Cleanup Keeps Road, Rail Arteries Closed : Derailment: Travelers are making do until chemical spill is cleaned up and damaged repaired.

Ventura County’s main road and rail arteries to the north will be closed at least until late today while emergency workers clean up a hazardous chemical spill and other damage caused by a weekend train derailment, officials said Monday.

The closure of a 10-mile stretch of the Ventura Freeway, including an overpass that crosses the derailment site at Seacliff, is necessary until the bridge can be inspected for possible damage, officials said.

The shutdown forced hundreds of motorists Monday to take a circuitous 35-mile detour that jammed traffic on California 33 and 150.

The derailment of a Southern Pacific train just after noon Sunday also shut down both freight traffic and Amtrak passenger trains that use the line until it is cleared.

Before the road inspection and rail repairs can begin, however, emergency workers must complete the removal of the spilled chemical, aqueous hydrazine, which has contaminated at least 10,000 square feet of ground. Brief exposure to the chemical, used as a jet fuel additive, causes lung and eye irritation, officials said, and prolonged exposure can be fatal.

Hazardous-materials teams from local fire departments and the railroad began the cleanup late Monday afternoon. They were equipped with tightly sealed masks, boots and protective suits.

Complicating the process was the presence of a tank car containing 5,000 gallons of another chemical, naphthalene. Although that car was not among the 12 that derailed and apparently was not damaged, officials fear a fire or explosion could occur if the naphthalene somehow escaped and mixed with hydrazine.

“It poses a very extraordinary cleanup problem, just from the standpoint that there is a lot of product in the area,” said Ventura County Fire Capt. Norm Plott, referring to the presence of two dangerous chemicals. “We’re fortunate that the product is not going into the ocean, but it’s going to take a lot of time to get all this cleaned up.”

About 200 workers from nearly 20 agencies were participating in the cleanup. They said they hoped to have most of the chemicals removed by this morning so they could allow the more than 300 residents evacuated Sunday to return to the area. An American Red Cross shelter set up at the Ventura County Fairgrounds remained open Monday night after taking in 92 people the previous evening.

Southern Pacific President Mike Mohan, who visited the scene by helicopter Monday, said the railroad accepts “full financial responsibility” for the wreck. “It’s a great public inconvenience for which we are deeply sorry,” Mohan said.

Investigators from the Federal Railroad Administration said the derailment occurred when an overheated bearing caused an axle to snap off of one of the cars. When that car derailed, so did 11 others on the 42-car train, bound from Los Angeles to Oakland.

The overheating apparently developed quickly. Jack Jenkins, a Southern Pacific inspector, said a trackside heat detector 36 miles south of the derailment scene detected no problems when the train passed. Later, the crew of another train parked on a parallel track in Ventura, 10 miles from the accident scene, watched the freight train pass and saw nothing unusual.

FRA spokeswoman Claire Austin in Washington called overheated bearings “a freak thing, one of those acts of God” that a railroad cannot prevent. Southern Pacific does not appear to have violated any federal rules in connection with the derailment, Austin said.

The train was inspected before leaving Los Angeles, and no problems were detected, Southern Pacific officials said.

“This is a mechanical cause, and there are no regulations covering these sorts of things,” Austin said. “It can happen in a matter of hours, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s like something we call ‘summer kinks,’ when a track heats up and melts and causes an accident. It’s just an act of God.”

Despite the FRA’s conclusion, the top railroad safety official in California said it was too early to fix a cause for the derailment.

“It could be a bearing, but then again it could be a faulty axle,” said William Well, chief of railroad safety for the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency with authority over railroads on the state level.

“It’s premature to call this an act of God. I haven’t heard anything from my staff that answers the question (of cause),” Well said. “They haven’t even had a chance to get in there and take a look.”

Well said the train’s two crew members--an engineer and a conductor--have been tested for drugs, but the results are not yet available. Investigators said the train was moving at 56 m.p.h. in a 60-m.p.h. zone.

