(The following article by Georgiana Stark was posted on the Virginian-Pilot website on October 13.)
NORFOLK, Va. — Plumes of thick smoke billowed out of a mangled heap of twisted black metal. A white car lay crushed under a fallen tree. Railroad cars were tossed on top of one another like a child’s train set cast aside.
A woman screams at a 911 operator, “I can’t see anything. There’s smoke. I’m by myself. I’ve got to get out of here.” Another man yells on the phone, “It’s chlorine. It’s chlorine. We can’t get out.”
This was the scene that Robin Chapman, a public relations manager for Norfolk-based Norfolk Southern Corp., faced on Jan. 6 this year in Graniteville, S.C., when one of his company’s trains transporting chlorine collided with a parked train at 2:40 a.m. The collision covered the small mill town’s downtown with a blanket of 90 tons of the deadly gas.
The accident, which killed nine and left more than 500 needing medical treatment, was the focus of a presentation Wednesday as part of a two-day Emergency Preparedness Media Relations Seminar, organized by Virginia Beach-based Emergency Services Training Associates at the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel.
Larry Hill started ESTA three years ago to provide training and seminars for emergency responders, public health workers and public information officers. The aim is to help government agencies and the private sector work together in emergencies, Hill said.
Twenty-two attendees, including police officers, firefighters, public health workers and public information officers, relived scenes from the crash and 911 calls from frightened residents at the beginning of the presentation given by Chapman and Thom Berry, director of the Division of Media Relations for the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control.
They had gathered from across the country hoping to gain a better understanding of how to respond to crises like this and take away the hard-won lessons learned by Chapman and Berry.
One of Berry’s biggest lessons was the importance of communicating with area hospitals. Residents who thought they might be contaminated drove themselves to hospitals up to 60 miles away to get treatment, without the hospitals having any idea what had happened to them, Berry said. “Guess how the Medical College of Georgia found out?” he asked the audience. “From television news,” he shouted.
In preparing emergency plans, he advised them to “awfulize.”
“Imagine the most awful things that could happen, and know it can get worse.”
In the aftermath of the second-largest rail disaster in the nation’s history, Chapman knew there would be a lot of opportunities to say and do the wrong thing. “I was anticipating a lot of hostility and blame,” he said.
The railroad company, which projects that the disaster will cost it $35 million, first apologized, then handed out 4,700 checks and Wal-Mart gift cards to residents over the following two weeks to help them get through the evacuation. “This was not a wealthy community,” Chapman said. “Many didn’t have cash up front to buy meals and hotel rooms.”
In the months after the disaster, Norfolk Southern received letters from residents praising the way it handled the crisis. In May, the company was awarded a 2004 Transportation Community Awareness and Emergency Response National Achievement Award for its support of the program, which promotes chemical transportation emergency preparedness.
However, nine months later, the small town of Graniteville, which houses 11 textile mills in a four-mile radius, is still suffering the effects of the spill. Monroe, Ga.-based Avondale Mills Inc. announced last week that it will have to shutter some of its operations there to finish its cleanup, laying off 350 workers, Berry said.
At a community meeting in Graniteville last week, some residents told Berry they still don’t believe their homes are safe. “There are still people in that community that believe in the bottom of their hearts that there is chlorine leaking in their basements,” he said. “It’s very hard to convince them otherwise.”
For Maria Pignataro, press secretary and director of communications for the mayor’s office in Jersey City, N.J., the presentation made her question what she might do in a similar crisis. “There are so many legs to the situation to deal with, in addition to the sheer compassion for the people,” she said. “They talked about things I hadn’t thought of and couldn’t ever imagine.”
Chapman advised the crowd to “play well with others” in crisis situations and find out who the other officials are so everyone can work together. The company’s experience in Graniteville reinforced the importance of accepting responsibility, expressing compassion and doing the right thing in a crisis, Chapman said.
Berry told the group he hoped such a crisis doesn’t happen in their backyards. “But if it does, you should remember what we’ve shared with you this morning,” he said.