(The following article by Travis Gulbrandson was posted on the Pierre Capital Journal website on April 2.)
PIERRE, S.D. — Slightly more than two weeks after the derailment of a Dakota, Minnesota & Eastern Railroad train in central Pierre, some of the final steps of the clean-up are being completed.
Jafar Karim, public affairs manager for the company that owns DM&E, said workers took care of the major response and clean-up effort at the site of the derailment, but work still needed to be done on one car.
“Three cars had been addressed at the site, but they were on their sides and couldn’t be moved,” Karim said.
One other car that still needed attention was sitting on the rails, so it was moved to DM&E’s property on the east edge of town by the Pierre Indian Learning Center to be worked on.
“We had to take the product out at our yards, and then we moved it to that site to be further dismantled and placed on to a truck,” Karim said.
The sight of work being done on the train car after its wheels had been removed caused some residents to believe another derailment had occurred. This error was also reported in Friday’s edition of the Capital Journal.
On the night of March 14, five cars of a DM&E train hauling bentonite clay from the Belle Fourche area to Chicago derailed a couple of blocks south of the state Capitol.
DM&E’s president and CEO Kevin Schieffer said the derailment was caused by a broken rail, and that the damage was confined to railroad property, Schieffer said.
According to information provided by the Federal Railroad Administration, DM&E has been involved in 19 accidents in Hughes and Stanley Counties since the year 2000. The year with the largest number of accidents was 2004, with 92 crashes nationwide.
DM&E had applied for a $2.3 billion Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing loan to finance construction of a new 280-mile rail line to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin coal mines and to reconstruct approximately 600 miles of existing track in South Dakota and Minnesota. The loan was turned down earlier this month by Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Boardman, who concluded the loan posed an unacceptably high risk to federal taxpayers.