(The Associated Press circulated the following article by Leon D’Souza on March 9.)
SALT LAKE CITY — The railroad tanker that leaked hazardous materials and temporarily forced thousands of people from their homes should not have arrived in Utah, company officials said Tuesday.
“We had not released the railcar to Union Pacific,” said Morris Azose, vice president of Houston-based Philip Services Corp.
‘s environmental division, which had leased the tanker from Kennecott Utah Copper.
Union Pacific “took it inadvertently and returned it to Kennecott Utah Copper,” he said.
Union Pacific spokesman John Bromley said the tanker’s manifest presented to railroad employees on Feb. 17 at Fernley, Nev. — where PSC workers loaded the tanker with 13,000 gallons of highly toxic chemical waste — stated that the tanker “was an empty car.”
That designation, Bromley said, prompted officials to give the tanker a “reverse routing” designation that sent it back to Utah, where on Sunday it leaked more than 6,000 gallons of various acids at the South Salt Lake railyard.
About 6,000 people evacuated their homes and several roads were shut down. No one was injured.
But a copy of the manifest obtained by The Associated Press — and signed jointly by representatives of Union Pacific and Philip Services — appears to show that the car contained 13,000 gallons of sulfuric and hydrofluoric acids, materials that the manifest indicates were loaded onto the tanker in Fernley, Nev.