(The following article by Jeff Wilkinson was posted on the State website on May 1.)
GRANITEVILLE, S.C. — Who lived and who died came down to sheer luck.
When a head-on train collision Jan. 6 released a deadly cloud of chlorine gas, no one was prepared. Not the residents asleep in their beds. Not the textile workers on the overnight shift at Avondale Mills. Not the community’s small Fire Department or the county’s emergency response agencies.
No one.
In the first critical hour, the townspeople’s lives were in the hands of fate.
By the time rescuers could assemble in the middle of the night, assess the situation and respond — two hours after the crash — eight of the nine victims were already dead.
They died in the first hour, most in the first minutes, coroner’s reports show. The ninth victim, the train’s engineer, died the next day in a hospital.
Those who were killed lived or worked close to Graniteville’s low-lying creek, where the heavy, deadly gas pooled. Those who lived fled uphill or stayed in their homes above the crash site.
Fate was the deciding factor.
After-action reports from the Aiken County Sheriff’s Department and other responding agencies are not complete. But a study by The State paints a scene of utter confusion by rescuers in that critical first hour, even though little could have been done to save those who died.
Experts aren’t surprised by the chaos or the casualties.
“Most American communities are not prepared to deal with these types of releases,” because they don’t know what the trains are carrying, said Fred Millar, a Washington, D.C.-based expert on the transportation of hazardous materials.
“And the folks in Graniteville weren’t.”
‘PEOPLE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO’
People living and working in the “hot zone,” within about a quarter mile of the crash site, were jolted by the 2:39 a.m. crash. They took action themselves long before emergency workers could assemble and respond, residents and millworkers said.
Most simply fled.
“It was like pouring poison in an ant hill,” said Phil Napier, chief of the Graniteville Fire Department. “People didn’t know what to do.”
Many who live on the ridge west of the railroad tracks, like the Rev. Douglas Puckett, fled up the hill, away from the crash, warning neighbors as they went.
They all lived.
“We were praying as we went out that we weren’t making a foolish mistake,” Puckett said.
The 200 or so workers on the night shift at the mill buildings closest to the spill scattered.
Curtis Mitchell, 49, wasn’t aware of a problem until he heard someone yell, he told The State. Two people were coming up an aisle toward him in one of the mill buildings.
Both were vomiting.
“C’mon! C’mon! Y’all got to get off this floor!” Mitchell yelled to them, aware of a faint odor.
They ran to the back of the plant. Other co-workers dashed into the parking lot.
Workers interviewed said huge ventilation fans sucked the gas into the buildings. Many thought the gas was coming from inside the mill and ran out into the cloud.
Workers who ran downhill to the creek — away from the crash, but where the heavier-than-air chlorine settled — died. Those who ran uphill, or made it to the vehicles of townspeople who rushed in to help, lived.
Those who gambled and stayed indoors met a mixed fate. Some lived, choking for hours on the toxic fumes. Three died, one within minutes.
“Some people walked away with just minor injuries; others were killed,” said Aiken County Coroner Tim Carlton. “Who knows why? Luck, I guess.”
IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE
Initially, emergency workers ordered hundreds of body bags from state special operations centers — an order Carlton canceled when he had a better picture of the body count.
“It could have been the worst disaster in South Carolina history,” Carlton said.
In some ways, Graniteville was very lucky:
o The streets were mostly deserted at 2:39 a.m.
o About 40 fewer workers were in the mill buildings closest to the crash than would be during the day shift.
o Leavelle McCampbell Middle School, was empty. During the day, about 500 children would have been in class just two blocks from the crash site.
o The wind was calm. The chlorine pooled into the bottom of the Horse Creek valley, the most sparsely populated area of the community, rather than rolling through the homes clustered on the ridge.
o And only one of the train’s three chlorine tanks ruptured. Each carried 90 tons. Together, they could have killed everyone in Graniteville and sickened people up to 40 miles away, experts said.
“It’s a miracle more lives weren’t lost,” said Napier, the fire chief.
Four months after the crash, pine and cedar trees up and down the two-mile-long valley still mark the spread of the chlorine plume, their green foliage turned coppery red from the gas.
“Everyone is anxious to see if they will come back,” Napier said.
Rick Inclima, director of safety for the national railroad maintenance worker’s union, said the number of deaths could have been staggering.
“At another time, at that same location, with those variables changed, this could have been an horrific incident of unimaginable magnitude,” he said.
Richard Powell, Aiken County Emergency Services director, said, “If this would have happened 12 hours earlier … it would have been something this community would have never gotten over.”
Hazardous materials transportation expert Millar said the death toll might not have approached a 1984 Bhopal, India, leak that killed 3,800, the worst chlorine leak in history.
“But it could have been much worse,” he said. Graniteville was “damn lucky.”
NOT READY
The agencies that responded have yet to prepare after-action reports because they are awaiting a federal coordinator who can assess the performance of all of them, Aiken County Sheriff Michael Hunt said.
But like the residents and mill workers, rescuers found themselves guessing about what to do, The State’s study shows:
o Members of the Graniteville-Vaucluse-Warrenville Fire Department — the first to reach the scene — had no hazardous material suits and little training for dealing with the spill.
They rushed in without knowing that a toxic cloud was spreading over the center of their small community. Chief Napier himself was overcome trying to reach the department’s main headquarters, which was engulfed by the plume.
o First responders had no clue what the train was carrying, what was leaking and whether a mixture of chemicals was involved.
The need to assess the situation delayed rescues for at least two hours.
o The mill had no plan for dealing with such a disaster — nor were they required to.
