
Most of all, the trauma of the wreck haunts him every day, making him emotional and sometimes angry. Dreams of mangled railroad cars and death jolt him awake. He wonders when the nightmares will end.
“It’s nightmares, flashbacks … not being able to sleep at night. You have dreams about the accident and different scenarios of what happened. You dream you are trapped up under a rail car and you can’t get out.”
Neighbors say they feel for Wright when they see him walking with his cane. He never needed it before the wreck.
“I got hysterical” upon hearing about the Graniteville crash, said Barbara Dixon, who lives next door to Wright. “It was like that happened to my own son.”
Unable to work because of the injuries, Wright left Norfolk Southern after the collision. The railroad gave him a “very favorable” legal settlement last month, said his lawyer, Mullins McLeod.
Norfolk Southern would not talk about the settlement because of a confidentiality agreement it required as a condition of the payment. Wright and McLeod said they could not disclose the amount.
“I think they realized he was … injured through no fault of his own and could never return to work,” McLeod said.
Wright knows recovery could take years. But he said he’s fortunate.
His lungs are better, though not 100 percent, and he can at least walk through his neighborhood near S.C. 34, just a few miles from the rural community where he grew up.
“You never forget it, but you have to, at some point, move on I’m blessed to be alive, I can tell you that.”