Washington – Trains carrying poisonous gases should be required to go slowly through populated areas, say safety officials who investigated a crash that killed nine people when it released chlorine gas on Graniteville, S.C.
Early on the morning of Jan. 6, a Norfolk Southern train veered off the main track onto a spur, rear-ending a parked train whose crew hadn’t returned the hand-operated switch to its original position, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded. The switch would have kept the moving train on the main rail.
The derailment punctured a tank car carrying 90 tons of chlorine, and the toxic cloud that escaped killed the train engineer and eight others. Another 250 people were injured and 5,400 evacuated.
It was the worst train wreck involving hazardous materials in 30 years, but not the only fatal one. On Jan. 18, 2002, a 112-car Canadian Pacific Railway train derailed in Minot, N.D., spewing 146,700 gallons of anhydrous ammonia into the air, killing one person and seriously injuring 11. A June 28 train crash near Macdona, Texas, released chlorine that killed the train’s conductor and two women in a nearby house.
New standards for sturdier tank cars are in the works but won’t be implemented soon.
The NTSB recommended that railroads in the meantime run trains in ways less likely to result in crashes. One of those ways is to slow down in populated areas. Just how slow is up to railroad regulators, said Mark Rosenker, the board’s acting chairman.
