(The following story by Ryan Sabalow appeared on the Redding Record Searchlight website on June 3, 2009.)
REDDING, Calif. — Six empty runaway train cars were stopped this afternoon in an intentional derailment between Mount Shasta and Dunsmuir, around a half-mile from the site of the infamous Cantara Loop chemical spill.
However, no one was hurt and no chemicals made it into the Sacramento River, Union Pacific spokeswoman Zoe Richmond said today.
Richmond said the cars were empty gondola rail cars often used to haul equipment around.
However, a Siskiyou County official said an undetermined amount of diesel fuel spilled into the soil from a semi-truck cab that the train was hauling.
One of the cab’s two tanks, which contained 90 gallons of diesel fuel, reptured about 150 feet away from the Sacramento River, said Rick Dean, a waste management unit manager with the Siskiyou County Public Health Department.
A boom was going to be placed in the river as a precaution before the cab could be pulled from the wreckage, Dean said.
Dean said he saw four derailed flat cars that carried 12 container boxes. All the containers were empty except one that contained 50 used railroad ties, Dean said.
The cars lay down an embankment off the tracks, but none of them went in the river.
Susan Gravenkamp, a Siskiyou County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman, said that around 1:50 p.m. Union Pacific Railroad officials called deputies to ask for their help after the six cars broke loose from the back of a train.
The deputies were prepared to block traffic in Dunsmuir if the train was to make it that far, but their services weren’t needed because train crews intentionally derailed the cars.
Gravenkamp said she didn’t know how the train was derailed.
Richmond said few details were available other than there was a reported “incident” near Dunsmuir and that the tracks were closed.
She said no one was hurt and nothing spilled into the water, a concern for residents after the Cantara Loop spill that wiped out fish and other life in the Sacramento River in 1991.
Gravenkamp said she didn’t know what was in the cars, but train officials have assured deputies that there’s no danger of a spill.
Richmond said she was en route to the site from Sacramento with a group of Union Pacific officials and would provide information as it came available.
Shasta County sheriff’s deputies were called to near the county line to assist Siskiyou County officials in the incident, a Shasta County law enforcement dispatch supervisor said.
On July 14, 1991, a Southern Pacific tanker loaded with metam sodium, an herbicide, landed in the river, dumping nearly 20,000 gallons in the north state’s premier trout fishery.
The pea-green chemical, which nearly made it to Lake Shasta before it was contained, killed tens of thousands of fish, trees, salamanders, crayfish and snails.
Within 10 years, the river was deemed to have completely recovered by biologists.