Rail Roulette

Plus, there are no Louisville rail bypasses - just a limited number of lines (eight) entering or leaving the city via tracks owned by biggies CSX and Norfolk Southern and the smaller-fry Paducah & Louisville, Louisville & Indiana and R.J. Corman Railroad Group, handling dozens of trains a day. "We can't think of this as a highway system," said Scott Jensen, spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, a trade association representing North American chemical companies. "Each railroad owns its own tracks" as well as the locomotives pulling a train, while the cars are owned or leased by manufacturer/suppliers. So the idea of ironing out and building a bypass-trackage system is next to inconceivable. The long and short:

At least for Louisville, the safest, most secure commercially viable hazmat route is likely to remain the same route it is now.

Which makes preparing for hazmat-transport emergencies of paramount importance. The city's Emergency Management Agency (EMA), as well as MetroSafe (911), is headed by former Louisville Police Chief Doug Hamilton, the point person in a local network that involves the city's 19 fire districts, six EMS districts and eight police divisions. Should a 911 call come in from someone who has witnessed a derailment or smelled a peculiar odor near a tanker car marked with a hazmat placard (all chemical cars are assigned four-digit contents numbers and warning signs issued by the Department of Transportation), EMA notifies fire, police and EMS and sends a specially trained fire hazmat unit to the site. "Our shop never closes," said Hamilton. "We have a hazmat unit on duty at all times - 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every day of the year. We as a community can grab hold of an incident and begin to manage it many times within four to six minutes."

To meet chemical-escape challenges, the Urban Service District of the Louisville Metro Fire Department has close to 100 hazmat technicians working in platooned four- to eight-technician teams that respond from three city stations. The other 18 Jefferson County fire districts field a combined three additional 24-hour teams. Hamilton said that when a 911 hazmat-suspected call comes in, he allots about a minute to rudimentary information gathering - to ascertain what amount of danger exists; another minute to "knockout," which means getting personnel assembled and on the road; and four minutes to have the first-response team on the scene, where a more in-depth assessment of the incident's severity can be made. Should the level of danger warrant it, there are 120 warning sirens in Jefferson County at the ready. "We have the ability to sound one of them, all of them, quadrants of them," Hamilton said, as well as issue instructions on 1610-AM, the EMA's dedicated radio band. There would be local commercial TV and radio warning interruptions as well.

"You still have to plan that not everybody is paying attention," he said. Not only would emergency vehicles "run up and down the streets with their sirens going, but firefighters would be going house-to-house." In most instances involving a hazmat chemical-vapor release, especially with any kind of wind, people would be instructed to "shelter in place," meaning they should go inside and stay put, close all doors and windows and plug any cracks, and shut off their air-conditioning or heating systems, which pull in outside air, until informed of an all-clear. More serious situations might call for area evacuations until the danger is over.