(The following article by Elizabeth Allen and Patrick Driscoll was posted on the San Antonio Express-News website on November 12.)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff said he is encouraged by Union Pacific’s response to Wednesday’s fatal train crash, but a comprehensive solution to San Antonio’s persistent rail problems is still in the distant future.
Wolff believes the railroad company will have to devote years to fixing the problems that have led to at least six incidents in six months — three of which involved toxic spills or deaths.
“I think they’ve got themselves in a situation that may take them a little while to get out of,” Wolff said Thursday.
The situation seems almost cyclical — a train crashes, tossing rail cars and killing or injuring people; Wolff dashes off a letter demanding safety improvements; and UP promises changes.
Weeks or months later, the scenario repeats itself.
On Wednesday, a boxcar was knocked off a track at Crystal Cold Storage on the Northeast Side and smashed into a building, killing 39-year-old Roger Bruening in his office. The crash also injured a worker who was in a boxcar and spilled about 200 gallons of diesel fuel.
An engineer backing up two locomotives and 29 cars didn’t hear a radio instruction to stop, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, which began an investigation Thursday. The train hit four parked boxcars, shoving one of them into the building 24 feet away.
“The last two transmissions were kind of garbled, from what I understand,” said NTSB spokesman Ted Lopatkiewicz.
A NTSB inspector from Chicago was in San Antonio to interview three UP workers and oversee testing of the radio system, Lopatkiewicz said.
“We’re trying to see if there are areas where there are dead zones,” he said.
In the meantime, UP has sent 10 additional managers, and company President Jim Young told Wolff more are on the way. The company also sharply increased walking inspections of all tracks in the region and plans to open a 24-hour-a-day
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safety command center by today.
“We are taking it seriously,” said UP spokeswoman Kathryn Blackwell. “We’re working real hard to try and correct things down here.”
Also, UP is setting up a fund of at least $1 million, with no legal strings attached, to help take care of Bruening’s daughter, Blackwell said.
Wolff said he warned Young that he’d be asking for a regulatory crackdown when he, Mayor Ed Garza, Councilman Richard Perez and other local leaders head to Washington, D.C., next week.
Three things combined to boost both the profile and the urgency of their trip.
Wednesday’s fatality occurred the same day U.S. Rep. Charlie Gonzalez’s office released a letter to the Federal Railroad Administration complaining about a UP request to waive inspections on its trains coming through Laredo from Mexico.
And the New York Times recently published a story alleging a too-close relationship between the FRA and UP.
Wolff sent a letter to congressional leaders Wednesday saying he is concerned about the allegations, the same day he asked UP to shut down train traffic in San Antonio for a day to focus on safety efforts.
UP declined to stop all the trains, saying disrupted operations pose greater safety and security risks as well as economic hardships.
The local leaders will meet with federal regulators and San Antonio congressional representatives in the office of U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison.
Hutchison, who was in town Thursday to promote her new book “American Heroines,” said she’s looking for answers from the NTSB and the FRA.
She declined to comment directly on the New York Times story, but said, “I think it’s very important for safety regulators to be independent so that they are able to do what is right for the American public.”
A pilot project being put together by a local company with the help of the San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative may gain momentum from the recent events.
The project, by Adolos Strategic, would hook cameras and chemical sensors into an existing fiber network along a stretch of UP tracks between San Antonio and Laredo.
The sensors would send data to emergency response coordinators about whether a crash had occurred and if hazardous materials were involved.