The mill’s emergency plans were reviewed by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 2003 and were in compliance, an OSHA spokesman said; but, an emphasis is not placed on handling this type of hazardous materials incident.
The federal government also doesn’t require companies to come up with contingency plans for disasters that happen outside their grounds.
The plant was not required to have specific contingency plans for a derailment or a gas leak despite the fact that five trains, often laden with hazardous materials, pass its mills each day.
“Textiles industries are not considered to be high-hazard” for such leaks, OSHA spokesman Jim Knight said.
Stephen Felker Jr., Avondale’s manager of corporate development, said workers followed the plant’s general evacuation plan “as well as they could under the circumstances.”
“But the danger was also outside the plant,” he said. “People had to improvise. A lot of people showed leadership.”
o The chain of command at the onset of the disaster was unclear.
There was friction between Napier, the first commander on the scene, and Sheriff Hunt, who eventually became the lead commander.
“There was a little bit of head-butting to begin with,” said Savannah River Site firefighter Kevin Faircloth. “But they worked it out fairly well.”
Napier, who wanted an immediate evacuation, claimed his authority was ignored. Hunt, who first wanted to better assess the situation, said there was a “unified command.”
David Ruth, Aiken County’s emergency preparedness coordinator, said the sheriff eventually took control because they thought the derailment might have been sabotage, a criminal act.
Powell, the county’s emergency services director, said there were “differences of opinion” but it was decided that the spill “jeopardized more than just the fire district.”
The consensus of emergency responders interviewed was that Chief Napier, stunned from his plunge into the heart of the gas plume, was in over his head. So Hunt, the county’s chief law enforcement officer, took over.
o The first warnings didn’t go out until 21⁄2 hours after the crash. And they were contradictory.
The State Emergency Preparedness Division issued news releases to the media at 5:09 a.m., advising people to evacuate.
Then, at 6:27 a.m., Aiken County sent out a “reverse 911” call to 3,600 homes. The message advised people to “shelter in place,” meaning stay in their homes or workplace.
It’s unclear whether the dispute over command caused the confused warnings.
“It was chaotic,” said Sgt. Charles Barranco, special operations chief for the Aiken Department of Public Safety, a city agency.
Sheriff Hunt said “shelter in place” was the proper response. But experts doubt whether any option commanders considered could have saved lives in that first hour.
“‘Shelter-in-place’ is the appropriate response, but it can also mean die in your home,” safety consultant Millar said. “More might have died if they would have stayed rather than run.”
Napier said officials “were damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It was a Catch-22.”
FINDING SURVIVORS
The first fully trained and equipped rescuers didn’t arrive for nearly two hours after the spill — between 4:30 and 5 a.m. They then began to scour the area for survivors.
One of the people they found was Kenny Bellinger, who had watched two of his co-workers die in a break room at the Gregg plant.
“You couldn’t stand it if you didn’t have anything over your face,” Bellinger told The State after surviving a four-hour wait for rescuers.
“I was asking God for another chance. … I had a lot of stuff I wanted to do with my kids that I didn’t have a chance to do and (to) please send somebody to come for us.”
By the time rescuers found Bellinger and others, the gas had largely dissipated. Whole families were being transported out of the area in open vehicles without respirators.
“They were coughing and had some respiratory issues,” but their lives were probably not threatened at that point, said Aiken Public Safety’s Barranco.
Twelve hours after the derailment, authorities ordered the evacuation of 5,400 people within one mile of the crash site.
Aiken County sheriff’s spokesman Michael Franks said the decision was made to protect residents from a potential secondary spill as the remaining two tanker cars were emptied.
It was up to a week before everyone was able to return home.
“It was an abundance of caution,” Franks said.
‘LET THEM DECIDE’
In the end, the only thing that probably would have saved lives, experts said, was preventing the accident in the first place.
Federal investigators are trying to determine the cause of the crash, focusing on a manual switch believed to be improperly set hours earlier that sent the train down the wrong track.
The only living witness to the crash was William Wright, the conductor of the moving train, who was critically poisoned but survived. He has repeatedly denied requests for an interview.
Experts say better, computerized signals would have warned the crew the switch was in the wrong position. Slower train speeds would have given them more time to react.
After the January accident, Norfolk Southern slowed its trains from a company-set 49 mph to a new 25 mph.
But telling rescue workers ahead of time what is on the trains that roll through their towns and counties could make the most difference, transportation expert Millar said.
“You give communities the worse-case scenarios and let them decide how to prepare,” he said.
In Graniteville, the firefighters from the Savannah River Site had to study the derailed cars up close for markings that identified their cargoes before they could complete their rescue operations. They even climbed under cars to find the placards.
That would have been unnecessary if the railroads were required to disclose their cargo to local authorities in advance.
Railroads are the only industry not required by the federal government to report to local emergency preparedness agencies what chemicals they are handling.
Mayors, including Columbia Mayor Bob Coble, are pushing for federal regulations to be changed to include railroads.
In a letter to the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Conference of Mayors asked that the agency “take immediate action with the freight railroads” to improve notice of hazardous material transported.
Members of each of the agencies interviewed pledged to improve training and equipment, so maybe next time luck won’t be the deciding factor.
“We don’t take (living near) the railroad for granted anymore,” Napier said at a recent ceremony at the Savannah River Site honoring firefighters who responded to the disaster. “Now, I stand and count the haz-mat cars as they pass.
“It’s sad that it takes a tragedy like this to make us more aware,” he said. “But we’re going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”