(The following story by Doug Donovan appeared on the Baltimore Sun website on January 15.)
BALTIMORE — Three and a half years after the 2001 train derailment and fire in Baltimore’s Howard Street tunnel, federal investigators have issued their final report on what caused the accident.
Their conclusion: They don’t know what happened.
The National Transportation Safety Board reported that damage from the chemical fire, flooding from a resulting broken water main and recovery efforts destroyed evidence needed to conclude why a CSX Corp. train derailed July 18, 2001.
The report offered no specific cause for the accident, a conclusion that NTSB officials called “rare.” Lawyers for the city and CSX, however, are continuing their court battle over fault, and a longtime railroad litigation attorney questioned the NTSB’s thoroughness.
One member of the NTSB board complained in an addendum to the final report, released late Thursday, that the investigation never should have taken more than three years, given that it was obvious early on that an exact cause would be difficult to determine.
“Considerable safety board resources have been dedicated to this accident investigation, and we have little to show for it,” board member Deborah A.P. Hersman wrote. The report’s recommendations “could have been made within one month of the accident.”
The final report recommends that the railroad keep better records of tunnel inspections and maintenance, and asked the city to include more detailed information about responding to tunnel emergencies. It recommends that both entities do a better job of sharing pertinent information – something the report criticized both for not doing previously.
The rail accident occurred about 3 p.m., when a CSX freight train carrying 60 cars partially derailed in the tunnel. Four of the 11 derailed cars were tankers containing flammable and hazardous chemicals. A tanker containing tripropylene, a liquid similar to petroleum, ruptured and the load ignited, creating an inferno that taxed firefighters and shuttered downtown businesses for days. Only minor injuries were reported.
Mayor Martin O’Malley said yesterday that “for all the time they spent looking at it, the advice they gave was pretty common-sense.”
City officials continued to rejoice at the NTSB conclusion – announced earlier this month in a preliminary report – that the accident was not caused by a water main break above the tracks that flooded Howard Street, as some railroad officials had speculated.
The city has filed suit against CSX to recover damages, which the NTSB has pegged at $12 million. A trial is scheduled for federal court in December, said City Solicitor Ralph S. Tyler.
Criticism in the report about CSX’s lack of recordkeeping on tunnel maintenance and repairs led Tyler yesterday to proclaim that the NTSB’s position supports the city’s case.
“The duty to maintain, inspect and repair tracks and tunnels and train equipment is CSX’s. And CSX has no such records that they did any such maintenance or repairs,” Tyler said.
CSX spokesman Robert T. Sullivan said litigation will determine the accident’s cause.
“We provided investigators promptly with records showing that the tunnel was in good condition,” Sullivan said.
The NTSB ruled out several derailment scenarios, including the water main break; sand on the tracks; track configuration; and a foreign object on the rails. The NTSB said the “most likely derailment scenario involved an obstruction between a wheel and the rail, in combination with changes in track geometry.”
But no evidence existed to support that conclusion.
Lawrence Mann of the Washington law firm Alper & Mann, a longtime railroad litigation expert who said he has studied the facts of the case, said that the NTSB did not thoroughly explore one possible cause: train alignment.
The final report states that the train consisted of 31 loaded and 29 empty cars but does not explain how the train’s cars were aligned. However, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said investigators know the weight, content and alignment of the cars.
If the train’s configuration had been a possible cause, it would have been included in the final report, Holloway said.
Mann said loaded cars lined up behind empty cars can cause the heavier cars to frequently bump up against the lighter ones, causing derailments.
“The train was assembled with a lot of light cars at the front,” Mann said.
The first car to derail, according to the report, was the 47th car out of its 60.
CSX’s Sullivan repeated that the NTSB found no fault with the track or with any train-handling methods.
To view the NTSB report, please go to www.baltimore sun.com/ntsb.