(The following article by Scott Jenkins was published by the Salisbury Post on June 19.)
KANNAPOLIS, N.C. — Pam Scaggs and her family have a couple of comfortable-looking wicker chairs and a wooden swing on their North Ridge Avenue front porch.
But they have not enjoyed the furniture much lately.
North Ridge residents have, for the past six weeks, looked at a mess across the street from their homes. A Norfolk Southern hopper car involved in a May 7 accident still sits overturned beside the tracks.
One thing that bothers Scaggs and others is that the accident did not even occur where the hopper now sits. It happened further north up the tracks. The railroad company pulled the car to where it is now and left it.
Surrounded by plastic yellow tape, the upside-down car is flanked by the rusting wheels and axles that once carried it along the tracks and mounds of the white plastic pellets it carried to a milk jug factory in Winston-Salem.
“This is where they dumped it, and it’s just been sitting there,” Scaggs said Wednesday. “How would you like to look out your window and see that every morning?”
Scaggs and next-door neighbor Dawn Campbell put handmade signs in their front yards recently to voice their displeasure. “What day is trash day for Norfolk Southern?” one sign asked.
Heavy rains destroyed the signs and the neighbors did not replace them. But they have made inquiries to Norfolk Southern and officials with the city, Scaggs said.
She spoke with one Norfolk Southern representative.
“Although he was very nice, he basically told me it was sitting on Norfolk Southern property and they would move it when they move it,” Scaggs said.
A Norfolk Southern spokeswoman said this morning that cleaning up the debris and disposing of the car involves several steps overseen by several different people.
Susan Bland said the company has to remove the pellets inside the hopper, then move the car and remove the pellets underneath. Norfolk Southern will then get another company to dismantle the junked car for scrap metal.
Workers have already started gathering up the pellets and should be finished by Friday, she said.
“We should have this done by the Fourth of July weekend,” Bland said today. “We appreciate their patience. Sometimes, these things take a little while.”
City officials say they have tried to speed up the process, but there was not much they could do, since the railroad company owns the land.
Kannapolis City Manager Mike Mahaney said the city has asked the N.C. Department of Transportation to pressure Norfolk Southern to move the tanker.
He said Kannapolis has been forced to “fight them on a number of things.”
The city is fining the company $100 a day for junk it has left lying around the old train depot on North Main Street. But it is trying to resolve the latest matter without opening a new code-enforcement case.
“They move at their own pace,”Mahaney said.
Meanwhile, Scaggs said, she and her neighbors will have to wait a while longer to enjoy their front porches.
“We used to have a beautiful view of the sunset,” she said. “We can’t even see the sunset anymore.”