(The following article by Patrick Driscoll was posted on San Antonio Express-News website on October 19.)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — As few answers trickled in Wednesday on why a Union Pacific freight train jumped its tracks and slid into a neighborhood near the Five Points area, a local congressman widened the blame to include federal oversight.
And the owner of a home damaged in the Tuesday incident launched a legal fight to keep his house from being razed.
Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, said the Federal Railroad Administration isn’t doing enough, such as requiring controls that can override human mistakes and adopting rules on better safety practices, compliance and enforcement.
“It would be unacceptable to wait for someone to be injured or killed again,” Gonzalez said in a statement. “Bottom line is that we cannot continue business as usual.”
Railroad Administration spokesman Steve Kulm said the agency already has stepped up safety efforts.
“There’s always more to be done, but we have taken substantial action in the past year and a half,” he said.
Nobody was injured when a 106-car UP train heading south buckled near Aganier Avenue and Hickman Street, derailing 17 boxcars and smashing two homes. And UP officials said no hazardous materials were on board.
“We were so very, very lucky no one was injured or killed,” County Judge Nelson Wolff said in his State of the County speech Wednesday.
But the accident spiked fears once again over how dangerous trains hauling chemicals such as chlorine, sulfuric acid and sodium hydroxide can be when rolling through heavily populated areas. About 70 trains go through the city each day.
When two trains collided in June 2004 in a rural part of Southwest Bexar County, a plume of chlorine gas spewing from a ruptured tank car killed four people and injured at least 30. A National Transportation Safety Board investigation pinpointed fatigue as the probable cause.
Former City Councilwoman Maria Berriozabal, co-founder of the Beacon Hill Area Neighborhood Association where the wreck occurred, said she intends to spur grass-roots action to persuade authorities to reroute rail traffic out of the city and improve tracks.
“The political people can’t do it by themselves,” she said.
UP and Railroad Administration officials said Wednesday they don’t know yet what caused the latest accident.
The company and the agency are doing separate investigations that could take several months. But Wolff — who sent a letter Tuesday to UP President Jim Young demanding answers — said Young told him the company might have preliminary results today.
UP spokesman Joe Arbona ruled out speed as a factor, saying the train was traveling 21 mph, four miles under the limit.
He also said inspectors hadn’t yet found anything wrong with the tracks, which Wolff, Mayor Phil Hardberger and residents said are in bad shape.
“We’ve looked at the tracks and we have no other reports of problems,” Arbona said.
In addition, he said, the engineer and conductor averaged 21 and 39 hours of rest, respectively, between shifts during the past month. A shift can’t last more than 12 hours.
The deadly 2004 wreck led to a yearlong agreement between UP and the Railroad Administration that called for more training and field-testing of crews.
The wreck also was a reason the Railroad Administration launched its National Rail Safety Action Plan in May 2005, Kulm said. As a result, 37 states had fewer train derailments and collisions from January through June compared with the same period last year.
Texas led the way with 28 fewer accidents.
UP wrecks in Bexar County dropped from 25 in 2004 to 18 last year. But in the first seven months of this year, the railroad company had 13, up one from a year ago.
Most wrecks are minor, and many occur in rail yards, so they go unnoticed. But some are close calls.
In July 2005, two hazmat cars were damaged in a seven-car derailment. In the past year and a half, three trains in wrecks — two that hit head-on and another that derailed — were carrying hazardous substances.
Meanwhile, Felix Alvarez and his family hired lawyers to stop UP and the city from bulldozing his home, which was damaged in Tuesday’s incident.
Alvarez bought the house in the 200 block of Hickman after he returned from World War II. Nine of his 11 children were born in the home.
The city condemned the house Tuesday, telling the family that the integrity of the structure was compromised.
“The house is a testament to his will and hard work ethics,” said a grandson, Felix Alvarez IV. “It has so much history and it’s so important to us. Once it comes down, that’s it.”