Anatomy of a Rail Disaster : Chronology: A day-by-day account of the cleanup process suggests that safety concerns undermined a quick resolution.

While detoured Ventura Freeway traffic crept along mountain roads after last Sunday’s Southern Pacific train wreck at the gated beachside community of Seacliff, the cleanup of toxic debris under the freeway overpass seemed to creep along, too.

But by the time the tracks were cleared and the freeway reopened at 2:02 p.m. Friday, railroad and emergency officials pronounced the cleanup a success and the delays inevitable.

Crews wearing hot, bulky protective suits simply could not rush the ticklish job of neutralizing dangerous chemicals spilled in the wreck, they said.

Moving any faster would have risked the explosion of a 5,000-gallon tank of naphthalene or a more serious encounter with hydrazine fumes, which mildly sickened 11 workers as they cut up the wreckage in their street clothes on Thursday.

“You don’t do these things every day, and there are no two alike,” said Michael Furtney, a Southern Pacific spokesman.

“It’s a matter of doing the best you can under the circumstances,” Furtney said. “Had people rushed in there and done things too hastily, there might have been more than 11 people disturbed in a minor way. It could have been much more serious.”

By the time the tracks were free of poison and debris on Friday afternoon, three days after the original projected completion date, about 275,000 detoured vehicles had traversed the Ojai and Rincon valleys.

Residents had been kept out of 49 evacuated homes for over five days. And Southern Pacific had spent significant sums on overtime pay for emergency workers.

According to investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, the California Public Utilities Commission and Southern Pacific, this is what happened:

The wreck of the 42-car freight train designated 1LABAF--for Los Angeles to Bay Area--began a few miles to the south, with no warning.

A sealed, self-lubricating roller bearing on one axle of the train’s 17th car began to overheat.

The train passed a rail-side hot-axle detector in Moorpark. But the bearing’s heat had not risen to 130 degrees above air temperature, which would have triggered a radio message ordering the train crew to stop.

It cruised through Ventura at 40 m.p.h., where it was inspected by another train’s engineer and conductor in accordance with federal railway regulations. But they saw nothing amiss.

By the time the train crossed Ventura’s western border, the axle bearing had heated to temperatures far higher than it was designed for. It seized and began to fly apart.

Sunday: The Wreck

The force of the moving train twisted the end off the axle and dropped the car’s undercarriage onto the rail bed. Beach-goers, surfers and residents of the homes along the Old Rincon Highway watched as the train drove onward, throwing sparks, dust and superheated bearing scraps onto the road. The hot shrapnel started small fires in the roadside brush.

The dragging car gouged gashes an inch wide in each railroad tie leading up to a siding switch beneath the twin overpasses of the Ventura Freeway, just 50 yards away from a row of beach houses at Seacliff.

At 56 m.p.h., just under the speed limit of 60, Car 17 hit the switch.

“It started to dig in and tore up everything,” said Ronald Regenor, a rail inspector for the PUC. “It looked bad. It was bad.”

The car jumped the tracks and crashed into a pillar supporting the overpass, spilling its cargo of Mature magazines onto the railway. Fourteen cars piled up behind it with a thunderous roar, twisting rails and splintering thick wooden ties beneath them.

Car 23 careened into the wreckage, scattering a potentially lethal cargo that would keep cleanup crews busy for the next five days.

The double-hulled tank of naphthalene, a highly flammable solvent, slammed into the berm north of the tracks. The tank’s steel frame sliced open the outer hull, but the inner hull held.

A metal cargo container flew off the same flatcar, scattering 55-gallon steel drums full of aqueous hydrazine, a toxic chemical used to make products ranging from photographs to pharmaceuticals.

Eight drums burst open and another 15 were punctured, spraying the wreckage and the tracks beneath it with the chemical.

Whitish fumes began to rise.

The engineer brought the rest of the train to a stop, and he and the conductor climbed down.

As firefighters from a nearby county fire station arrived, conductor Bob Nagle shook his head. He told them he didn’t know what had happened to Car 17’s axle until the train derailed, snapping the brake lines.

“I looked back and I saw a cloud of dust, and I knew we had a problem,” Nagle said.

Within an hour, police had evacuated 300 residents, surfers, campers and oil-field workers from Seacliff, the beaches and a nearby Mobil facility.

The California Highway Patrol closed the Ventura Freeway, shunting coastal traffic onto routes 33 and 150 through the Ojai and Rincon valleys, tight two-lane roads that sometimes came to a standstill during the week as traffic swelled to three times its normal volume.

Southern Pacific officials arrived. The Seacliff wreck, hard on the heels of a Southern Pacific derailment that dumped a pesticide into the Sacramento River just two weeks earlier, stunned them.

“It is very uncommon for this type of thing to happen,” said Jack Jenkins, a Southern Pacific inspector. “We operate thousands of miles of railroad track, with thousands of trains per week, and this kind of thing almost never happens.”

Later: Deadly Cargo

It was not until late afternoon that they learned that the train’s cargo, listed on the shipping manifest simply as “aromatic hydrocarbons,” included the potentially explosive naphthalene and hydrazine, a probable carcinogen.

Meanwhile, a news cameraman and a resident were overcome by fumes and taken to nearby hospitals for treatment.

