A tranquil Saturday night spent listening to tunes was abruptly interrupted when Mike Jones spied an alert for a train derailment on his phone. The Free Press sat down with Jones, who has been with the Fredericksburg Fire Department for the past 41 years — serving as its chief for the past four — to discuss the derailment, his department’s response and his takeaways from the incident.
Editor’s note: The following interview has been edited only lightly, for length and clarity purposes.
Free Press: With CSX freight trains like the one involved in Saturday’s derailment, how frequently are those types of trains carrying hazardous chemicals?
Fredericksburg Fire Chief Mike Jones: Every day. Yeah. Probably every train.
FP: So, it was fortuitous that they weren’t in this case?
MJ: Well, now you’ve got to realize that the section of cars that ran down the hill from Mayfield and got derailed, you’ve got to realize that there were five cars that derailed. The first two were open cars that had scrap in them.
The third car that took out the sound wall was a car that was loaded with soybean mixture. Okay. And that soybean mixture looked like cornmeal.
The next car that the trucks, they call them the trucks, which is the actual rails or wheels that came off of was a box car. It was empty. And the next car back that stayed upright, but just jumped off the track was full of lime, like lime you put on your lawn or everything like that, not like limes.
All the cars, the next eight cars past that, that stayed on the rails and didn’t drop had molten sulfur in them. Molten sulfur is a hazardous material. And if it gets out of its container, it can cause problems.
It did not. There were no leaks. There were no spills, anything like that. Everything was good to go. But just about every freight train every day that comes through here has some type of hazardous materials on it.
Whether it’s liquefied petroleum gas, whether it’s chlorine, whether it’s sodium hydroxide, whether it’s molten sulfur, whether it’s ethanol, whether it’s some type of acrylic or something like that.
I mean, it just depends on what they need and where they need to move it to move through this area. Again, remember on a weekday between VRE Amtrak passenger service and CSX freight, they average around 96 trains a day. Yeah.
It’s about four an hour. And that’s a lot of movement back and forth. So when you think about the number of derailments we’ve had in Fredericksburg since I’ve been here, which has been 41 years, we’ve had four. Yeah. So that’s about one every 10 years.
So again, is that great? No. But is it terrible? No. And considering the amount of traffic that runs up and down the rails every day, that’s a minuscule amount of problem.
FP: How, how did you hear the call? What were you doing when you when you heard the initial call go to your dispatch?
MJ: Well, I was at home like a lot of people on Saturday night, just kind of listening to some music on the computer. On my phone, I have what is known as ‘Active 911. ‘So anytime that the dispatch office drops a call, I get notified of the call.
It could be a medical emergency. It can be a structure fire. It can be a gas leak. It can be anything. So I pulled that up and looked at it and it said train derailment. So I immediately went over to the app on my phone that allows me to listen to the dispatchers.
And I did that. And it said report of a train derailment. I said, ‘Hmm, that’s not good. I said, well, let me see if I can get a unit on the scene and give me a report.’
Sometimes they’re very simple. The last one we had was in 2013, what happened is the locomotive and four cars jumped the track and they sat all upright right there. And all they had to do was re-rail them. There were no leaks.
That was up on the spur line that goes back besides Pepsi Cola in the Spotsylvania Industrial Park over there off Shannon Park Drive. So it could be something simple like that.
And then the return [call] was, we have a report of a train derailment with a sound wall knocked down with a couple of garages collapsed. That’s not good.
I got up, got my vehicle and came back to town. The first unit marked on the scene said we’ve got four garages collapsed and we’ve got a sound wall down. Looks like we’ve got a train derailment.
FP: What’s your priority upon reaching the scene of the derailment?
MJ: At that point, the incident commander got on the scene. He established incident command. You have a two-sided incident. So you’ve got an incident on the railway. You’ve got to have a group over there checking the rails and checking the tank cars and checking everything else to see what kind of hazards we have there.
You’ve got another group that’s got to be on the Cobblestone side checking to see if there is anybody in any of those garages. Do we have a life hazard? Do we have any other type of hazard? Things like that. So you’ve got a two-sided incident you’ve got to work.
You’ve got to pick your resources at both locations to try to do that. Once we determined that we only had five cars off the track and that we had no hazardous material leaks, those train cars weren’t going anywhere. They’d done the damage they were going to do.
