COLUMN ONE : America’s Poisons on the Move : Accidents involving hazardous materials are rising, and some are catastrophic. Particularly worrisome are unknown cargoes in containers and piggyback trailers.

Day and night, an intricate national transportation network hauls the commonplace poisons of modern life across the countryside and through city neighborhoods.

Chlorine for water treatment, ammonia for fertilizer, pesticides, industrial acids, corrosives, explosives and plain old gasoline are shipped in huge volumes--along with dramatically expanding quantities of exotic new chemicals.

Small things go wrong all the time on the trucks, trains, ships and planes that carry these hazardous goods. Valves leak. Drums break loose. Trucks jackknife.

But big accidents happen too. And then the consequences can be enormous--as in two train derailments in California last year that brought environmental devastation to the Sacramento River and massive disruption to Ventura County.

Defenders say significant improvements have been made in the transport of hazardous materials over the last 10 years.

But a Times computer study of nearly 68,000 hazardous-materials incidents in that period confirms what anyone knows who has been injured, evacuated or stuck on the freeway behind a tanker such as the one that exploded in flames Friday on the Hollywood Freeway--or worse, who has lost a friend or relative to a hazardous-materials accident:

While the U.S. transport system has yet to see the equal of Bhopal or Chernobyl, neither people nor the economy nor the land have been spared.

Hazardous-materials incidents--ranging from a leaking 55-gallon drum to a tank car explosion--rose 37% from 1982 to 1991, according to U.S. Department of Transportation data analyzed by The Times.

Incidents involving trucks--which carry most of the hazardous materials, including the most common, notably gasoline--went up 34%. Injuries to people as a direct result of the truck spills soared 374%. On the nation’s railroads, meanwhile, incidents large and small were up 36%.

Among the most striking findings: Two workhorses of the transportation system--the unpressurized rail tank car and the common truck tanker-trailer--were responsible for almost 85% of all damage reported.

Almost all the deaths--106 out of 108--involved tanker trucks, as did the Christmas, 1989, explosion that took the lives of Alan and Kristi Ann Mercurio of Glendora and their children. They were killed when the family car slammed into a gasoline tanker that had overturned on the San Bernardino Freeway.

Indeed, gasoline is the deadliest chemical transported around the nation, responsible for 52 of the deaths over the last decade. The category of flammable liquids accounted for the most hazardous-materials incidents--almost 5,100--while sulfuric acid caused the most injuries and ammonia forced the most extensive evacuations.

Critics blame the federal regulatory system, which they say has too few inspectors, maintains haphazard records, performs little forward-looking research and takes a weak approach to enforcement.

Indeed, government for the most part has left transportation companies free to police themselves in a system that may owe more to good luck than to foresight.

“Although we have been fortunate that more accidents have not occurred, there is no guarantee we will be as lucky in the future,” James L. Kolstad, then-chairman of the federal National Transportation Safety Board, warned a House subcommittee last year.

Difficult questions face the public and policy-makers: How much risk should society accept in this commerce? How much regulation is appropriate? Should hazards to the environment be controlled as tightly as hazards to human life? How much can an industry be trusted to regulate itself?

These issues are becoming critical because the volume of hazardous materials, or “hazmat,” shipped across the country is increasing at an ominous rate. Every day, an estimated 500,000 shipments carry 4 million to 8 million tons; no one really knows how much.

The growth stems from industry’s reliance on a grand new spectrum of man-made materials, many of them formed from dangerous compounds. Computer cabinets and lawn furniture, once made of steel, are molded from lightweight synthetics and composites. From ketchup to corn syrup, household commodities are sold in plastic bottles, not glass.

Thirty years ago, biologist Rachel Carson, in her landmark best-seller “Silent Spring,” warned that the United States was manufacturing 500 new chemicals every year at what she described as the “impetuous and heedless pace of man.”

Now, as many as 1,000 new man-made chemicals go into production every year.

Meanwhile, the transportation system is becoming increasingly complex.

