(The following article by Maureen Nolan and Diana LaMattina was posted on the Syracuse Post-Standard website on November 20.)
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — A CSX freight train derailed Saturday in Central Square, leaving six tanker cars carrying hazardous chemicals neatly tucked against one another sidewise across the tracks, nearly in the backyards of a handful of houses.
“They look like a package of hot dogs,” a firefighter said.
A total of 28 cars in the 122-car train derailed about 2:45 p.m., said CSX spokesman Gary Sease, reached by telephone in Jacksonville, Fla. The derailment was near the Route 11 bridge over the railroad, north of where Dry Bridge Road dead-ends at the tracks.
That’s two miles north of Brewerton, just north of the Onondaga-Oswego County line.
Terry Bennett, speaking for the Oswego County Emergency Management Office, said four of the cars contained chlorine and two contained sodium hydroxide.
The chlorine was in the form of liquefied gas and the sodium hydroxide was a liquid. One of the cars carrying sodium hydroxide was leaking Saturday night, Sease said.
“It is a caustic agent that is not particularly hazardous,” Sease said. “Our hazardous materials team said it was similar to Drano.”
CSX had teams reporting to 8
the crash site to help reposition the cars and pick through the rubble to get to the source of the leak, Sease said. Sease and officials at the scene said no one was injured, including the two men operating the train.
Bennett said she did not know the cause of the derailment. It remained under investigation Saturday night.
Officials said they had alerted neighbors and were prepared to evacuate them if needed.
Matt Barling, 23, lives on Dry Bridge Road near the derailment. He said his mother, Linda, heard a loud bang like thunder.
“At first, we couldn’t figure out what it was,” he said. “We thought it was a tractor-trailer that fell off the (U.S. Route 11) bridge.
“Then we looked through binoculars, and we saw it was a train.”
He said some of the cylindrical tanker cars “looked like a hot dog pack all lined up.”
Others went over a high embankment beside the tracks, he said.
“Some flipped over the embankment, and went end over end into the front yard of my buddy’s residence,” he said. “It’s a giant mess.”
Emile Godard, 82, who lives two houses from the tracks on Mohawk Avenue, said firefighters suggested he leave his house about 3 p.m.
“I was told it would be a good idea to leave, but there was no obligation,” he said. “I was on my own.”
He said his wife, Annette, 81, can’t walk, so he told the firefighters he wouldn’t leave unless the situation became dangerous.
“I could see from my back yard all the cars piled up,” he said. “Sometimes, they go by too darn fast on that curve” across U.S. Route 11.
Another neighbor, Andrea Martino, 22, of Thelma Road, said the situation was “a little scary.”
“I hope they get it cleaned up soon,” she said Saturday night.
The Central Square and Brewerton fire departments, Oswego County hazardous material team, New York state police, state Department of Environmental Conservation police and spill control workers, and CSX staff were among the agencies that responded to the scene.
From the Route 11 bridge over the tracks onlookers could see buckled and bent cars, some piled on one another, strewn around the tracks. If the accident site hadn’t been located in a gully, the derailed cars could have traveled farther, Central Square Assistant Fire Chief Scott House said.
Officials blocked traffic from Route 11 on either side of the bridge and from a small stretch of Route 49, where it crosses the tracks.
House said he’s been a firefighter in Central Square for 30 years and this is the first time he’s seen a train derailment there.
The train, which included four locomotives, originated in Canada and was traveling to the DeWitt railyard, Sease said.
The train was a “mixed-freight,” which means it could carry anything from building supplies to newsprint to chlorine.
Bennett said the cleanup was in the hands of CSX, which was sending in heavy equipment and a hazardous materials team. Bulldozers and an excavator arrived Saturday night and were at work, apparently creating an access road to the scene.