The other side, simultaneously to that, was going through and punching holes into the walls of the neighboring garages and looking through and hollering in there and seeing if we had any people that were actually in the garages at the time they were collapsed. It’s sheet rock so you just knock a hole into it, look in there and we found there was a Cadillac in there.
There was a Jeep in there and there was a motorcycle in there and a bunch of people’s stuff that you normally put in garages that you don’t have in your house and everything like that. We hollered in there. We checked.
We got ahold of the people that owned those garages to make sure that they were out, and we didn’t have any life hazard in there. We determined that because some of those things pancaked down right on top of it.
When the sound wall was built, when they put those garages up, the back wall of the garage is right on the sound wall. So, if the sound wall comes down, the back wall is going to come down, the garage is going to collapse. I mean that’s pretty obvious. But we were fortunate, and it only took one section of the sound wall out.
Now, I’m not saying there aren’t other damages later on that they’ll have to put some type of transit on there and determine if that wall is sound or not, and I’m sure CSX and everybody else will work on that. But our concern was life hazard and then do we have any hazards that are going to cause damage to the property or the environment?
FP: How did you determine that there were no hazardous materials?
MJ: Our crews went in there and they started searching those areas and they searched as best they could. They determined there wasn’t a life hazard in the garages. So that’s one section.
Then you talk with the conductor and the people from CSX and say, ‘This is a freight train, correct?’ Yeah. Well the only life hazard you normally have on a freight train is the engineer and the conductor and they both ride in the locomotive.
So now we have to start worrying about property damage and damage to the environment. Those are the other two things we have to worry about. So we know we have property damage.
What can we do? Do we have to cordon off? We basically fire-line taped a lot of area and got people back away from it so that if we had any additional collapses that wouldn’t cause any additional problems. We made sure people weren’t in those garages, and then we want to make sure that the train cars don’t move and everything like that. We depend on CSX as experts to do that.
Their people showed up pretty quickly. I initially reported to the side where the train was. Saw what was going on there.
We had our crews across the tracks checking and making sure that there wasn’t any leak from the hazardous materials cars.
I went around to the Cobblestone side. Probably took me 15-20 minutes to get over there. By the time I had assessed the other side with the incident commander, when I got over there and I got out of my buggy, the hazardous materials officer from CSX was already there.
FP: How long did that process take?
MJ: Probably within a half hour of the time that the initial call came in, easily. He was right there. Now we’re fortunate the local hazardous materials officer for CSX and his boss both happen to live in Spotsylvania County. At least one of the two of them is or still is a volunteer fireman in Spotsylvania. They have knowledge of our business. They have knowledge of CSX so that helps getting on the scene and everything like that.
The problem becomes: ‘Do we have any leaks or spills that cause problems with the environment?’ We didn’t. We didn’t have any diesel fuel spills because there wasn’t a diesel locomotive there or anything. We didn’t have any hazardous materials spill.
We really didn’t have anything leaking out of the lime car and nothing out of the soybean car, and that’s really not going to cause environmental hazards.
FP: Until you got there and got that relayed to you, how worried were you about that potential?
MJ: You’re always worried about the potential because you don’t know what is on those sidings [side tracks]. We don’t know for sure exactly what’s on those sidings, and it moves from time to time as they move things back and forth.
Remember most of the stuff done in a yard is done from about two, three o’clock in the afternoon until around midnight. That’s when those guys really use the things back and forth in the yard. There’s not a lot going on in the morning and, again, they have a lot of crews over there that are car men and other things that work on the rails.
FP: How would you rate your department’s response?
MJ: I think they did an extremely good job. It’s not something you run into every day. We do have training on it fairly regularly, but a lot of it is caring and common sense and taking the knowledge you have of hazardous materials and the knowledge you have of firefighting and putting that together and then again life hazards, property damage, environment. If we can take care of all those three things then we take care of that, and they know what needs to be done.
FP: How many firefighters and EMS or rescue personnel from Fredericksburg were there?
MJ: We had a full response. An incident like that gets a full response from our organization, which is basically two engines, a ladder truck, a medic unit and a battalion chief who’s the incident commander, but we also get responses automatically from Stafford and Spotsylvania. They should each send an engine.
So all together initially we probably had about somewhere between 15 and 20 first responders on the scene. That doesn’t include law enforcement they had two or three officers there — a couple on Cobblestone, a couple over on the other side and then CSX will show up with their personnel.
Eventually, once we determined that there wasn’t a life hazard and that the property was damaged and no environmental (hazards) then we scaled the incident back. We kept it to the city units. We returned Stafford and Spotsylvania so they could handle their calls.
