(The St. Louis Post-Dispatch posted the following article by Ken Leiser on its website on February 16.)
TAMAROA, Ill. — Nobody can say how long it will take to restore a sense of normalcy to this small town along U.S. Highway 51.
Residents who returned to their homes last week passed the burned and battered husks of the chemical tankers and hopper cars that derailed Feb. 9. The accident forced the evacuation of an entire town and outlying areas. In all, 1,000 people were out of their homes for more than four days.
By Friday, rail-car axles and wooden ties were piled up near the accident scene. Flimsy orange-mesh fencing was put up around the cleanup area to keep people away. Railroad crews had already replaced the damaged section of track where 21 cars of a northbound Illinois Central-Canadian National train cascaded off the tracks. Traffic resumed on the new track Friday morning, with trains creeping along at 10 to 15 mph.
The last of the 1,000 displaced residents were scheduled to return to their homes late Friday. Roger and Marie Perkey, like others whose homes are closest to the accident, entered their home for the first time Friday to wait for environmental tests.
“I guess if they say everything’s all right, I guess everything is all right,” Roger Perkey said. “I mean Bill (Place) said it is going to be all right, and he lives right on it.”
The two live in Tamaroa but work about 75 miles away in St. Louis. During the evacuation, their children stayed with the Perkeys’ ex-spouses, and their dog went to the veterinarian.
“We stayed at my dad’s in Pinckneyville,” Roger Perkey said. “I haven’t lived with my dad since I was 18.”
Empty in an hour
It all began with a sickening squeal of metal grinding on metal. People who saw it describe a spectacular scene right out of a Hollywood action movie.
Bill Place has lived with the sound of railroad cars thundering past his gray, single-story home since 1967. He knew this was different.
By the time he got to his front door – remote control in one hand, strawberry Pop Tart in the other – the railroad tanker cars had already begun to pile up like an accordion on the old Illinois Central Railroad line a few dozen yards from his house.
“Lots of hot, white metal. Sparks,” said Place, president of both the village’s board of trustees and its fire protection district.
The derailment in the heart of this small town ignited a methanol fire that burned for several hours.
Toxic hydrochloric acid and vinyl chloride escaped from some of the ruptured cars.
The menacing pile of toxic chemical cars left no room for debate. The playbook used by hazardous materials teams in this kind of emergency called for evacuating everyone within a mile of the crash. In this case, that meant the whole town.
It took an hour. The town’s volunteer fire department announced the news over its public-address system. Volunteers helped the elderly – some of whom needed special care with their walkers, oxygen tanks and wheelchairs.
People left so quickly that many left their dogs and cats behind with just a day’s worth of food. Coffeepots and space heaters were left on. Many expected to be away only a few hours, or a day at the most, and took only the clothes they were wearing.
Spills and evacuations like the one in Tamaroa are not uncommon. Between 1991 and 2001, there were 375 hazardous materials releases from railroad incidents, according to Federal Railroad Administration reports. More than 127,000 people had to be evacuated as a result of all those incidents.
More than 3,500 people had to be evacuated from Eunice, La., in May 2000 after a Union Pacific freight train derailed and released hazardous materials.
Last year in Minot, N.D., the derailment of a Canadian Pacific Railway train sent 31 cars off the track and led to the release of 250,000 gallons of anhydrous ammonia. One person was killed, and many were injured.
Miraculously, nobody in Tamaroa was seriously hurt. The accident site is ringed by five churches that were holding services that morning and residential neighborhoods.
Environmental health experts and firefighters said the frosty temperatures last weekend helped to contain the release of any potentially lethal chemicals into the atmosphere.
The fire burned itself out by the first night. But the methanol tankers continued to pose a threat – causing two explosions during the cleanup. A tanker filled with vinyl chloride had to be tapped and its contents transferred to a new railcar.
Hydrochloric acid spills were neutralized with agricultural lime and soda ash.
Anger and valentines
The American Legion hall in neighboring Du Quoin, Ill., where the American Red Cross set up its disaster relief center, became a sort of community water cooler where Tamaroa residents sought elusive updates about the evacuation and other morsels of information.
And misinformation. There were occasional reports about deadly explosions at the cleanup site, and dead dogs and birds littering the town. None proved true.Two television sets were tuned in to the local news. Teachers from the Tamaroa elementary school showed up one day with construction paper to help their displaced students make Valentines.
One night, residents got an update from the railroad and town officials.Patience wore thin by Thursday.
“We’re getting mad,” said Eric Estep, a 10-year Tamaroa resident whose wife and daughter were staying with relatives during the evacuation.
The railroad, he said, wasn’t doing enough to help out people who were displaced. Estep also questioned the condition of the railroad tracks running through town.
Estep wants testing to go further than the air samples being gathered inside and outside people’s homes. Indoor surfaces also were tested for traces of chemical. But he wants his pool and hot tub to be free of contamination.
“I am not going to reopen my pool and allow my child in that water until that pool is drained and cleaned,” Estep said.
The Canadian National Railway Co. is going to open a claims center this week and has encouraged residents to save receipts for accident-related expenses.
Kirk Pestka, owner of the town’s only grocery, 1 1/2 blocks from the accident site, wants the railroad to buy the meat and other merchandise that could have been contaminated.
“My biggest concern is making sure that everything is safe in my store,” he said. “I want to make sure that nothing got in there so that somewhere down the line, someone isn’t going to get sick and come back and say, ‘We got sick from food in your store.'”
Although Pestka said “everybody and their son is talking about suing somebody” after the wreck, he just wants to make sure he’s fairly compensated for all his losses.
“If they want to give me what I lost every day, I mean that’s fine,” he said. “But I am not going to sign nothing that I don’t feel comfortable signing.
“Cleanup will continue for weeks, and Place said it would include digging up contaminated soil down to the clay. Railroad officials wouldn’t speculate on how long the cleanup would take or how much it would cost.
Business got back to a slow start Friday morning at Rudy’s Bar. By 11:30 a.m. Friday, environmental tests showed that it was clean of toxic vapors, and a couple of customers had already stopped in.John Walters bellied up for a cold can of Milwaukee’s Best and a shot of brandy. He didn’t understand why everyone made such a fuss in the first place.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” Walters said. “It’s a thing that happens every day.”
Bartender Shannon Tilley of Tamaroa observed: “You feel like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz: no place like home.”