Once, rail inspector Leonard R. Keen worried most about simple explosions--like a fiery accident in Brownsville, Tenn., that killed three railroad workers in 1990. A truck driver hauling a common alcohol solvent used for dyes and paints tried to snake around the barricades at a railroad crossing. A small, yellowed photo of the locomotive, with the burned tanker truck flattened against its snout, is hung on a wall of Keen’s Gardena office.

What troubles the National Transportation Safety Board inspector most these days, however, are the unknown cargoes hidden in containers and in piggyback trailers--increasingly popular methods of transportation.

As many as three different shippers or shipping consolidators handle such containers before loading them onto a rail car or truck. Each handoff increases the chance that hazardous material will end up packed away without adequate warnings.

“It’s a real problem,” Keen says wearily.

The sometimes-fragile state of the hazmat system is also revealed in the chaos of such disasters as the July 14, 1991, toxic spill from a Southern Pacific freight train that killed virtually every organism along 40 miles of the Sacramento River.

At 9:40 p.m. that Sunday, part of the train pitched off a bridge, dumping a tank car containing what the waybill described as “weed killer” into the river.

More than an hour later, a Southern Pacific representative did not know what “creek” the tank car had landed in, nor did he tell authorities that it was leaking. Not till about 1 a.m. Monday did officials learn that the “weed killer” was a deadly chemical called metam sodium. Not until 5 a.m. did Southern Pacific acknowledge that it had been spilled.

No long-term health damage has yet been found. Indeed, research suggests that the timing of the spill spared Dunsmuir residents more serious harm: Metam sodium releases toxic fumes much faster in sunlight than at night.

Good fortune played a part once again.

“We’re in some ways lucky,” said Rick Kreutzer, a physician-epidemiologist with the state health department, “because most of what spilled floated by Dunsmuir in the dark.”

Beyond such confusion, the staff of the California Public Utilities Commission--which regulates railroads in the state--attributed the Dunsmuir disaster to problems that ripple through America’s transportation system: Poor equipment maintenance, lax operating rules, inadequate information about hazardous substances, tank cars criticized as being unsafe for hauling many hazardous goods.

For their part, Southern Pacific executives deny that the train’s locomotives were of “questionable reliability” or that the line’s operating rules were inadequate. They pass blame on to the DOT, which did not then list metam sodium in that concentration as a hazard and allows chemical companies to use the questionable tank cars--cars that Southern Pacific, as a common carrier, is obliged to accept.

DOT officials strongly defend the system.

“Considering the fact that we’re looking at much-increased volumes of materials--more vehicles, more mileage, more tonnage, more everything, I mean just astronomical growth in all these areas--safety has definitely improved,” said Alan I. Roberts, the veteran DOT administrator who has developed most of the regulations that govern the shipping of hazardous goods.

In his view, the last decade’s statistics for deaths, injuries and damage have been “rather stable,” despite the growing freightage.

The Assn. of American Railroads, the rail industry’s trade group, says major accidents in which dangerous materials are released are the lowest in a decade, though it estimates that hazardous cargoes have increased by almost 50% in the last five years. The trucking industry sees no basic safety problems either.

But critics contend that the transportation system cannot keep track of the chemicals it already carries, let alone the rush of new materials to come.

Roberts “has a tiny program administering this gigantic industry,” said Fred Millar, a hazardous-materials specialist with the environmental group Friends of the Earth. Indeed, Roberts has a staff of only seven tracking hazmat incident statistics.

The General Accounting Office, relentlessly skeptical about the DOT reporting system, complained a year ago that “the department lacks accurate, complete data.”

Toxic releases in the air and at sea were 10 to 20 times more frequent than the DOT’s count, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimated in 1986. Rail incidents were triple the DOT’s figures and those on the highways were twice as high.

Even by the DOT count, the frequency of railroad spills increased 36% from 1982 to 1991, while the number of highway spills jumped 34%, according to The Times’ computer analysis.

