(The following article by Tim Sheehan appeared on the Fresno Bee website on August 12.)
ALPAUGH, Calif. — Nineteen cars of a freight train derailed Monday morning in southwestern Tulare County, tearing up a quarter-mile of track and disrupting freight and passenger rail service in the southern San Joaquin Valley.
The cars were part of a 33-car train bound from Fresno to Bakersfield along the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway line. The derailment happened about 9:20 a.m. along Highway 43 just south of Avenue 56, a few miles from Alpaugh.
Rail cars were scattered like toys on steel rails that had been twisted like spaghetti. The stout wooden ties that normally hold the rails in place were chewed up as though by a wood chipper, and steel spikes and other debris littered the ground along the track.
Two overturned tankers were loaded with ammonium nitrate, a liquid fertilizer, according to Joel Martins, an environmental health specialist with the Tulare County Health and Human Services Agency. One of the cars spilled several hundred gallons of the fertilizer onto the ground near the tracks, but environmental and fire officials quickly determined that the chemical posed no health threat.
“It’s not real dangerous, but they tell us you wouldn’t want to bathe in it,” said Phil Brown, a battalion chief with the Tulare County Fire Department/California Department of Forestry.
Four other overturned cars were hauling tomato paste.
No injuries were reported in the accident.
Railroad officials said they didn’t know what caused the crash.
Steve Forsberg, the railroad’s director of public affairs, said the train was traveling about 55 mph when the cars derailed. The route — Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s main freight line through the Valley — handles an average of 30 freight trains a day, he said.
Sparks from the accident caused a small grass fire on the west side of the tracks, but Brown said firefighters quickly contained it to a few acres.
Highway 43, adjacent to the tracks, was closed in southwestern Tulare County from Avenue 56 to Avenue 24; the California Highway Patrol said the road was expected to reopen late Monday or early this morning.
Frank W. Comiskey, general manager of BNSF’s Northern California division, was helping to assess the damage as heavy equipment began clearing the jumbled cars off the demolished track.
Comiskey said railroad crews would work through the night to remove the wreckage and install new track. He estimated that the tracks would reopen about 3 a.m. today.
“We’ll probably have between 75 and 100 people at some points during the night,” Comiskey said.
The railroad was rerouting a small number of its trains with high-priority cargo onto the Union Pacific railroad line between Bakersfield and Fresno, Comiskey said.
At the Hanford Amtrak station, ticket clerk Jim Forrer said the derailment was proving to be an inconvenience to his passengers.
Passengers on Amtrak’s San Joaquin trains — which share the BNSF line — were being bused between Hanford and Bakersfield through much of Monday, Forrer said. Passengers heading south came by rail as far as Hanford before they and their luggage were loaded onto buses for Bakersfield.
“Today hasn’t been as busy as yesterday,” Forrer said Monday afternoon. “We’ve had about 200 people on the trains so far today. On Sunday, it was more like 300.”
Later in the day, Forrer said, southbound trains were expected to be halted in Fresno and passengers bused between Fresno and Bakersfield. Railroad officials said they hoped to keep the sidings in Hanford clear to make reopening the line easier this morning.
Amtrak’s San Joaquin line runs six trains north and six south each day. Forrer said between 20 and 40 passengers usually catch the train in Hanford each day.