(The following story by Stephen Gurr appeared on The Gainesville Times website on September 7.)
GAINESVILLE, Ga. — Each weekday morning when Gloria Chandler drops off her twin 3-year-old girls at the Faith Christian Academy day care on Candler Highway, the stomach-turning odor of rotten soy meal hits them.
“Me and the girls have been complaining every morning,” Chandler said. “It’s about the stinkiest smell.”
The smell, which drifts across Ga. 60 from the site of a July 25 train derailment, is from soy meal that spilled from wrecked boxcars, got wet in the elements and rotted.
“It smells like an outhouse,” said Wes Goble, manager of the nearby Zack’s Food Rack, who has been handing out cards to patrons encouraging them to call railroad owner CSX.
Area residents and business owners say CSX fixed the track within a day of the accident and salvaged all the cargo it could, but has done little in the six ensuing weeks to clean up the mess. On Thursday, six wrecked boxcars remain pushed to the side of the track, some with their wheels removed.
“We’ve got one heck of a problem,” said Leon Austin, who lives next door to the day care center and directly in the line of the foul stench. Austin said he’s called state, local and federal health officials, in addition to the railroad. “We can’t get nobody to do nothing.”
Austin showed a form letter CSX sent him stating it was forwarding his complaints to the appropriate person. Those who have called the railroad to complain say they are asked to give the exact location of the train wreck, down to the nearest cross-street.
“It’s like they don’t know where it is,” said Faith Christian Academy co-owner Phyllis Henson.
Henson said several of the 108 children in her day care have become physically ill from the smell.
“They’re supposed to have an hour outside to play, but you can’t stay out there 15 minutes,” Henson said.
CSX spokesman Gary Sease, returning a phone message left by The Times, said Thursday was the first day he had heard about the odor problem. He acknowledged that officials with the company’s government affairs office in Atlanta had gotten complaints.
Sease said that four to six weeks wasn’t an unusual length of time to clean up a derailment.
Contractors are hired to move the boxcars, and “sometimes that contractor is backed up with other work,” Sease said.
Sease said he hoped to have CSX environmental workers on the scene by today to “assess what we can do immediately, which may be putting some odor-neutralizing agent on the soy meal until we can clean it up.”
“We’ve got some people involved in it and focused on it now, so we should have some action very quickly,” Sease said.
Austin said he wouldn’t have raised a fuss if CSX officials had acted sooner.
“If they would have come out here and done their job, they would have never heard a word,” he said.