Hazardous train cargo poses increasing threat to populated areas; system flawed
Trains hauling aging, substandard tank cars loaded with deadly chemicals pass through cities and towns across the United States every day, carrying their dangerous cargo past homes, schools, hospitals and busy highways.
I didn't consider them a serious hazard until a Union Pacific freight train derailed last year in a densely populated neighborhood of San Bernardino, a working-class city in inland Southern California. The wreck left a jumble of tank cars piled along the tracks. Among the chemicals on board: pressurized chlorine gas, a substance used to kill soldiers in World War I trenches.
The railroad company and the local authorities gave the impression the accident was no big deal. No one died and no one was injured, although hundreds of residents had to leave their homes for more than two days.
But an investigation by four Press-Enterprise reporters found cause for concern.
Locally, we found an ineffective track inspection that overlooked obvious track defects that, only three days later, caused the derailment. Chemical cargo was misidentified, a federal violation and an obstacle for emergency responders who needed to know what was in the derailed tank cars. A 26-year-old tank car full of chlorine gas was cracked, although no chemical escaped. Miscommunication between the railroad and police allowed hundreds of residents to return to their homes before it was safe.
The San Bernardino wreck, we found, was a symptom of a national hazard that claimed more lives in 2005 than in the previous 20 years combined.
Limited track
San Bernardino had escaped a disaster. Other communities were not so fortunate. Minot, N.D., and Graniteville, S.C., are still recovering from deadly chemical clouds released in train wrecks.
Nationwide, we found many tank cars that are more than 30 years old and more than half made with steel that doesn't meet the current standards, set in 1989.
We also discovered that the railroad industry and Federal Railroad Administration remain reluctant to make changes that safety officials have been seeking for years.
Our work faced the obstacle of post-9/11 official secrecy. We wanted to know what kinds and amounts of chemicals are hauled through our coverage area, principally Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Railroad companies and their state regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission, refused to release such data, arguing that a terrorist could use the information to plan an attack.
With repeated public records requests and the help of an attorney, we were able to get accident reports kept by the utilities commission.
We got an idea of the types of chemicals rolling through our region by analyzing 12 years of U.S. Department of Transportation data on hazardous materials spills. This data showed that San Bernardino County had more spills from trains than any other county in the nation.
Commodity data kept by U.S. Census Bureau provided national numbers showing that the volume of hazardous materials transported by rail had increased substantially since the 1990s. Local transportation agencies had rail traffic data showing that more and more trains are crowding onto a limited amount of track, increasing the likelihood of accidents in Southern California.
Our transportation reporter, Phil Pitchford, spent two days in the isolated desert town of Barstow, where train crews often spend the night between work shifts. He explored the train crews' view of hazardous cargo in several interviews with engineers and other railroad workers. Pitchford wrote the first draft of the main story and kept updating as the reporting evolved, a strategy that was tremendously helpful as deadline approached.
Mark Kawar, a business writer who covers railroads, worked industry, government and academic sources that provided expert commentary on increasing rail traffic and the industry's pace in making safety improvements.
General assignment reporter Ben Goad focused on the San Bernardino accident and the emergency response. He also pursued San Bernardino residents' complaints about liability waivers the railroads circulated after the derailment and evacuation. Many of the residents did not speak English and said they did not understand the documents they said they were pressured to sign.
I usually write about air pollution and other environmental issues. For this project, I focused on getting every public record I could find, including National Transportation Safety Board reports dating to the 1980s that detailed the board's repeated efforts to improve the safety of hazardous-materials shipments on trains.
We farther collaborated with Ray Carnes, a computer modeling expert with ESRI, a mapping software company based in Redlands, Calif. Using updated census tract data, he gave us a sense of how severe of catastrophic release of chlorine could be in our area. His calculations became the starting point of a "what-if ' graphic and Flash graphic.
