Home at Last : Derailment: Evacuees return to beach houses they left when rail cars spilled toxic chemical in Seacliff a week ago.

As heavy machines dragged away most of the remaining wreckage from a Southern Pacific train that derailed on a Ventura Freeway overpass, residents returned to the beach houses Saturday that they were forced to leave six days earlier.

Truckers and crane operators, wearing only work clothes, speedily moved tons of twisted rail cars, avoiding the remaining hydrazine hot spots, which had been fenced off and covered with sand.

Continuing tests on air and soil revealed possible traces in only one house of the acrid hydrazine fumes that forced the closure of the freeway last Sunday and the evacuation of 49 homes, state environmental officials said.

Test results from one of the houses closest to the crash could be false positives, caused by anything from animal urine to household ammonia cleaners, said Dennis Dickerson, regional administrator of the Toxic Substances Control Program for the California Department of Health Services.

The house’s owners, Marty and Lily Eifrid, spent Saturday night in a Carpinteria hotel. The couple had returned home briefly Wednesday with a sheriff’s escort to collect some belongings. They found their 10-year-old English sheep dog, Bones, dead on the kitchen floor, Marty Eifrid said.

“We’re pretty torn apart by this whole thing, anyway. . . . We wanted to make sure there wasn’t something in there that would be dangerous for us,” he said, explaining why they would stay away one more night.

Eifrid said an autopsy of the dog by county animal authorities determined that the cause of death may not have been the result of the spilled chemical, but further tests are being performed.

Late Saturday afternoon, Southern Pacific officials arranged to meet with California Environmental Protection Agency officials Monday to discuss their plans for finishing the cleanup, said Bill Currier, the railway company’s Los Angeles superintendent.

Hot spots that were covered with sand could be left in place for several weeks to allow the remaining hydrazine fumes to seep slowly into the air and dissipate, he said.

In the accident, 42 cars of a Southern Pacific freight train derailed after a bearing overheated and an axle snapped. Eight 55-gallon drums of hydrazine, a suspected carcinogen, were spilled and another 15 were punctured. A 5,000-gallon tank of naphthalene was thrown off a flatcar but did not rupture.

Although the freeway was reopened by mid-Friday and the first freight train rolled through Seacliff on the newly repaired rails early Saturday morning, some Seacliff residents did not make it home until later in the day. Beginning late Friday, sheriff’s deputies began notifying them by phone that they were free to return.

As they approached their gated beachside community, they drove past a paper banner hung and signed by county emergency officials. Festooned with yellow police barrier tape, the greeting read, “Welcome Home Seacliff Residents.”

“We’re real glad to be home and have our life restored to tranquility,” Maryann Cord, 30, said as she stopped her car. The hooks in the car’s back seat carried all the clothes she was able to grab when deputies allowed her to retrieve belongings from her home, the residence closest to the crash site.

“I watched it happen,” Cord said of the wreck that piled up 50 yards from her kitchen window. “It was very loud and the boxcars were just slamming into each other like, ‘ boom, boom, boom, boom, boom .’ I called 911 and said, ‘Train crash, train wreck at Seacliff!’ ”

For some, the crashing freight cars and the evacuation that followed disrupted vacation plans.

“Just like everybody else, we figured we’d be back in in a couple hours,” said John Huie, 50, who had brought his family from Claremont for a week at a rented Seacliff home. Today is their last day of vacation. Almost as a memento of his ordeal, Huie sported a brand-new, salt and pepper beard.

“I said Sunday that I wouldn’t shave until we got back in,” Huie said. “Last night, we were wondering if I was gonna look like Santa Claus before I got back in.”

Randy McCaslin, 51, who shares a vacation house in Seacliff with several others, was riding his bike when he heard “a heck of a noise” last Sunday. “It was pretty obvious there was a problem.”

The McCaslins said the disruption of their vacation was a minor worry in light of the early uncertainties over what might have been spilled near their beach house when the train cars left the tracks.

“The biggest thing that bothered us is that they didn’t even know what it was,” Beverly McCaslin, 49, said of the ruptured drums dumped on the tracks. “It seems to us that the driver should have some idea what they’re carrying on the trains.”

Colin Walker, 46, and Al Templeman, 49, of Oak View were miles away bicycling through Ojai when the accident happened. It was only after riding more than 50 miles to Santa Barbara that they learned what had taken place. Santa Barbara deputies on the Pacific Coast Highway blocked their return to Templeman’s vacation home at Seacliff but couldn’t really tell them why.

“The most annoying thing to me was how poor the communication was between the sheriffs in Santa Barbara County and the police here,” Templeman said. “They had no idea what was going on.”