Remember, you’re putting a lot of assets that are close by from Spotsylvania and Stafford into the city to try to help out and if we needed it we would have used it but they also have incidents themselves. As soon as Spotsylvania cleared, they had a bad wreck down at New Post and they all haul freight down to New Post so it was good we were able to do that so they could concentrate their resources down there.
It takes a few minutes to get a handle on it but once you do at that point when you don’t have any leaks or spills you don’t have any hazardous materials involved you don’t have any life threats, then the incident really goes from a rescue mode to a recovery mode and at that point a lot of that involves CSX and what they do.
FP: What did you think of CSX’s response?
MJ: CSX has taken it on the chin a little bit, but they do a lot of good things, too. I mean, you know there’s issues that they have and I get that and you know people are rightly asking questions and they want answers and I understand why they want answers, and they need to get answers.
But look at the things they did: they had hazardous materials people on the scene with us; they called in their hazardous materials cleanup contractor (which is HEPACO) right away and they showed up there within the first hour hour and a half; they called Cranemasters which is their contractor that re-rails cars and those people have to mobilize. They have to bring a crane in from Richmond, they have to bring in other people, they have to bring a crane in from someplace in North Carolina. They showed up on the scene by three o’clock in the morning to start getting ready to re-rail the cars that were derailed.
CSX came in during the night, and they fenced that entire area that was collapsed and then screened it. You know, a lot of times people, I hate to say this about people, but it’s a natural tendency — they want to see damage, they want to see this, they want to see that. If they hadn’t screened that, the people would have been coming through Cobblestone just making a loop.
You hate to see anybody’s property damaged but you don’t want people gawking at it, either.
They [CSX] have problems, they have issues, they’re going to have to take care of that whatever they do on their side but they all did some good things, too, and this will probably lead to some more collaboration with first responders as well to provide more training and talk about what went on and I’m sure they’ll generate their own after-action reports that they’ll share with us and we’ll go from there.
FP: You’ve witnessed four derailments in your 41 years. Where does this rank among them in terms of severity?
MJ: In terms of just the impact that it had I think it’s probably the worst. The reason I say that is all the other ones occurred in the rail yard farther up, and they were simple derailments.
We had one where an alcohol car turned over. That was little or nothing to that they just had to re-rail that, fell over in the ditch line over closest to where stock building is and then we had another one a couple cars went off them.
One of them I’ll never forget was a flat big car that had board lumber on it. It threw 2x4s all over the place, 2x4s everywhere. One day, I looked at it said ‘oh this is a mess’. I mean, there was no hazard, it’s just 2x4s broke up everywhere, but it shut the rails down for a while because they had to clean all that mess up.
FP: Did you learn anything from this derailment, where, God forbid something like this were to happen again, you would be able to go to school on kind of how you guys responded to this and apply those lessons?
MJ: I think the thing about it is I think we’ve got a good [evacuation] plan for Mayfield. I think maybe from an emergency management standpoint we probably need to look at what do we do for the Darby Town neighborhood and what do we do for the Cobblestone neighborhood if we have to do an evacuation or something like that.
I think from a hazardous material standpoint, it’s just a matter of making sure we keep our A-game ready to go and that we have the facilities and things that we need to do if we would have a spill or something like that. We’d need to get a water supply in there, if we needed to be able to run water back in there to put unmanned hose monitors to knock down a vapor cloud or something like that where it is a lot of it you know depends on what it is sometimes.
The best thing to do is just to evacuate, isolate, deny entry and let it do what it’s going to do. Eventually it’ll do itself out or something like that and then work with the hazmat folks from CSX.
You got to realize when [the spilt derail device] was put in, Cobblestone wasn’t there. There was nothing, that was just field and brush and so there was no sound wall there was no sound wall or anything right there when that split derail was put in there. Now, they will move it back into an area probably back up where the woods are or something like that so they don’t have that problem.
FP: Is the risk of a possible derailment compounded because of the pipeline in Mayfield? Could hazardous materials have any interplay with the pipeline infrastructure?
MJ: I would say highly, highly unlikely. And the reason for that is the pipeline is underground and it’s 36 inches underground. You’d have to have a major derailment that would dig up through the dirt to pierce the thing to get to it.
It’s more likely that it will flip off and roll over and just lay in a ditch line or something like that.
I think there are there hazards both ways, but I don’t think they’re a synergistic hazard if you know what I mean.
