(The following story by Michael Dresser appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on January 16.)
BALTIMORE, Md. — The Howard Street Tunnel fire that brought rail traffic along the East Coast to a standstill and closed downtown businesses for days more than three years ago had one saving grace: No one was killed or seriously hurt by the fumes from the burning tanker car.
But trains carrying deadly chemicals such as chlorine continue to rumble through the heart of Baltimore with little notice and little apparent security. Tank cars that carry chlorine and other toxic chemicals were seen standing at a CSX rail yard in South Baltimore last week.
The potential peril of this toxic traffic was brought home again this month when a train derailment ruptured a Norfolk Southern tank car and unleashed a choking cloud of caustic chlorine gas near the small town of Graniteville, S.C., killing nine people and injuring 250.
Baltimore officials are aware of the risk. They are doing their part to lessen the traffic by phasing out the use of pure chlorine to treat wastewater and replacing it with less dangerous bleach, according to Kurt L. Kocher, a spokesman for the city Department of Public Works. Last month, he said, the department completed the conversion of the Back River plant, the city’s largest, to using bleach – eliminating the need to run railcars filled with chlorine to the facility.
Officials for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission said they were doing the same thing but still need to use chlorine to treat drinking water.
City fire official Ronald Addison said companies and government agencies that use chlorine in Baltimore have cut their consumption by 90 percent and have largely abandoned the practice of stockpiling chlorine on site since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forced security experts to think about hazards that were once unthinkable.
Still, chlorine – a liquid when transported in a pressurized tank – is a fact of life in an industrial city that is also a hub for freight transportation. Chlorine is a crucial element in the manufacture of chemicals, solvents, pharmaceuticals and household products.
“It’s something our society is not going to do without,” Addison said.
The city continues to accept the risks associated with the transport and storage of chlorine and other toxic materials, in part because of its confidence in the safety record of the railroad industry.
99.9% success rate
CSX Transportation spokesman Robert T. Sullivan said that out of 513,000 shipments of hazardous materials handled by the railroad last year, seven had any sort of release. That’s better than a 99.9 percent success rate.
But the people of Graniteville learned the consequences of being one of those few exceptions Jan. 6, when a Norfolk Southern train slammed into parked railroad cars, puncturing a chlorine tank. About 5,400 residents were evacuated; hundreds had still not returned to their homes yesterday.
In July 2001, Baltimore was luckier. The railcars that burned in the Howard Street Tunnel were carrying noxious chemicals, but none of them was as dangerous as chlorine.
The fire tied up East Coast rail freight traffic for days and damaged much of downtown’s underground infrastructure. But nobody died. Had the ruptured railcars been carrying chlorine, which Addison calls “the No. 1 bad guy” among toxic chemicals, the results could have been catastrophic – especially if the release took place near the residential neighborhoods surrounding the approaches to the tunnel.
Authorities believe the South Carolina accident may have been the result of a work crew leaving a switch in the wrong position. In a report released Friday, the National Transportation Safety Board could not determine a cause of the Howard Street Tunnel fire, which was so intense that it destroyed possible evidence. But the board said the most likely explanation was a flaw in the track.
Critics of the railroad industry say the next chemical spill might not be an accident. With terrorism a threat, they say, railroads should divert hazardous cargoes from heavily populated areas.
“We are pre-positioning cargoes that the federal government calls potential weapons of mass destruction right in our high-target cities,” said Fred Millar, a consultant on the transport of hazardous materials. “The terrorists have known this stuff for years.”
Members of the District of Columbia Council say that in recent months, CSX officials have been rerouting hazardous shipments around Washington, where tank cars of chlorine would routinely pass within four blocks of the Capitol.
That unofficial policy, which a CSX spokesman would neither acknowledge nor discuss, does not apply to Baltimore or other potential target cities. Critics such as Millar say company officials want to keep the Washington rerouting secret so that other cities won’t take notice and seek similar treatment.
Addison said the Fire Department’s training and equipment for handling a toxic chemical release have improved since the Howard Street fire. Communications with rail officials – which were criticized in the NTSB’s report – are much improved since then, he said.
But safer is not the same as entirely safe.
No visible barriers
One day last week, four tanker cars stood in a row in an unfenced CSX Transportation rail yard in the industrial Fairfield section of South Baltimore – over the Hanover Street Bridge and close to the residential neighborhoods of Curtis Bay and Brooklyn.
