(The following article by Andrew Wolfson was posted on the Courier-Journal website on January 17.)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The derailment of a CSX train and the resulting spectacular fire yesterday in Bullitt County came on the heels of another frightening incident Monday in which four runaway CSX cars rolled 20 miles before smashing into two parked locomotives in Eastern Kentucky
Gov. Ernie Fletcher said the two accidents raised concerns about rail safety in the state and promised a full investigation.
But Federal Railroad Administration records show that CSX — one of the nation’s four largest railroads — has had a relatively good safety record recently.
Yesterday’s derailment was CSX’s first in Kentucky since July 2003 that required an evacuation. Nationally, in the first 10 months of last year, CSX derailments caused five evacuations; none in Indiana or Kentucky.
Derailments of CSX trains nationally declined 7 percent from 2003 to 2005, while those involving two of the other big four railroads, Union Pacific and BSNF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) — climbed by 18 percent and 9 percent respectively. Norfolk Southern’s dropped 2 percent.
“Our safety record has been on a positive trend,” said Gary Sease, a spokesman for CSX, based in Jacksonville, Fla.
In Kentucky during the past five years, CSX had 37 derailments on main tracks, 17 of which were caused by track problems, nine by equipment problems, four by human error and seven by other causes, records show.
But over the years, CSX derailments have caused major disasters in Baltimore, New Orleans and other cities.
And members of Congress have recently tried — unsuccessfully — to beef up penalties for safety violations and increase the numbers of inspectors.
After the derailment of a Canadian Pacific Railway freight train outside Minot, N.D., the National Transportation Safety Board found that more than half of the 60,000 tank cars then in operation in the United States were built before new rules in 1989 required strengthening them.
The NTSB found that the five tankers that broke open when the Canadian Pacific train derailed had grown brittle. One resident was killed and 300 were injured by noxious fumes that escaped.
The age of the cars involved in yesterday’s derailment near Brooks wasn’t known. The 80-car train included three cars of liquid propane, as well as chemicals and other highly flammable materials.
In 2002 CSX agreed to pay $220 million to settle a lawsuit involving 9,000 people who lived in a 150-block neighborhood of New Orleans that was virtually destroyed in 1987 when a toxic chemical leaked from a train car that had derailed.
In July 2001, a CSX freight train derailed in Baltimore’s Howard Street Tunnel, sparking a chemical fire that raged for six days and virtually shut down the downtown area until the heat caused a water main to rupture, largely extinguishing the fire.
In a potentially catastrophic derailment in Kentucky, a CSX train carrying highly flammable propylene oxide crashed in 1991 on the Salt River Bridge at Shepherdsville, prompting the evacuation of about 3,000 people from their homes for 2½ days.
The accident was caused when a garbage truck got stuck in an underpass at the south end of the bridge, throwing the tracks out of alignment, and sending 13 cars into the river.
Warren Flatau, a spokesman for the federal rail agency, said the first focus in any derailment is on track conditions, although attention is also paid to equipment defects, switches and human errors, including excessive speed.
He couldn’t immediately say when his agency last inspected the track involved in yesterday’s derailment. He said railroads themselves may inspect major lines as often as every day.
In February 2005 — prompted in part by a derailment in Graniteville, S.C., the month before that killed 10 people when chlorine gas was released — U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., introduced the Rail Crossing and Hazardous Material Act, a bill to increase the number of inspectors responsible for hazardous materials and rail crossings.
The bill died in committee, but Schumer this month said he plans to re-introduce it.