The FRA is the agency with lead regulatory responsibility for the nation’s railroads. Only the FRA can impose penalties on Southern Pacific if violations of federal railroad rules are found.

The National Transportation Safety Board also sent an investigator to the scene, but the board is not expected to conduct a full-fledged inquiry because there were no fatalities. The NTSB is an advisory body that can recommended new laws or regulations but has no authority to impose penalties.

No serious injuries were reported, but a news photographer was treated Monday after he became ill while photographing the ruptured chemical drums. Terry Miller, 38, of the Carpinteria Herald was photographing the ruptured hydrazine drums when he was overcome by fumes, officials said. He was hosed down at the scene and taken by ambulance to Ventura County Medical Center, but was not admitted.

Railroad officials said 76 drums of hydrazine fell from a broken cargo container, and at least eight of them burst, spilling 440 gallons of the chemical. Another eight drums were punctured, and their contents were to be vacuumed out Monday night. Workers were planning to then spray the contaminated area with a different chemical to neutralize the hydrazine. Contaminated soil was to be scooped up and hauled away for disposal.

Cranes were standing by late Monday, ready to begin righting the derailed cars and clearing the tracks today. But officials said the work may be slowed while they check for possible ruptures in a natural gas pipeline that runs parallel to the tracks.

This was Southern Pacific’s second derailment involving a chemical spill in two weeks. But unlike the July 14 wreck near Dunsmuir in Northern California, which caused a pesticide spill that wiped out life along a 45-mile stretch of the Sacramento River, the Ventura County derailment appeared to have caused no major environmental damage, officials said. They said they had discovered no evidence so far that the chemical reached the ocean or ground-water supplies.

While emergency workers struggled to clean up the scene, motorists diverted from the county’s major north-south highway struggled along the Alpine twists and turns of California 150 and 33, the only routes around the accident scene.

Scores of Amtrak passengers were stranded as all local trains between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles were canceled. Passengers on the Coast Starlight, the most popular Amtrak route in the nation, were forced to travel by bus between Los Angeles and Oakland, a spokesman said.

Doug Major said he and his family were forced to sleep on cots at the Red Cross shelter Sunday night when they found themselves stranded in Oxnard.

Major, bound for Santa Barbara, said he, his wife and two sons boarded a train in Fullerton at 7:10 p.m. Sunday without being told that the rail lines to Santa Barbara had been closed since early afternoon. At Union Station in Los Angeles, where Major expected to change trains, he said his family was ushered onto a bus destined for Oxnard without being told that they would be stuck there for the night.

“They said there had been an accident, but no one told us the bus wasn’t going through to Santa Barbara,” said Major, a Paso Robles resident who was taking his son, Ross, on his first train ride for his third birthday. “This you’re-on-your-own attitude on Amtrak’s part is not the type of thing that will get them repeat customers.”

His wife, Nancy, said four busloads of Amtrak passengers were left stranded at the Oxnard bus station Sunday night. While some found motel rooms nearby, she said, her family and more than a dozen others were driven to the fairgrounds shelter by a merciful driver.

Clifford Black, an Amtrak spokesman in Washington, D.C., agreed that the derailment had “severely disrupted our service between L.A. and Oakland,” but he said he had no information on specific complaints.

Seacliff residents Jim and Cathy Foley spent the night in the Red Cross shelter after finding out on their drive home Sunday from a picnic in Thousand Oaks that their community was in the evacuation zone.

Cathy Foley said all motel rooms were booked in the Ventura area, where they encountered the highway closure at 5 p.m. “The Red Cross did a really great job and was real accommodating to everyone.”

Rudy and Connie Martinez left Indio Sunday with their brand-new travel-trailer in tow when their three-week motor tour of Northern California was abruptly stopped short in Ventura.

With the transmission on their pickup having problems that made a detour through the mountains unwise, the couple spent the first night of their vacation in the Ventura County Fairgrounds parking lot.

“We’re going to make the best of it here until the highway reopens,” Connie Martinez said.

Times staff writer Jenifer Warren contributed to this story.