(The following story by John O’Connor appeared on The State website on January 13.)
GRANITEVILLE, S.C. — They knew the silence meant trouble.
No traffic. No barking dogs.
No noise from nearby Avondale Mills, which runs 24 hours a day.
The only sound firefighters Bill Elliott and Kevin Faircloth heard was the ding-ding-ding of the railroad crossing warning bells, still sounding as the end of the smashed train blocked the crossing. Clouds of green, blue and bright orange haze oozed from the train. Black smoke poured from the wreckage.
A white powder covered the ground.
“It was eerie,” Elliott said. “It was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen.
“I said ‘Oh Lord, I hope we got the right protective clothing on,’ but it was too late anyway.”Elliott, Faircloth and Dwain Smith, all employed by the Westinghouse Savannah River Co. as firefighters, were one of the first hazardous materials teams to reach the scene of the crash that killed nine.
Elliott and Faircloth described their experience for the first time on Wednesday.
Faircloth was on duty at the Savannah River Site when the call for help came in just before 3 a.m., while Elliott and Smith were awakened by the emergency tones over their radios.
The three, who have known and served with each other for more than 15 years, met at the Aiken command post about 3:15 a.m.
“I looked at Dwain and said ‘You want to go?’ Elliott said. “I didn’t even have to ask him.”
The two grabbed Faircloth, a Graniteville resident and 17-year veteran firefighter, because he knew the town.
They worked their way into the protective gear.
They realized they needed a bigger vehicle. They knew they’d be bringing out victims.
So they commandeered a city of Aiken Public Safety Department utility pickup truck with its keys in the ignition and drove to the crash.
They would experience fortuitous combinations of training and luck that would protect them and allow them to rescue others.
IN THE RIGHT PLACE …
Elliott, a firefighter for 25 years, and Faircloth said their first piece of luck that morning was choosing to enter town from the south on Aiken Road, which led them right to the crash.
They didn’t know a young man was trapped there in his car, pinned by a tree.
If they had entered town from the other direction, Faircloth said, they never would have seen the back of the white Ford Taurus poking out from the big oak’s canopy.
Chlorine vapor was “oozing” over the roof of the vehicle, Elliott said, and the firefighters could hear the man, identified in published reports as Mark Broome, yelling inside the vehicle.
They told him to get down, broke out the rear passenger window and Faircloth pulled him from the car.
Broome, 18, covered his mouth with a wet cloth, and Faircloth and Elliott hustled him to the back of the pickup truck. While Smith drove to Aiken Regional Medical Center, Faircloth and Elliott struggled to hook up an oxygen tank for Broome. Their thick rubber gloves made the job difficult.
The hospital is only about three miles away, but the haze and lack of visibility made the drive seem much longer.
Though surrounded for hours by toxic chemicals, Broome was treated for chemical burns on his arms and released, according to published reports.
“I don’t know if I would have had been able to stay in a car for three hours,” Faircloth said.
But doing that probably saved Broome’s life, he said.
‘IT KIND OF HIT HOME’
At most emergency scenes, firefighters usually only make one run into the “hot zone.” One trip is enough to exhaust anyone burdened with about 70 pounds of protective gear.
Crews have about 45 minutes of working time before their oxygen tanks empty.
The “level B” protective suits the three wore that morning included rubber boots, gloves and a stiff plastic suit that covers the body and head, making it difficult to work. The boots, which are about two sizes too big to accommodate the extra suit material, make walking tougher.
Their “level A” gear would have been heavier.
With Broome safe at the hospital, Elliott, Faircloth and Smith decided to battle the chemical haze, the darkness and their fogging gas masks again because authorities feared the chlorine was on fire.
So on their second run, the crew took a thermal-imaging camera, which can track heat, and learned the only heat was the chemical reaction of the liquid chlorine vaporizing.
The rail car was not on fire.
The firefighters also checked the cars for markings that identified their cargoes, even climbing under cars.
With such poor visibility, Faircloth said, hazards weren’t immediately apparent.
“I can look back at it, at parts, and say we were lucky,” Faircloth said. “I didn’t see the downed power line by the train car.”
The three firefighters made at least five trips to the scene — on one, Elliott recovered the bodies of six men from in and around the plant.
Faircloth, who lives in Graniteville, worried that one of them would be a relative or someone he knew.
“It kind of hit home,” he said. “That’s always been one of my fears.”
All told, the crew spent more than 16 hours — maybe 18 — at the scene. They’re not sure.
And the pickup they commandeered was ruined, corroded from the repeated trips into the toxic gases.
ACTS OF HEROISM
Elliott went back to work at the crash site on Sunday, and all the men returned to their jobs at SRS this week.
Elliott and Faircloth pointed to dozens of acts of heroism the day of the crash, and, especially, the leadership of Graniteville-Vaucluse-Warrenville fire chief Phil Napier and Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt.
“I’d rather go do what we have to do,” Faircloth said, “rather than being the one who has to lead.”
The two said that additional training and equipment since 9/11 helped create a more organized response from command down to firefighters and police in the field.
Though neither Elliott nor Faircloth had ever battled a chemical spill, both said they would not hesitate to rush to such a scene again.
“It was just a reaction,” Elliott said. “We heard people were down; that’s what we’re trained to do.”