(The following story by Sylvain Metz appeared on the Clarion Ledger website on July 11.)
YAZOO COUNTY, Miss. — The bodies of two men were pulled today from the wreckage of two freight-train locomotives that collided head-on early Sunday in the Anding community. That brings the confirmed death toll to three.
Rescue workers are continuing their search for another crew member missing and feared dead following the head-on collision — the second in Mississippi in two weeks — at about 4 a.m. Sunday. The body of a fourth crew member was recovered from wreckage Sunday.
Neither Yazoo County Coroner Ricky Shivers nor officials with the National Transportation Safety Board will identify the dead, but said that they are Mississippi residents.
But one of the four was identified by his mother as conductor Shannon Purvis, 21, of Puckett.
“He was a good child. He loved the work,” said his mother, Sarah McDaniel, who had been keeping a vigil at the crash site. She said her son began working for the railroad three years ago.
“He loved the railroad,” she said. “His life has been taken from him.”
Both paid and volunteer firefighters worked late into Sunday night to put out the blaze that consumed several locomotives, said Sheriff James T. Williams.
The crash prompted evacuation of the rural Yazoo County site north of Bentonia and two miles west of Little Yazoo, Williams said. He said about 50 residents were affected, with about 20 being sent to the L.T. Miller Community Center in nearby Yazoo City.
By today, all homeowners in the area but one had been allowed to return to their residences.
On June 28, five crew members were injured, two critically, in a fiery head-on collision on a west Jackson railroad track in a wooded area near Westhaven Drive at Clinton Boulevard involving two Kansas City Southern freight trains. The cause of that accident is still under investigation.
During a noon news conference near the Anding crash site, NTSB officials would not say what they believe caused the crash. An investigation is continuing, said Debbie Hersman, a member of the safety board for the NTSB.
But she did say that of the 140 to 150 head-on collisions of freight trains that occur in the United States each year, 80 to 90 percent are chalked up to human error.
That would include cases of train operators falling asleep or becoming fatigued, employees not following procedure and employees not following signals, Hersman said.
She said that investigators have yet to locate the “black boxes” located on the locomotives in Sunday’s wreck. The boxes contain vital computerized information that includes the speed of the trains and if they attempted to brake, she said.
The train wreckage and derailed cars should be cleared from the 500-foot damage site by sometime this afternoon, officials at the site said.
Goat and chicken farmer Richard Isonhood, 62, said he heard the Sunday crash but thought nothing of it until he was rousted out of bed by the sheriff’s department.
“They told us it was poisonous gas,” Isonhood said. “They told me the gas would kill my animals.”
Firefighters from Yazoo City, along with volunteers from Bentonia, Tri-Community, Benton and Eden volunteer fire departments, fought the blaze fed by diesel fuel and other lubricants carried by the two Canadian National Railroad trains.
Mary Johnston, who lives with her mother less than a half-mile from the crash site, said the collision shook their home. Johnston made her way to the site and saw the fire and smoke. “It scared me,” she said.
A hazardous material team from the rail company and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality were on the scene, but left by mid- to late morning, said Nash Nunnery, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. The trains collided on a bridge crossing at Anding Oil City Road, Williams said.
Karen Phillips, a spokeswoman for CNR, said 17 cars and six locomotives derailed.
The trains also were pulling seven “residue” cars, which carried residue of previous tanks of hazardous materials. Other cars carried liquefied petroleum gas, one full of isopropylamine gas (a cleaning solvent), one full of carbamate pesticide, three cars full of soybeans and two carrying clay, she said. None of the derailed cars leaked, Phillips said.
The northbound train from New Orleans, on its way to Iowa, had 137 cars and four locomotives, she said. The southbound train from Champaign, Ill., to Ferguson, had 107 cars and two locomotives, Phillips said.
The crossing had a signal, Phillips said.