ROCHESTER, N.Y. — The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reportws that one year ago today, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, Richard Connolly was hosting a family Christmas party when he saw a runaway train roar past his River Street house “going 50 or 60 miles per hour, easy,” he said.
Moments later, his wife, Sharon, watched cars from the train “fly into the air and burst into flames” about 1,000 feet north of the house, she said.
The Connollys were not injured. They lost no property, did not smell smoke or even feel the heat from the fireball that billowed into the sky. But the derailment they witnessed still echoes today.
Three of the 23 cars that toppled off a 47-car train that day — the result a brake failure blamed on a conductor — contained 60,000 gallons of industrial solvents bound for Eastman Kodak Co.
As much as 14,000 gallons, unburned or unrecovered, soaked into soil or poured into the Genesee River, which flows about 100 feet from the tracks.
Since then, almost 28,000 tons of tainted soil have been scooped up and trucked away by the train’s owner, CSX Transportation.
The dig, which started April 15, was delayed for at least three months as CSX and the city of Rochester — which owns most of the spill site, about 39,000 square feet — wrangled over terms of access.
The city fears the riverside site remains contaminated, compromising plans to develop Charlotte as a tourist destination.
And unknown amounts of contaminants might still linger under the tracks.
Tom Antonoff, a CSX consultant, said the site is “better than 90 percent” cleaned up, but he acknowledges there are “minimal” amounts of contamination still under the tracks.
Beyond city concerns, at least one landowner — there were four major property holders affected — said he will take CSX to court for property destroyed at his marina and for business lost at his seasonal restaurant, Pelican’s Waterfront Cafe — 500 feet from the northern edge of the spill zone.
“It was a disaster,” Terry Testa said of the “blazing inferno” he watched.
Three marina buildings and several customer boats burned, he said. The wreck left worries — among his customers and others — that Charlotte’s river waterfront is environmentally compromised.
City attorney Linda Kingsley, her department’s lead on derailment issues, acknowledged that “a stigma” could overshadow the site.
But the biggest remaining problems at the site may be all too real, she said: sediments in the river bottom contaminated by methylene chloride, a heavier-than-water solvent, and land under the train tracks, where buried solvents could recontaminate land the city hopes to develop.
“This spring is the latest we can get going with development,” because plans were already in motion before the spill, said Kingsley. She called on CSX to quickly dredge contaminants out of the river.
A plan to rebuild River Street has already been delayed for a year because of the spill, she said. In the next month, the contractor who won the River Street bid will inform the city of extra charges allowed under a “delay claim” in the contract, said Kingsley — a bill she wants to pass on to CSX.
CSX spokesman Bob Sullivan said if state regulators decide this spring that dredging is needed, then it will be done. “The issue here is not money,” he said.
“As we said in the beginning, the cost of this (cleanup) is going to be whatever it takes to do it right.”
The Florida-based company has already put $8 million into the project.
Mark Gregor, tracking the spill issue for the city’s Department of Environmental Services, said the wreck delayed several other projects, including a pedestrian promenade along the west side of the river, new docks and plans to refurbish an old train station.
“But longer-term issues are also of concern,” he said. Soil-borne, hidden solvents — considered hazardous waste in high enough amounts — could delay future construction or simply affect repairs to utilities.
In the river, a patch of contaminated sediments covers about one-third of an acre — about 13,500 square feet — starting at the river bank and extending out toward the middle. The fate of methylene chloride there, said Gregor, is “a dynamic situation” — just as it is on land. “Contamination goes places you don’t necessarily know about,” he said.
Antonoff said dredging would only stir up buried contamination. Natural attentuation — micro-organisms and river currents — have already lessened the pollution, he said. And just one month after the spill, water in the river above the sediments had returned to drinking-water quality.
A recent letter from the state Department of Environmental Conservation to CSX asked the company to respond to the issue of river sediments.
One year after the accident — which prompted CSX to re-train some personnel — the company has no intentions of leaving the job half-done, said Sullivan, who drove to Rochester the night of the spill from his home in Philadelphia. “You don’t just fill up a dump truck and drive away.”
That sentiment is attractive but perhaps does not tell the whole story, said Kingsley. “Their (CSX) PR to the community is, ‘We’ll make it right,’ “ she said. “But the reality has been that for every concession, they’re kicking and screaming.”
CSX representatives have attended monthly meetings of the Charlotte Community Association since the derailment. But acrimony and doubt about the details of the cleanup have dwindled. At the last such meeting, early this month, the sparse crowd in attendance even gave the CSX presenter a light hand of applause.
David Pratt, a DEC regional hazardous waste engineer, said the CSX dig went quickly, compared with toxic-waste site projects of comparable complexity and scale.
Antonoff, a veteran geologist with the Albany-area Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure Inc., said that most of the Charlotte cleanup work was done within eight months of the derailment, despite delays.
Similar cleanups in New York, he said, often take up to five years.
The river sediments remain the derailment’s major remaining issue.
Kingsley said waiting for nature to dispel the pollution — buried 4 feet or more in the river bed — is not enough. The risk to development is too high without immediate dredging.
The DEC — the middleman in a year of behind-the-scenes sparring between the city and CSX — has made no decision on the sediments issue, said Pratt. But by mid-January, he said, the agency should have a final report from CSX on the scope and intensity of contamination in the river.
“My fondest wish would be to get the river bottom cleaned (by CSX) — get it done this spring,” said Kingsley.
“Just leave us the way we were. Don’t leave us better. Just don’t leave us worse.”