As for the cost of damages--usually estimated on the run by emergency personnel rather than by trained accident appraisers--the OTA calculated the true costs to be at least 10 times the Department of Transportation figures. If the OTA multiplier is accurate, The Times’ computer study indicates that the cost of hazardous-materials spills over the last 10 years exceeded $2.23 billion.

Roberts acknowledges the official figures are incomplete. He agrees that for years many companies failed to file the reports mandated after every hazardous-materials spill. In any event, Roberts said, the reports are meant only to give a general idea of problems in the transportation system.

But when Roberts started to issue $1,500 penalty notices more than two years ago, errant transporters “began to think that we meant business, so the reports started flooding in,” he said. That hardball, he insists, explains the recent rise in reported incidents--up almost 20% the last two years.

“I don’t think it’s an indicator that the country’s falling apart from hazmat,” Roberts said.

Critics, on the other hand, say the crackdown simply confirmed that earlier statistics greatly understated the problem.

But the shortcomings of federal regulation of hazardous-materials transport are not limited to keeping track of spills, these critics say. According to environmentalists, safety experts and congressional overseers, too much power has been ceded to industry to oversee itself.

In fact, since the first federal law was passed regulating dangerous goods in transit--enacted just after the Civil War, it covered nitroglycerin and other explosives--the carriers and chemical industry have had a big hand in developing new rules.

For most of this century, standards developed by the Assn. of American Railroads have been the basis of the federal regulatory system. And for the last 32 years, the trade group’s Tank Car Committee--rarely challenged by the DOT, which lacks the technical expertise--has controlled the design, construction and retrofitting of the nation’s rail tank cars.

But DOT officials, like the industry, say there is little evidence that the current regulatory structure is leaving Americans unprotected. Rather, they contend, risk, precaution and profitability have been balanced.

The spills--large and small--continue, almost 9,000 of them a year. Of these, about one incident a day could be considered significant--not just a leaky valve but an accident involving the transport of hazardous materials, according to the DOT.

Over the last decade, deaths from the shipment of such materials have averaged 10.8 a year. But that barely registers next to about 40,000 deaths annually on U.S. roads from routine auto accidents.

To Roberts and others, the hazmat figures hardly suggest a crisis.

Rules, Roberts said, should not be made “because some guy somewhere went and saw an accident and said, ‘I think you should change every tank car in the United States because I saw this accident and I didn’t like what I saw.’ ”

Rather, he says, the DOT, step by step, has presided over major improvements in the transport network in the 26 years since it took over the job from the Interstate Commerce Commission. The DOT mandated that pressurized tank cars be made stronger and recently imposed industrywide training standards and a commercial drivers’ license program designed to ban dangerous truckers.

Now, Roberts says, he is “fine-tuning” the system.

Less sanguine observers, however, have a very different way of looking at the dangers involved in transporting hazardous materials.

Big spills are what experts in risk assessment call “low-probability, high-consequence” events. Although the daily chance of a significant U.S. hazmat transport accident is low, they say, when one occurs it has great potential for death and destruction.

“One chlorine tank car can cause a Bhopal-size disaster,” said Fred Millar of Friends of the Earth, referring to the 1984 toxic leak in Bhopal, India, that killed more than 2,000 people and injured 200,000.

Millar and others call for rerouting hazardous materials around major population areas as the condition of rural roads and railroad tracks permit. Such detours, he says, could cut the risk to cities by 50% to 90%.

Critics also argue that communities and local officials should be told what is passing through their neighborhoods, and what worst-case scenarios could unfold.

In Washington, for example, Millar serves on the local emergency planning committee, which by federal law must develop an annual hazard assessment and emergency plan for residents. But federal law does not require transporters to disclose what they carry.

“The only way we could get the information was to bully” the two railroads carrying hazardous materials through the nation’s capital, Millar said.

The International Assn. of Firefighters has lobbied Congress to establish a national computer tracking system for all hazardous materials in shipment, something like airlines’ reservation systems. Proponents foresee an organization--perhaps privately run--that could instantly tell emergency teams what materials they would encounter at a particular accident, even when the telltale diamond placard or waybill on a train car or trailer had been destroyed.

