News / Evacuations as burning sulphur spills from another US freight train derailment

Photo: © Tony Dezenzio

Another US freight train derailment forced the evacuation of residents in Livingston, Kentucky, on Wednesday.

Some 16 cars of the CSX train derailed and caught fire at 2.30pm, two of them tank cars carrying molten sulphur. Kentucky governor Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency.

Authorities were still testing for sulphur dioxide, the gas formed when molten sulphur burns and which is removed from ship exhausts by EGS ‘scrubber’ systems. In relatively small amounts, it can cause breathing difficulties, while concentrations of over 1,000ppm are deadly.

Livingston resident Evelyn Gray told Kentucky news station WTVQ-TV, she “had a real bad asthma attack” as soon as the back door of her home was opened.

CSX spokesperson Bryan Tucker said the fire was “completely out” by Thursday afternoon.

A user-made map of train derailments thus far in 2023 now highlights more than 40 incidents, including three in Ohio, where residents of East Palestine are still said to be feeling the effects of a crash and chemical spill in February.

“We understand what’s going on,” one resident, Jami Wallace, told NewsNation last week, during a visit to the town by Ohio governor Mike DeWine. “When we still have children that are covered in rashes, when we still have children or a community suffering unexplained nosebleeds, we know that everything is not okay here.”

The emergency response to East Palestine came in for enormous criticism from lawmakers, including several who themselves had voted to relax safety standards for railroad operators. Safety bills mandating at least two crewmembers on cargo trains, as well as a bill to expand the use of electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, both proposed during the Obama era, were shot down under the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, The Loadstar finds the signatures of several vocal critics of the emergency response to East Palestine, including Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, on a 2021 letter to the Federal Railroad Administration, urging that in-person track inspections be dispensed with in favour of automated ones.

Precision scheduled railroading (PSR), a business ethos espoused by Class I railroad operators, has been deemed responsible for a number of derailments and other major rail accidents in the US, to the point where, rather than avoided, they are now considered a cost of doing business.

Systemic failings, including shortfalls in planned maintenance, excessively long and poorly assembled trains which cannot use sidings to avoid one another; and driver and engineer redundancies driven by cost-savings are all leading to problems, experts say.

At last week’s Rail Trends conference in New York, Surface Transportation Board (STB) chairman Martin Oberman excoriated the ‘big four’ Class Is Norfolk-Southern, BNSF, CSX and Union Pacific, as “monopolists”, and compared their laying-off of some 18.5% of staff pre-pandemic, and a further 10% since 2020, to an industrial lockout.

“While costing the US economy possibly hundreds of billions of dollars, the Class Is, over the last two-and-a-half years, saved roughly $4.8bn in payroll.

“During the same last two-and-a-half years, the Class Is have returned nearly $60bn to shareholders in stock buybacks and dividends… might the shareholders have been satisfied with only $55bn? Apparently not.”