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Rail Roulette

Louisville, Jan 2008 by Welch, Jack

Crescent Hill is, by all accounts, a picturesque neighborhood. With its Victorian houses, locally owned shops and restaurants, and old Main Street feel, it's like a small town in the middle of a large city. Longtime Louisville mayor Jerry Abramson is a resident. And part of the charm, for locals and the East End suburbanites who venture in for a taste of urban hubbub, is the rail line running alongside Frankfort Avenue, whose freight trains imbue a sense of authentic Americana to the whole experience of being there.

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It must be blissful ignorance - or denial - that allows them to appreciate the presence of a diesel-fueled behemoth that most likely includes tank cars containing chemicals that are toxic or corrosive or flammable enough to be labeled "hazardous materials," or hazmat for short - from chlorine to anhydrous ammonia to sulfuric acid. Safely contained and delivered, they are harmless. Allowed to escape in a densely populated area during transport, whether by accident or post-9/1 1 sabotage, the result could be catastrophic.

It was a year ago, on Jan. 16, that 25 cars of an 80-car CSX Transportation train heading north toward Louisville derailed near the Bullitt County town of Brooks, including several tank cars carrying such hazardous chemicals as butadiene, methylethyl ketone and cyclohexane (whose straight-chain cousin, hexane, caused Old Louisville's 1981 sewer explosions). Fourteen cars, including four containing the three toxic inhalants mentioned above, went up in flames and thick black smoke, and 500 people living within a one-mile radius of the conflagration had to be evacuated - though no one died, thanks much to the dissipating power of the wind that day. Had the accident happened in any of a dozen concentrated Louisville neighborhoods intersected by freight rail lines, with many homes within 60 feet of the tracks, the human toll would surely have been considerable.

The cause of the derailment, CSX found, was a broken wheel bolt, although the official cause is yet to be determined by the National Transportation Safety Board, according to Zoneton Fire Department assistant chief Kevin Moulpon, who noted that "all the wrecked cars are still in a fenced-in area on the other side of the street from where the incident happened." One of the derailed cars, Moulpon said, was an empty chlorine tank car. Chlorine, officials from the Federal Railroad Administration, Association of American Railroads and American Chemistry Council all agree, is one of the most lethal chemicals in existence; as a military weapon, heavier-than-air chlorine gas killed thousands of soldiers in their trenches in World War I. Its primary use is in the production of the hard-plastic building material polyvinyl chloride, or PVC - molded into plumbing and sewer pipes, house siding, even window and door casings. Mixed with hazmat softeners called phthalates, PVC yields garden hoses, foam insulation, charge cards and iPods. So, dangerous as chlorine is - it and fertilizer/explosive anhydrous ammonia account for 70 percent of rail-shipped toxic inhalants - the chemical supplies a large component of our consumer economy, as does butadiene, used to make everything from golf-club heads and football helmets to LEGOs and tattoo inks.

(Historically, chlorine has also been used by the Louisville Water Co. to purify drinking water and by the Metropolitan Sewer District to disinfect sewage pipes. In 1999, recognizing the posed danger, MSD switched from ordering chlorine by the 90-ton tanker to using a diluted form of sodium hypochlorite akin to household bleach, and the water company is finalizing designs for its own chlorine-generation facility, slated to be completed by the end of 2009, ending its need for chlorine deliveries by rail.)

Although Federal Railroad Administration statistics show that the number of train accidents and derailments has decreased over each of the past three years and that the year-by-year percentages of accidental hazmat releases are miniscule - in 2005, for instance, 99.997 percent of rail hazmat shipments reached their destinations without a release - the statistics also show that 2,000 or more train derailments (of all kinds, not just hazmat) do occur nationwide each year. So the risk of serious incidents is substantial.

A few examples from 2007: In August, a runaway tank car holding 34,500 gallons of chlorine rolled off a siding track just south of Las Vegas and, at speeds up to 50 mph, traveled 20 miles through the city before slowing down on an incline north of town. In September, a derailment on the outskirts of Eunice, La., forced the evacuation of 2,500 people and left 30 cars carrying such hazardous chemicals as dichloropropane, methyl chloride, toluene diisocyanate, hexane, acrylic acid and phenol in a precarious pile as two cars of plastics burned. In October, 13 cars holding either liquefied petroleum gas or ethanol ignited near the town of Paintsville, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of 1,000 residents. Also in October, several thousand gallons of toxic-vapor-producing hydrochloric acid spilled from a derailed tanker outside Clara City, Minn., driving 400 people from their homes.

Rail Roulette

Louisville, Jan 2008 by Welch, Jack

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