(The following article by Fernanda Santos and Anahad O’Connor was posted on the New York Times website on March 13.)
ONEIDA, N.Y. — A freight train carrying liquid propane derailed yesterday in a rural section of central New York State, and the accident was accompanied by a thunderous explosion and a fierce fire that forced the evacuation of homes, schools and a jail in the area, halted passenger train service and temporarily shut a section of the New York State Thruway, the authorities said.
There were no deaths or injuries as a result of the explosion in Oneida, a city of about 10,000, shortly after 7 a.m., State Trooper James Simpson said, and the conductor and an engineer both walked away.
More than 25 of the 79 rail cars derailed as the train, operated by the CSX Corporation and traveling from Buffalo to Selkirk, just south of Albany, reached the northern edge of Oneida, about halfway between Syracuse and Utica. Five of about 40 cars loaded with liquid propane ignited, shooting a fireball high into the early-morning sky and spreading thick black smoke into the air for miles.
The power of the explosion rattled windows in downtown Oneida, rocked homes in neighboring towns and touched off dozens of 911 calls, the police said.
“I was shaken awake,” said Myron Peebles, a 62-year-old retired power plant employee who lives about a half-mile from the site of the explosion. “The sun had not yet come up, but my blinds were orange. I peeked out and I couldn’t believe it. The woods were glowing, and then I saw this huge orange column going up. I thought that a large airliner had crashed in the woods behind my house.”
Billie Keller, mayor of Wampsville, a neighboring village of 600 residents, said: “I was sitting at home, drinking coffee, and I heard this massive blast. The whole house shook.”
Traffic on a 23-mile stretch of the Thruway, which runs parallel to the train tracks and is 1,000 feet away, was closed in both directions west of Exit 33 for about four hours while the fire was burning itself out. Amtrak, which runs passenger service on the track owned by CSX, halted train service between Buffalo and Albany, shuttling passengers by bus instead, a spokesman for the railroad said.
Three of the derailed cars, which contained liquid propane and toluene, an industrial solvent, were still burning last night, and the spokesman for Amtrak, Cliff Cole, said that service would not be restored until at least this afternoon. Some of the cars were carrying ferric chloride, which is used in sewage treatment and water filtration.
A CSX spokesman, Robert Sullivan, said that it was still unclear whether the derailment touched off the explosion or the propane in the tanks blew up first, causing the train to derail. The tracks are inspected twice a week, Mr. Sullivan said.
For almost an hour after the explosion, emergency crews struggled to get to the site, said Michael Whipple, Oneida’s deputy fire chief, although it is only about a mile from downtown. He said the smoke and flames were coming from an isolated thicket of wood that could be reached by a remote access road.
Once firefighters got to the pile of mangled cars, the heat was so intense that they could do nothing but watch the inferno burn from a distance, he said, and the chemicals in the cars carried the threat of another explosion.
In addition, the closest source of water was about a mile from the derailment, he said, so firefighters had to connect hose after hose along a parallel roadway.
Police officers went from door to door within a mile of the explosion, seeking to advise the roughly 4,000 residents of the area where to seek shelter if they wanted to leave their homes. The evacuation was mandatory only for the homes closest to the site and ended up affecting no more than eight families, Trooper Simpson said.
Classes at two elementary schools near the site of the raging fire were canceled. The Oneida schools superintendent, Ron Spadafora, said that most parents had been prepared for the cancellation because the blast occurred about two hours before the start of school.
In addition, 76 inmates boarded yellow school buses that took them from the Madison County Jail in Wampsville to the jail in Norwich, about 40 miles to the south, said the county sheriff, Ronald Cary.
The Red Cross set up a shelter in the New Beginnings Free Methodist Church in Wampsville. Skip Hellmig, its pastor, said that a few hundred people came by during the day, but that all had been able to return home by late afternoon.
Adults stretched out in the pews, watching the news from a big-screen television set up in the sanctuary, Pastor Hellmig said, and the children were able to bathe and change in the nursery.
“We just kept a steady flow of coffee and tea and juices flowing to everybody,” said Pastor Hellmig, who compared the explosion with “those pictures of the Arizona when it blew up in Pearl Harbor.”
“The heavy black smoke went straight up in a column, and the column stayed pretty contained because the wind wasn’t blowing,” he said of yesterday’s conflagration. “After it got up about 100 feet, the wind kind of fanned it out and blew it northeast, away from us.”