(The following article by Richard Brooks was posted on the Press-Enterprise website on April 29.)
ROSEVILLE, Calif. — A segment of uneven railroad track caused the April 4 train derailment that forced 300 people to evacuate their homes on San Bernardino’s Westside, a railroad spokesman said Thursday.
“Essentially, it was rough track,” John Bromley said by phone from Union Pacific’s headquarters in Omaha, Neb. “It can lift a wheel off the rail. One rail may have been higher than the other one at that particular point.”
The 79-car freight train was traveling from Colton to the Sacramento-area town of Roseville when 14 cars derailed, including seven filled with hazardous material, Bromley said.
The wreck happened at 8:20 p.m. near Foothill Boulevard and Macy Street.
Among the derailed cars were two loaded with potentially poisonous chlorine, two containing potentially explosive propane, two with a combustible fuel additive and one filled with antifreeze.
The evacuation was prompted by damage to one of the cars loaded with chlorine, which can form a cloud of deadly fumes if it leaks.
“There was a crack in the (car’s) shell,” Bromley said. “It did not leak.”
The only material that spilled was about 200 gallons of antifreeze, he said.
Crews cleaned up the antifreeze, removed the freight cars and repaired the rails. The track was reopened at 8:55 a.m. on April 7, 2 1⁄2 days after the accident, railroad records show.
The evacuation affected 200 residents of single-family homes between the 100 and the 400 blocks of Macy Street, and about 100 residents of a mobile home park on Meridian Avenue.
Last year, there were 22 derailments in San Bernardino County but none in Riverside County, according to the Federal Railroad Administration.
Roughly two miles north of this month’s wreck, a May 1989 derailment killed three people and destroyed 11 homes when a Southern Pacific Railway freight train crashed along Duffy Street in Muscoy.
During cleanup operations 13 days after the wreck, an underground gasoline pipeline exploded, burning homes and killing three more people.