(The following article by Patty Henetz was posted on the Salt Lake Tribune website on October 1.)
SALT LAKE CITY — Two years of volunteer trainspotting has yielded a list of 59 hazardous substances rolling down the Union Pacific tracks along 900 South, with five of those substances considered dangerous enough to be on a federal high-priority regis- try.
The Utah Federation for Youth, with a $20,000 grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, marshaled 20 volunteers to keep track of hazardous-materials placards posted on the sides of rail cars. Armed with a video camera, flashlights, notebooks and a lot of resolve, the youths matched the placard numbers against lists kept by emergency service providers who must respond in the event of train derailments.
While the volunteer project focused on the Union Pacific route through Glendale and Poplar Grove – and in fact got the Environmental Justice grant to study local environmental health concerns – organizers stress- ed the neighborhood was not unique.
“This is not necessarily specific to the 900 South line. It’s pretty much representative of the entire Union Pacific network in Salt Lake,” said 900 South Railroad Hazardous Substances Research Project coordinator Jeannine Davis during a Thursday news conference. “The best thing is for the community to be prepared and know what to expect in case of an emergency.”
Union Pacific spokesman Mark Davis agreed. In a telephone interview, Davis said he hadn’t seen the report, but applauded it. “This [report] would be an excellent way for the community to look at what is being transported and help first responders in the unlikely event of a spill.
“The numbers and statistics bear out the safety of the rail industry in the transport of hazardous materials,” Davis said. “It is something we work on constantly.”
Jeannine Davis, a 22-year-old Westminster College student, and Talon Ozmore, 18, an East High student who supervised the volunteers, got a big assist from former state lawmaker Fred Fife, who lives on 900 South and started monitoring the trains a year before the grant program started.
The trains, with their attendant noise and safety issues, have been a problem for Fife and others along the 900 South corridor since Union Pacific’s decision to reactivate it in 2001, despite city plans to convert what had long been considered an abandoned line to a trail that would connect The Gateway with the Jordan River Parkway.
The trains were rerouted during the 2002 Winter Olympics. Then, in December 2002, seven cars of a 46-car train traveling at about 15 mph derailed on the line. One of the cars spilled a small amount of lime. Other cars were carrying sodium cyanide and anhydrous ammonia, which Salt Lake City Fire Department spokesman Scott Freitag said were flammable, toxic and “very dangerous to humans, wildlife and the environment.” Had those cars tipped, residents in a one-mile radius would have been forced to leave the area.
After that, Fife and a neighbor referred to an old hazmat manual to figure out what the numbered placards meant.
He has been jotting down the data ever since, and figures there’s “no question” a toxic spill is a possibility.
Volunteers, many of whom lived within walking distance of the tracks, didn’t know when the trains might come, but nevertheless managed to monitor 200 trains from January 2002 through this September, logging more than 1,000 hours on the project.
They found that the most abundant toxin the trains carry through the neighborhood is sulfuric acid, a colorless, odorless component of phosphate fertilizers and some explosives.
High levels will kill plants and animals that come in contact with it.
The volunteers also found that the trains carried chlorine, ammonia, aluminum, toluene and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs – all found on the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act list, also known as Superfund. The full report can be found on the Web at http://www.ufyi.org.
Mayor Rocky Anderson and the city have been working with Union Pacific to get the trains off the 900 South line. But in order to do that, a bottleneck known as Grant Tower, west of The Gateway, would have to be realigned to allow the trains to pass at 40 mph instead of the 5 to 10 mph now necessary.
Union Pacific has given the city until Sept. 30, 2007, to find the $40 million necessary to eliminate the curves. The company has pledged $4.5 million. The city has asked for $1 million from the federal government, but the rest of the funding is proving elusive.