(The following story by Allyson Bird appeared on The State website on November 7.)
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A sleepy Sunday afternoon in Prosperity turned into a jumble of traffic reroutes and flashes of red railroad-crossing lights after a CSX train derailed there.
CSX spokeswoman Jane Covington said 20 of the 99 cars on the train, which was carrying coal from Erwin, Tenn., to Cayce, derailed at 2:23 p.m. No one was injured, and Covington said many of the cars were still upright on the tracks.
Covington could not explain why the train derailed because the investigation was not complete.
The train started a series of small fires in Newberry County before derailing.
Prosperity Fire Chief Mark Bowers said grass fires began at four locations: half a mile out of Prosperity on S.C. 76, downtown at Shiloh and Brown roads, and in two locations in the upper part of Newberry County.
The S.C. Forestry Commission had to plow a path to the train tracks for firefighters to reach the fire downtown, Bowers said.
Bowers said friction from something on the train ignited the fires, which were confined to grass and wood. No homes were in danger, he said. Firefighters from Prosperity, Fairfield and Little Mountain responded.
Sheriff James Lee Foster said the fires happened before the derailment.
“Whatever was wrong with the train that was causing the fires reached its critical level and caused the train to derail,” Foster said.
He said the Sheriff’s Department was working with the S.C. Department of Transportation to direct traffic around three major railroad crossings blocked by the train cars. These affected travel to the south end of the county.
Foster said he saw CSX representatives but did not get new information and was not sure Sunday night when the roads would reopen.
“They’ve been here and know we’re here,” he said. “They just told us to step away from the tracks.”
One home was damaged by the derailment when a spring from the train broke through the window in Allen Wise’s mobile home at 119 Pine St.
Neither Wise, 49, nor his 12-year-old son, Terry Dominic, was home when the spring hit their home.
Wise said he was relaxing in the yard at his property manager’s house next door when he saw smoke and remembered he had a pot on the stove.
“I thought, ‘I hope it’s not my house,’” Wise said.
After checking the stove, Wise didn’t immediately notice the spring that had flown into what he calls his junk room. Another spring and a piece of metal were flung into Wise’s yard.
“It didn’t really bother me,” he said with a smile. “I was used to the trains anyway.”