We may not know the hazards trains carry through the Triangle, but first responders do

The train derailment that unleashed streams of hazardous chemicals and clouds of toxic smoke on a small Ohio town this winter may have some people wondering what’s in the rail cars that pass through their communities.

Phillip McDaniel wonders sometimes. But McDaniel doesn’t have to guess.

McDaniel is the fire chief in Selma, the Johnston County town where busy tracks for both CSX and Norfolk Southern railroads pass through the center of town. When he’s stopped at a crossing, he’s often reading the placards on the sides of the train cars, looking for numbers he doesn’t recognize.

The numbers correspond to a particular chemical. Many of them, such as ethanol and chlorine, are familiar to McDaniel. But for those that are not, he carries the Emergency Response Guidebook or ERG, where he can quickly look up any number on the placards to learn the chemical in each car and what his firefighters should do if that chemical ever leaks or catches fire.

“The main thing, if we get an accident, is to understand what is there,” McDaniel said. “That Emergency Response Guidebook gives us guidelines to respond, from evacuation areas, what to do if it is on fire, what to do if it’s leaking, etc. Even goes down to personal protective equipment we have to wear around it. It’s very detailed.”

Railroads aren’t required to tell local authorities or the public in advance what hazardous materials they plan to bring through their communities. The state Division of Emergency Management receives quarterly reports of planned “high hazard” trains, those carrying large amounts of flammable liquids. In addition, county emergency management agencies can get summaries of the chemicals that companies move through their communities by rail.

Neither the railroads nor the government agencies make those reports public, citing security.

But local first responders say they have tools and training to help them quickly assess what’s in a particular rail car and to prepare for accidents big and small.

This week, the National Transportation Safety Board will hold public hearings in East Palestine, Ohio, to learn more about the derailment there. On Feb. 3, 38 cars from a Norfolk Southern train jumped the tracks on the edge of town, including 11 carrying hazardous materials that caught fire. As many as 2,000 people were evacuated within a mile of the crash site.

It took two days to bring the fire under control. But then authorities noticed that the temperature inside a car carrying vinyl chloride was still rising, suggesting an explosion was possible. The evacuation zone was expanded to two miles as vinyl chloride from five tank cars was gradually released and burned.

The accident brought calls for more regulation and better handling of hazardous materials on rail cars. It also prompted fire departments and other first responders across the country to review their plans for how they would respond if it happened in their community.

“When something like the Ohio incident happens, you kind of take a look at it and start asking some questions and make sure we are prepared for something that happens like that,” said Jim Cole, deputy chief of emergency operations at the Durham Fire Department. “I feel that we are prepared for something like that.”

Chemical leaks from train accidents are rare

An accident as large as the one in Ohio would bring first responders from around the region. That would include one of seven teams of firefighters statewide with the equipment and training to handle hazardous materials. The Triangle’s Hazardous Materials Regional Response Team is based at the Raleigh Fire Department, which has 80 hazmat firefighters, including 45 with special training in responding to accidents involving trucks and rail cars, said Fire Chief Herbert Griffin.

Griffin said the Raleigh department trains with CSX and Norfolk Southern annually on such tasks as capping chemical leaks and depressurizing tanks cars. Other area fire departments take part in these training exercises as well.

Norfolk Southern says it trained 5,000 first responders nationwide last year through a program that uses a special train with classrooms and retired tank cars for hands-on exercises. CSX has a similar training program.

Train accidents that release hazardous chemicals are rare in North Carolina. Since 2006, there have been eight, according to the Federal Railroad Administration, none resulting in fires or explosions. The largest by volume was 392,700 pounds of ammonia nitrate from two cars that derailed after heavy rain undermined CSX tracks in McDowell County in late 2018.

Evacuations are also rare. In 2013, about 500 people were evacuated as a precaution after nine CSX train cars, including one carrying toxic anhydrous ammonia, derailed in Bladenboro, 100 miles south of Raleigh, though none leaked. Two people were evacuated when about 6,200 gallons of sodium hydroxide spilled at a Norfolk Southern switching yard in Durham in 2009.

App helps firefighters know what’s in a train car

The first step in responding to any incident involving a freight train is to determine whether it is carrying hazardous materials and if so what kind.

First responders can tell something about what a train car is carrying by its shape and color. They’re trained to tell the difference between tank cars carrying chemicals under pressure, for example, from those that are not.

“Most rail cars you see are black,” Griffin, the Raleigh fire chief, said. “Sometimes you see the white ones with those fluorescent stripes. That’s a bad chemical coming through.”

The second step is to read the placards on the sides and ends of the cars to determine what’s in each one, even if firefighters have to see the numbers through binoculars.

If they can’t get to a rail car or read the numbers, first responders can get a manifest from the engineer at the front of the train or use an app, called AskRail, to see what materials are on the train and where those cars are located. The AskRail app was created in 2014 by the country’s largest freight rail companies in conjunction with first responders.

“It’s updated every time a train stops,” McDaniel said. “If they stop in Virginia and pick up three cars, there’s a new list.”

From there, first responders would consult the ERG to help them decide what to do next.

Freight railroad companies argue that moving hazardous materials by rail is far safer than by truck, and many emergency responders agree. There are far more variables that can cause a truck to crash, notes Dominic Minor, a hazardous materials planner with Durham County Emergency Management.

“With trucks, you’ve got to worry about other drivers on the road; how safely the driver of that truck is acting; how they package the materials on the truck; the weather conditions,” Minor said.

Indeed, the large majority of emergency railroad calls in the Triangle involve people or cars getting hit by trains, Minor said. But he and other local first responders say they are ready for something worse.

“Something like Ohio would be terrible if it happened in downtown Durham or anywhere in Durham,” he said. “But it’s something that, as a community, we’d be able to respond to and also be able to count on the support from our neighboring communities as well.”