Rolling Fright

Most of the farmland community of Crete, Neb., was asleep last month when 19 cars of a Burlington freight train jumped track on the outskirts of town.

The cars slammed into a tank car parked on a siding, rupturing it and allowing its cargo of anhydrous ammonia fertilizer to escape. Within minutes, a deadly, all-enveloping mist hovered over the vicinity. Sleeping in their house near the tracks, Ron Hatchett, 21, and his small daughter died almost instantly. So did an elderly couple living nearby and another man a few houses away. Besides the five in Crete, the accident killed three men riding the rails and hospitalized 18 other people with ammonia inhalation and burns.

Overdue Measures. "This is what we've been warning people about for months," says Chairman Joseph O'Connell of the National Transportation Safety Board (TIME, May 10). The tiny agency (250 staffers), which has no enforcement power, has been trying to get railroads to adopt long-overdue safety measures. Derailments are the leading cause of train accidents, which increased by 71% between 1961 and 1968. "With the railroads hauling more hazardous materials, the potential for catastrophic accidents bothers the hell out of me," says O'Connell.

This week the Safety Board is investigating a Southern Railway derailment in Laurel, Miss., where 13 tank cars loaded with liquid petroleum gas skipped track and exploded. Ten square blocks of Laurel were set afire and two of the townfolk were killed.

The powerful Association of American Railroads' lobby has managed to block broad federal legislation that would set minimum safety standards like those required of airlines. A regulatory bill introduced during the last session of Congress got only as far as the House Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee, where it suffered a quiet death.

Clearly, the escalating number of train wrecks across the country is not caused by mere happenstance. Clacking over dilapidated roadbeds at ever higher speeds, the railroads are carrying heavier and more dangerous loads.

Until Laurel and Crete, few lives had been lost, a fact that O'Connell considers miraculous. During January 1968 alone there were 576 derailments. At Dunreith, Ind., 250 residents had to be evacuated for 48 hours after two freight trains sideswiped, releasing flammable and poisonous liquids that resulted in a ten-hour fire and a huge explosion. The fire destroyed a cannery--Dunreith's major industry--and seven houses; cyanide pollution of the water persisted for several months. The wreck, which cost the railroad $ 1,000,000, was caused by a defective rail that would have cost $50 to repair.

Deadly Stock. Among other near disasters, 15 cars carrying explosives were derailed on Milwaukee's south side. A Sante Fe railway car carrying 750-lb. bombs jumped the tracks near North Avondale, Colo. Fortunately, the bombs did not explode. The 2,300 residents of Chadbourne, N.C., had to leave town when a twelve-car freight carrying ammunition was derailed.

During the past six months, the Army has transported "diversified chemical stocks" from its Rocky Mountain Arsenal after a group of scientists protested that the material--stored only ten miles from Denver--consisted of "one billion lethal doses" of nerve gas. The chemicals were moved by tank cars to Utah's Tooele Army Depot via Salt Lake City. The shipments arrived safely, but the route is as derailment-prone as any in the U.S. Along those same Union Pacific tracks, and during the same period, there were three major freight-train derailments.

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