(The following column by Frederic Smith appeared on the Bismarck Tribune website on March 18.)
BISMARCK, N.D. — Officials and residents of Minot — and anyone else in North Dakota who lives along a railroad line — should beware of learning the wrong lessons from the January 2002 derailment in the Magic City.
In that middle-of-the-night accident on the outskirts of town, 31 cars spilled. Five tank cars carrying anhydrous ammonia ruptured, and poisonous gas drifted into a trackside neighborhood, killing one and injuring about 300. Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board blamed inadequate track maintenance and inspection by the Canadian Pacific Railway.
The board says that “ultrasonic testing,” a technology previously used by the CP but apparently discontinued, would have detected cracks in some joint bars before they fractured and allowed rails to separate under the train.
Although the railroad disputed this conclusion, you can be sure it will be taking whatever corrective action the board calls for. The problem is that some Minot officials talked in terms of “problem solved.”
One expressed the hope that changes will ensure that “we won’t see that kind of incident occur ever again.” Another said, primly, “I would just ask (both Minot railroads) to keep their trains on the track.”
Would we say that we never expected to hear of another airplane crash or truck accident? As if to underscore the fatuousness of this talk, that very afternoon Minot’s other railroad, the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, spilled the same number of cars that CPR had two years earlier — 31.
This happened at White Earth, but could just as well have happened in Minot, where the train would have arrived in a couple of hours. The train was carrying automobiles, but it could just as well have been hauling more chemicals.
Derailments are expensive, and railroads hate them.
But they happen several times a day, every day, somewhere in America, although usually harmlessly in the country — as at White Earth — or in a freight yard. Besides track failure — usually more a function of physics or the weather than poor maintenance — there are numerous causes, including wheel or axle failure or just a truck or car on the railroad tracks.
The point is, derailments will always be with us, and anyone who lives beside the railroad should be alert to the possibility — just as someone who lives right next to the highway should be prepared for a truck in his living room one day.
Minot officials are more impressive when they say they have used the time since January 2002 to sharpen their disaster-response plans and public-warning systems, the latter now including a “reverse 911,” such as Burleigh County started last fall.
In Bismarck-Mandan, we see lots of chemicals on the rails, some of them on their way to and from the Mandan refinery and the Beulah gasification plant. Also, dozens of chemical-bearing trucks travel through the cities daily, often at a freight-train clip.
These probably pale in significance beside the stationary hazardous chemicals we are used to living with. Two years ago, the Tribune learned from Bismarck Fire Chief Joel Boespflug that the city has inventoried 200-some “fixed” facilities around town that have these chemicals on-site. Boespflug has a trained “hazmat” team to deal with an average 75 incidents a year involving these chemicals.
That’s the ticket. In storage, in transit, hazardous chemicals are a fact of modern life. Plans for coping with the accidents should not include repealing bad luck.