(The following story by John Tedesco appeared on the San Antonio Express-News website on July 4. Gil Gore is General Chairman of the BLET’s Union Pacific Southern Region General Committee of Adjustment.)
SAN ANTONIO — In a quiet corner of Bexar County dotted with trees and farmland, a train collision last week caused the nation’s deadliest chemical accident on the rails in more than a decade.
Forty cars overturned and a container with 90 tons of chlorine ruptured. Toxic fumes killed a train conductor and two women who were asleep in their home and sent 50 people to the hospital.
The wreck, a reminder of the rail traffic that churns through the city day and night, raised a troubling question — what if it had happened in densely populated San Antonio?
Local officials say they’ve spent years honing their responses to hazardous releases. Federal laws make cities powerless to ban or reroute railroads, which are afforded a measure of secrecy with regard to the cargo they transport because of fears about the potential for terrorism.
The commerce clause in the Constitution and federal statutes effectively bar communities from forming hazmat routes for trains.
As a matter of public policy, the government and industry prefer it that way. They want trains to be on the most direct and best-maintained routes, which often means transporting dangerous materials through big cities.
“The main lines have historically gone through the center of towns,” Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley said. “There are no bypasses.”
Railroads and companies that build tank cars have spent millions of dollars to improve their safety record and avoid a catastrophe.
An average of more than 2,800 train wrecks occurred each year in the United States between 1990 and 2003. Only a small fraction of those caused a release of hazardous materials, according to a federal database of railway accidents, and only three people died in those accidents.
But last week, the engineer of a Union Pacific train traveling 44 mph through Southwest Bexar County failed to hit the brakes — despite passing two yellow warning signals — and struck a Burlington Northern-Santa Fe train that was pulling into a siding, federal investigators said.
The poisonous cloud of chlorine that wafted from the wreckage is a product commonly shipped by railroads.
“Chlorine goes through the heart of San Antonio, right by the Alamodome,” said Bexar County Fire Marshal Carl Mixon, whose job is to prepare for worst-case scenarios.
Mixon coordinated the response to Monday’s train wreck.
“If the Alamodome had an activity going on at the time, with the air conditioning pulling air in, and they had a train derailment there of the same type of chemical, we wouldn’t be looking at just three fatalities,” he said.
Routine risk
Trains are firmly ingrained in the fabric of daily life in San Antonio. They rumble by La Tuna in Southtown, thunder through Alta Vista within mere feet of homes, and cruise by shops at Alamo Quarry Market.
Hazardous cargo is part of the routine. But in the name of homeland security, the public can’t find out how much or when hazardous train cargo is rolling down the rails.
Mixon said railroad companies provide annual reports on the type and quantity of chemicals transported through the county. A 1989 law written by then-state Sen. Carlos Truan, D-Corpus Christi, mandated the reports to help prepare firefighters.
The industry grudgingly went along with the law, Truan said.
“The railroads monitored the legislation,” Truan said. “They did say it was going to hamper their operations, it would cost money, there was no need to be concerned, they had everything under control.”
The public had access to the reports — and could gauge for themselves the relative safety or threat posed by hazardous shipments — until the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Emergency officials still can read them, but Union Pacific believes the public shouldn’t be granted the same access because that information could aid terrorists, said David Young, a lawyer for the railroad company.
Mixon declined to release the records, but he and Young separately listed the most common chemicals transported through Bexar County. They wouldn’t say how often or when freight trains roll through the city or how many tons of hazardous cargo they carry.
“Chlorine is high on the list,” Mixon said. “Sulfuric acid … a lot of manufacturing-type chemicals.
“You get load counts, how many loads go through the community,” Mixon added. “Some of them are over 1,000.”
Prepared for the worst?
In a national review of preparedness, experts commissioned by the CNN network ranked San Antonio second behind New York City two years ago for its ability to respond to a chemical attack. But the accident Monday revealed how even the rescuers can be vulnerable.
Derailed train cars blocked the only road firefighters could use to get to trapped residents, and a 45-minute air supply in their hazmat suits further limited them. Mixon said emergency workers risked their lives trying to save victims.
The truth is that in the first minutes and hours of a major chemical accident in San Antonio, many residents will have to rely on themselves, rescue experts say. People may be asked to stay indoors, turn off air conditioners, and put wet towels under doors and windows if fumes make an evacuation too dangerous.
And thousands of residents could be exposed. According to an analysis by the San Antonio Express-News, at least 162 schools and hospitals are within a mile of the rail lines that cross Bexar County, and more than 500,000 residents live in census tracts along those routes.