Two were labeled as vessels for transporting hydrochloric acid. One said it carried sodium hydroxide, a powerful corrosive agent that can explode when combined with acid or water.
Between them was a car used to carry chlorine, which can sear the lungs and eyes. According to Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, it is the toxic chemical that poses more risk to the public than any other.
There were no visible barriers between three visitors to the CSX Transportation yard and the cars except about 100 yards of open space and tracks. There was ample cover for someone to hide or stash a weapon.
No security personnel stopped to question why the visitors were lingering there and why one of them was taking pictures. There was no visible security – not even a “no trespassing” sign.
Sullivan, the CSX spokesman, could not give an assurance that cars stored at the site were not carrying hazardous materials.
“It could be a load or it could be empty,” he said.
Closer to downtown that same day, a gap in the fence at the southern end of Light Street afforded easy access to the tracks, just blocks from where several tanker cars – whose cargo could not be identified – were parked a short distance from a residential neighborhood.
A few blocks away, not even a fence separates the rowhouses along Race Street from the tracks leading to the entrance of the Howard Street Tunnel between the football and baseball stadiums.
“There’s nothing between you and the railcars,” said Terry Harris, president of the Baltimore-based Cleanup Coalition, as he stood on the track during a guided tour of city rail facilities for a Sun reporter and photographer. “You have to think long and hard about whether you let chlorine-like chemicals in that tunnel.”
But avoiding the tunnel would not be easy. It is a vital link in the main CSX route along the East Coast.
Dennis Schrader, director of the Maryland Emergency Management Agency, said proposals to exclude chlorine from populated areas are impractical because the chemical is “ubiquitous in its uses in daily life.”
“We don’t want to turn America into Fortress America. We’re searching for what we call a new normalcy,” he said. “We don’t want to shut down commerce or negatively affect our way of life.”
But advocates of greater transportation restriction say a chlorine release in a highly populated area could have a devastating impact.
Jay Boris, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, caused a stir last year when he said that under a worst-case scenario – with a brisk breeze and Fourth of July crowds on the National Mall in Washington – a chlorine tank rupture on a rail line near the 14th Street Bridge could release a toxic plume that could kill 100,000 people within 30 minutes. His computer projection showed that several square miles of the city could be contaminated within a half-hour.
“It’s purely the whimsy of the wind who would be most in danger,” said Rick Hind, legislative director of the Greenpeace Toxics Campaign.
‘Infinitesimal’
Thomas C. White, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, dismissed Boris’ projection as “so unlikely that it borders on infinitesimal.”
White added that concerns about a terrorist attack on a chemical shipment are overblown.
“Terrorists don’t know where and when something’s going to be coming through,” he said. If they were to stake out a rail line in the hope of attacking a car carrying hazardous materials, they would quickly call attention to themselves, he said.
White said the industry does careful background checks on all employees. He said one reason the industry doesn’t routinely inform public safety authorities about shipments in transit is to safeguard against leaks of information.
Trucks carrying hazardous materials can more easily bypass downtown areas, but White said that would be a poor alternative. He said hazardous cargo shipped by truck is 16 times more likely to be released than that transported by train.
Sullivan, the CSX spokesman, said any effort to regulate shipments or force reroutings on the local level would create a “patchwork quilt” of laws that would tie up traffic without improving safety. Such laws, he said, would mean trains would have to take circuitous routes with longer transit times for toxic materials.
Railroad representatives are tight-lipped when asked about security issues. Neither Sullivan nor a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, which runs freight trains along the Amtrak line through Baltimore at night, would discuss the specifics of CSX’s hazardous-cargo movements through Baltimore.
In an example of the rail industry’s reticence, Sullivan declined to say whether the company avoids scheduling hazardous shipments through the tunnel when events at the city’s stadiums bring tens of thousands of spectators within a few hundred yards of the entrance.
“We’re fully aware of what’s going on in these communities,” he said. “Are we aware of athletic events? Absolutely.”
Sullivan emphasized that CSX works closely with public safety agencies and is vigilant about security. “Everything that we are doing in this area is responsible and prudent,” he said.
But Greenpeace’s Hind said it would be “frighteningly easy” to cause a rupture in a tanker with a legally available, high-powered rifle.
“It just proves that there aren’t that many totally evil people in the world that it hasn’t happened yet,” he said.