(The following story by Leeanne Root appeared on the Oneida Daily Dispatch website on March 18.)
ONEIDA, N.Y. — The cleanup and removal of derailed CSX train cars is nearing completion and officials say the track should be back in use soon.
“The track sections are all cleaned up. They’ve basically lined the cars up along the side, there’s probably six or seven of them down there,” said Oneida Fire Chief Don Hudson. “They have to wait for permission to move them. They have to be inspected.”
City of Oneida Mayor Leo Matzke estimated the number of remaining cars at 13. He said one of the tracks was reopened Friday and CSX hoped to have the other one in use today.
“For a couple of weeks you’ll see some additional burning because they have to now clean out these tanks before they load them up so they don’t have to worry about any additional propane buildup in the tanks,” he said.
Some of the smoke seen Friday was from the burning off of butane.
“When the weather changed and became cooler it was harder to get the butane out of the tank because the pressure decreased,” Matzke said. “So they cut a hole in the tank and drained all that butane into a pit like they were doing with the propane and did a controlled burn.”
He said the process of cleaning out the remaining tanks could take up to two weeks.
The fire department has been on the scene providing CSX with round-the-clock fire and EMS protection should anyone on site need it.
But Hudson also has a city of 11,000 to keep safe and 24 employees with whom to do it.
“Fuses are short, but it’s because it’s been a real long week with a lot of real long hours to put in,” he said.
Most of his employees are providing coverage at the derailment site but he said a full crew of firefighters was also covering the fire station for day-to-day calls.
Hudson asked the City of Utica and the City of Rome for assistance and both cities came to Oneida to help at the derailment site. The Department of Public Works has also provided employees to help the fire department with pumping out flooded basements.
Hudson said the city’s firefighters felt they were well-trained and prepared for a situation like the one they saw on Monday morning.
Hudson said just last year about two-thirds of his department attended a rail accident class in Utica and those principles have been applied throughout the emergency.
“I wouldn’t wish it on any firefighter, but this has been one of the greatest learning experiences,” he said.
Deputy Chief Jim Dowd attended the training in Utica last year and said it reinforced the dos and don’ts associated with hazardous train cargo that helped them deal with Monday’s derailment.
He said they were taught how rail cars are made, “where their weak points are-how to recognize a car by looking at it,” he said. “Even though we don’t know what’s in it, by looking at the shape and size of the car and the valves on the car you can get an idea if it’s hazardous material or just something as simple as a train car full of flour, which there was two on that particular derailment.”
Dowd explained that right away he knew that they would be unable to fight the fire.
“We were trained in a situation like that when you have that kind of fire with that kind of fuel, if you don’t have 1,000 gallons a minute of water on that fire in less than 15 minutes,” it could have erupted into what firefighters call a “bleve,” which Dowd described as a “boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion.” He said the initial explosion was a lot smaller than a bleve.
“If one of those tank cars actually exploded in a bleve situation, the fireball would have been phenomenal-more than anybody around here could ever imagine,” he said.
Dowd said this is why the fire department did not try to fight the fire; it was too dangerous. Dowd said that with some chemicals, such as the toluene, it’s better to let them burn.
“When that starts to burn you don’t want to put that out,” he said. “The vapors that would be emitted are worse than the fire.”
Identifying the various chemicals and the best way to handle them is also taught in many of the firefighters’ training classes.
Firefighters were able to tell by a hazardous materials label bearing the number 1075 that many of the derailed cars contained liquid propane .
“We see a 1075 and we know that we have an extremely volatile explosive chemical,” he said. “We know we don’t have the capabilities to fight the fire that’s going to present us with.”
The United States Department of Transportation provides a book entitled the “Emergency Response Guidebook” to all emergency responders detailing steps on handling situations like the one firefighters faced Monday. Dowd said it was that book that recommended the initial one-mile evacuation.
“I’ve been here 26 years and I’ve never seen anything to that magnitude and just the fact that we were able to pull in there, recognize exactly what we had within minutes-made me feel good,” Dowd said.
The costs of the clean-up are mounting.
CSX spokesperson Gary Sease did not have an estimate of costs relating to the derailment but listed the many people involved at the clean-up site, including environmental specialists, hazardous materials specialists and contractors specializing in derailments and track rebuilding.
Other costs include the payment of claims to affected residents and communities as well as the cost of having to send freight over longer routes and environmental remediation, which Sease said would be ongoing until “state and environmental officials are satisfied that the site is cleaned up.”
Matzke said that “yellow birds” were testing air quality at Otto Shortell Middle School in Wampsville Friday because the wind shifted.
He said the testers are called that because of the yellow suits they wear.
Sease said air monitoring has been a continual process that started early Monday morning.
“That has continued to be clean with no data indicating problems,” he said.
An environmental plan will be put in place to deal with the ground where ferric chloride was spilled. Sease said the plan would be under the oversight of state and federal environmental officials.
Sease said continual testing of the water at and around the site is being done as well. He said the ferric chloride contamination has been contained to a small area at the spill site.
For those families with concerns about the safety of their homes, CSX provided environmental scientists from the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health to conduct tests before residents returned to their homes.
“We want to make sure folks going back into their homes in the aftermath of something like this feel confident about the safety and cleanliness of their homes,” Sease said. “The testing would be to have scientific data to show them that there are no contaminants or any other problems with their homes. It’s for peace of mind.”
CSX reimbursed many affected residents with $100 and those affected more were considered on a case by case basis. The company also plans on reimbursing the city for public services used during the derailment.
Matzke said that so far $7,000 has been recorded for police overtime but more reliable estimates for the city would be available next week.
Oneida Fire Chief Don Hudson expects that the train derailment will eat up about a quarter of his $75,000 overtime budget for 2007.