(The following story by Blaise Schweitzer appeared on The Daily Freeman website on July 6.)
TOWN OF ULSTER, N.Y. — A messy fuel leak at the CSX yard off Ulster Avenue in the Town of Ulster had 25 members of Ulster Hose catching diesel fuel flowing from a damaged tank on a CSX engine, Saturday.
“We’re not exactly sure on the amount, we caught about 225 gallons in buckets before getting the leak slowed down,” said Paul Masten, assistant chief for Ulster Hose, “but it was leaking prior to us getting there.”
That’s almost enough to fill a standard home heating oil tank. But no, Masten said, the fire fighters could not bring the “liquid gold” home to pour the into their heating oil tanks to help get them through next winter. An environmental cleanup firm eventually showed up to pump away the remaining oil in the tank and clean up the oil spilled on the ground in an attempt to keep it from getting into the groundwater.
In addition to Ulster Hose fire fighters, six members of the Kingston Fire Department’s Hazmat crew showed up to stop the leak. They spent almost five hours at the scene, Masten said.
In the end it was a sort of paste applied to the gash in the tank that eased the situation, Masten said. “It got the leak slowed down enough to manage.”
The cause of the leak?
“They figured they must have hit something somewhere around Esopus and before they realized it they were in Kingston,” Masten said, declining to guess how much oil may have landed on the ties between Esopus and Kingston.
Beyond the expenses involved in the loss of the fuel oil and the damage to the train engine, CSX will be charged for the cleanup, Masten said. “Kingston Hazmat will send them a bill and any equipment we used we can bill them for.”