The fumes were coming from a 51% solution of hydrazine. It was more diluted than the full-strength hydrazine used as a rocket-fuel additive, but still irritating to the eyes, skin and respiratory tract and potentially fatal in high concentration.

“I used to handle 1% solution and it was toxic as hell,” said cancer researcher Dr. Bela Toth.

Southern Pacific officials called in hazardous-materials handlers from OHM Corp. Environmental Service. The railroad had hired the Findlay, Ohio, firm to clean up the Sacramento River fallout, and many workers came directly from the site of that crash.

“They’re the best in the business,” said Furtney.

Wearing hooded protective suits of an impermeable white paper called Tyvek and air tanks with plastic face shields, OHM workers slipped on rubber boots and gloves, and sealed themselves in with duct tape.

They waded in among the fumes, then came out to give their assessment: The eight burst barrels had sprayed hydrazine over an area 100 feet square, which could easily be made safe if sprayed with a neutralizing chemical.

Monday: Setting Up

On Monday, as firefighters set up perimeters to keep out the public and the dozens of reporters and photographers converging on Seacliff, massive cranes and bulldozers lined up along the Old Rincon Highway, ready to work.

But they would wait until Thursday before moving a single boxcar.

The work moved slowly, delayed repeatedly by numerous conferences among officials from 26 emergency agencies, utilities and cleanup companies.

“The work never really stopped, even then,” explained Lt. Arve Wells, who oversaw the crash site for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. “There were a lot of things going on in those meetings, not only dealing with the operations that are going to happen now, but you have to deal with what’s going to happen in the future.”

Workers raided local pool-supply companies to buy 3,000 pounds of calcium hypochlorite, or common swimming-pool chlorine, which they dumped into rented tanker trucks full of water at the crash site.

Just as they prepared to spray the 8% solution onto tainted ground, they were ordered to stop.

Herbie Bart, Southern Pacific’s cleanup chief, ruled that the large quantities of hydrazine in the 15 punctured drums would react violently with the chlorine, creating a potentially explosive cloud of hydrogen and ammonium gas.

Bart ordered a tank truck equipped with a vacuum to suck the hydrazine out of the drums before the chlorine solution could be applied to the spill. But the wrong type of truck arrived.

The hydrazine could have eaten through the truck’s carbon-steel tank. Bart again stopped work until a stainless-steel truck could be brought in.

By the time it could be positioned and repositioned and workers suited up, it was 2 a.m. Officials halted the cleanup for the night to let the fatigued workers rest.

Tuesday: The Cleanup

On Tuesday, the vacuuming did not begin until evening, after emergency officials and cleanup supervisors huddled in numerous strategy meetings.

It was not until late Tuesday night that they finished vacuuming out the drums and neutralizing the area with chlorine sprays that sent white clouds of hydrogen and ammonium gas wafting 150 feet into the night sky.

On Wednesday, OHM workers vacuumed the hydrazine out of six other drums that had been damaged and began sealing the 47 undamaged drums into polyurethane barrels.

Using a crane positioned on the northbound Ventura Freeway overpass, they lifted the barrels onto a flatbed truck for transfer to another train and return to their manufacturer, Olin Corp. of Lake Charles, La.

Thursday: Hot Spots

On Thursday, OHM workers cordoned off newly discovered hot spots of hydrazine so heavy cranes could be inserted to pull apart the wreckage. All day, the cranes shifted undamaged cargo containers onto flatbed trucks while bulldozers shoved spilled cargoes of wax pellets, sand and rags off the tracks.

As workers from another company, Trans Loading Services of Los Angeles, used torches to cut apart the twisted rail cars Thursday night, 11 complained of nausea and irritated eyes and throats. Work stopped again.

Nine were taken to area hospitals, treated for exposure to hydrazine fumes, and released. The others were treated at the scene. Some returned Friday morning to finish clearing the tracks after OHM workers neutralized the remaining hot spots.

Early Friday, crane operators lifted the naphthalene tank onto another flatbed truck, which left the scene. Inspectors would decide whether it could travel on to its destination in Oakland intact or if its contents would have to be put into another tank.

“We can see a light at the end of the tunnel, but we don’t want to get too optimistic,” county Fire Battalion Chief Dan Spykerman announced.

Just a few hours later, the freeway was reopened.

Friday: The All-Clear

And at 7 p.m. Friday, officials from the railroad, Fire Department and OHM conferred in Ventura. It was safe, they ruled, for the residents of Seacliff to go home.

At 2:30 a.m. Saturday, the first train was allowed to move through Seacliff since the derailment.

Seven and a half hours later, an Amtrak passenger train rumbled over the newly repaired tracks.

Pushed by a grimy, ash-speckled diesel engine, its seven cars inched over gleaming new sections of track, between the hulks of mangled flatcars, past the fenced-off patches of sand covering a few hot spots of spilled hydrazine.

As the train neared the support pillar of the Ventura Freeway overpass that still showed scars of paint and rust from its encounter with 1LABAF, an Amtrak conductor leaned from an open door with a pocket camera cradled in his hand.

He began snapping pictures furiously, then leaned back inside. As the train passed onto the old sections of track again, it sped up and chugged onward, north to San Francisco.