(The following story by Kimm R. Montone appeared on the Citizens’ Voice website on June 25.)
GLENBURN TOWNSHIP, Pa. — A train carrying chemicals and other freight jumped off its rails late Monday, prompting a massive response from area emergency crews and leaving a rail line closed Tuesday.
“The main objective is to upright the cars safely and clean up the mess,” said Kevin Howard, operations and training officer with Lackawanna County’s Emergency Management Agency.
Nine out of 39 cars left the rails near the Glenburn Township municipal building at 3110 Waterford Road. No one was injured, officials said.
The freight included three cars containing anhydrous ammonia, three cars with propane, a car with liquid sulfuric acid, an empty lumber car and a car with plastics, Department of Environmental Protection spokesman Mark Carmon said.
A DEP hazardous materials crew scanned the area for toxic vapors using air-monitoring equipment, The tests turned up negative, Carmon said.
The tank cars were not full, but contained residual amounts of the chemicals, Carmon said, having off-loaded their contents at another location. Anhydrous ammonia poses an inhalation threat, while propane poses an explosive threat, he said.
“It was less of a threat than full containers, but it still could have posed a threat to responders and people,” he added.
“It could have been very dangerous.”
According to railroad officials, the cars owned by Norfolk, Va.-based Norfolk Southern Corp. jumped the tracks before midnight on lines owned by Canadian Pacific, based in Calgary, Alberta.
Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband placed the time of the derailment at 11:45 p.m. Monday. The Lackawanna County Communications center said it was dispatched at 12:32 a.m. Tuesday.
First responders from Dalton and Clarks Summit and officials from the county Emergency Management Agency, DEP and two railroad companies also converged on the scene.
The train was traveling from Allentown to Buffalo, N.Y., Husband said. He declined to release the name of the train’s engineer or additional details about the investigation.
Canadian Pacific spokeswoman Breanne Feigel said the line was closed and did not immediately know when it would reopen. She referred questions to Norfolk Southern.
Crews were still at work maneuvering heavy equipment around the derailed cars Tuesday, with at least one of the cars left lying lengthwise across the rails.
The only damage to township property was a chain-link fence, which was crushed after part of a train car’s axle and wheels rolled over before continuing across the township parking lot, coming to rest at a utility pole, supervisor Chairman Bill Wicks said.