A Jan. 18, 2002, train wreck in the town of Minot, N.D. sent a vapor cloud of anhydrous ammonia into the air that was estimated to be 5 miles long, 2 miles wide and 350 feet high, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. The fumes killed one resident and in varying degrees affected 15,000 others, or about 40 percent of the town.
“I think it’s time for people to realize that we need to make some hard decisions, and come up with a better way of getting hazardous cargo through our community,” Mixon said.
The city had a close call in May, when rail cars derailed off a bridge near Brackenridge High School. Four cars carrying highly explosive propane were part of the train, but those cars didn’t tumble off the track.
After that wreck, County Judge Nelson Wolff met with county and city officials in an effort to persuade Union Pacific to reroute major lines in San Antonio.
Wolff’s May 10 letter to the company pointed out the railroad is preparing to handle more freight traffic in the county. He asked, among other things, to reroute an old Southern Pacific line away from downtown San Antonio and the Alamodome; to reroute another line on Comal Street in front of Bexar County Jail; and to close a rail yard on the East Side.
Wolff said Union Pacific was receptive, but laying new rails would be expensive — costing as much as $1 million a mile.
“I understand that implementing any of these ideas would require private and public capital investment,” Wolff wrote.
Other cities have grappled with the issue. Earlier this year, the City Council in Washington proposed rerouting hazardous train cargo around the nation’s capital. The rail and chemical industries oppose the idea.
The industry says rail offers the safest method of transportation for chemicals.
Rerouting trains would make trips longer, increasing the chances of wreck. If more and more cities try to impose hazmat bans, chemicals that fuel modern society would be delayed, said Tom White, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads.
“All you’re doing is shifting from one community to another the possibility of something happening,” White said. “Is that good public policy?”
Growing business
In 2002, railroads hauled more than 38,000 tons of chemicals that originated in Texas, more any other state in the country, according to statistics provided by the railroad association. And hazmat loads are going up across the country.
But more freight traffic is coinciding with an exodus of experienced railroad employees who are reaching retirement.
In an industry that employs roughly 220,000 workers, railroads have hired 80,000 new employees in recent years to replace older workers, according to the American Association of Railroads.
The Union Pacific conductor who died in Bexar County was 23 years old. Heath Pape, a San Antonio native and graduate of East Central High School, had dreamed of following his father’s footsteps and working for the railroads.
The engineer who operated the Union Pacific train is in his late 30s. He still is on a respirator after being exposed to chlorine, and investigators have been unable to interview him.
White said the next generation of railroad workers is thoroughly trained. But Gil Gore, general chairman of the southern region of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, said Union Pacific gives short thrift to training — including instruction in hazardous materials.
“Am I disappointed in the training our members get in this arena? Yes, I am,” Gore said. “We’re understaffed, we’re under-manpower.
“I gotta tell you, my big concern is fatigue. That’s the No. 1 issue.”
Increased commerce also means more hazmat cars are exposed to wrecks.
Since 1990, more than 3,000 cars carrying hazardous materials were involved in train wrecks in the United Sates. By 2003, that number had more than doubled to 7,800 hazmat cars.
But only a portion of those cars were damaged, and fewer still released any material. White said an expensive, 30-year effort to build safer tank cars is the main reason chemical releases have dropped from 90 incidents in 1990 to 36 in 2003, a decrease of 60 percent.
“It’s led to a lot of improvements to tank cars, so when an accident does occur, you’re less apt to have a release of material,” White said.
Trucks vs. trains
On June 8, 1986, a train carrying butadiene, formaldehyde and antifreeze derailed when a bridge collapsed near San Antonio International Airport. The wreck burned for days, authorities evacuated thousands of residents and Mayor Henry Cisneros led a chorus of politicians who pledged to reroute trains with dangerous cargo.
“We must take aggressive action,” Cisneros said at the time.
Since then, however, rail safety has been a backburner issue in San Antonio.
In the 1990s, community leaders were more concerned about hazardous truck cargo on the city’s downtown interstates.
Over the years, tanker trucks have exploded in giant fireballs and released clouds of chemicals. Still, it took the city more than a decade to wrestle with bureaucratic red tape and establish a hazardous truck route away from downtown.
During that same time span, not one rail accident caused a chemical release in the county, according to federal records, and the issue of rerouting trains was seldom raised at City Hall, despite the concerns of some residents.
The other obstacle was the enormous expense of building new rail lines.
“Obviously with our highways we’ve had more input and say,” Mayor Ed Garza said. “We’ve been able to restrict certain hazardous materials from parts of our populated areas.
“The question is why can’t we do the same for our rail lines?” Garza said. “I think the same concern still exists.”