Central to the debate over how tightly the transportation system should be regulated are the vast gaps in society’s knowledge about hazardous materials.

The Dunsmuir spill, for instance, raised the question of how many other pesticides are like the metam sodium that poisoned the Sacramento River: relatively safe when properly used, destructive when released in an accident--and not listed as being hazardous for transport.

“Basically two-thirds of the old pesticides still in commercial use lack enough data to tell whether they can harm people or the environment,” said William Pease, a toxicologist at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health.

What remains unknown about other chemicals is even more staggering. Fewer than 1% of the estimated 70,000 chemicals in general use have had even minimal testing for toxicity, according to Pease and other experts.

Indeed, the uproar over metam sodium illustrates the complexities of regulating potentially hazardous materials.

“Does it strike you . . . as being amazing, as it does me, that a chemical initially developed for chemical warfare wasn’t on the hazardous materials list?” Rep. Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), chair of the House subcommittee on government activities and transportation, asked a witness at one of the hearings she conducted after the Dunsmuir spill.

Actually, metam sodium was already listed as a hazardous substance by the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOT--but at concentrations of 35% or higher.

The solution spilled in the Sacramento River was 32.7%.

The EPA did not list lower concentrations for the same reason metam sodium was a dud as a chemical weapon in World War I--it is short-lived in the environment, according to Linda J. Fisher, EPA assistant administrator of pesticides and toxic substances.

“Historically, (it) has not stood out in any way among pesticides or industrial chemicals,” she told Boxer’s subcommittee.

But that 32.7% concentration proved powerful enough. Some experts estimated that a 55-gallon drum’s worth--let alone the thousands of gallons that drained into the Sacramento--would have done as much damage.

Such environmental blights are a different order of threat than the dynamite-filled box cars against which the regulatory system was designed to protect.

“The shippers, and particularly the carriers, perceive toxic materials in the same way they see other materials--as just another carload to get down the track,” said John Cameron, associate director of Illinois Public Action and a nationally known advocate of hazardous-transport policy reform. “They view them as fire hazards or explosives, rather than human health or environmental dangers--dangers that have increased dramatically,” Cameron says, despite what he calls DOT’s “static view of safety.”

Far from the dynamite blasts of decades ago, most of today’s rail and truck accidents are maddeningly complex--as Charlie and Dorothy Price, of Blowing Rock, N.C., can attest.

On a Friday evening in July, 1989, “a big old tanker truck,” as Charlie, 71, remembers it, came barreling down a two-lane highway and missed a curve only 200 feet uphill from the Prices’ home.

The driver survived the crash. But 3,000 gallons of toxic naphtha, toluene and mineral spirits sloshed into a storm culvert that emptied into a ditch running the length of the Prices’ back yard. By the time the retired couple returned from their weekly trip to the market, masked emergency technicians in orange protective coveralls were tramping around their property.

“They said it was safe,” Price said. “Then the doctor said it wasn’t safe.”

Three years later--after tests, permit filings, public hearings, protests and the other entanglements of a toxic cleanup--most of the vapors are gone. A company hired by the shipper and its insurance company has been vacuuming fumes from Price’s yard through pipes dropped down four 20-foot dry wells. The job is expected to be finished in three to six months.

But the solvents have also seeped into the local water table. Six months to a year of ground-water cleanup will begin once the soil is purged. Meanwhile, Price has been told not to eat the vegetables, or his favorite blueberries, from the couple’s carefully tended yard.

His larger concern is his property value. Local real estate brokers have told him that his land and home are virtually worthless.

“They say they wouldn’t want to list it, really,” Price said.

And the trucking company and its insurer will not compensate him for any loss until the land is cleaned up. So far, the shipper has paid for blood tests for Price and his wife, but nothing else.

“What I wish,” Price said with disgust, “is that they’d just take up these pipes and get out of here.”

Times researchers William Holmes and Cary Schneider contributed to this story.

How Study Was Done

The Los Angeles Times began its study of hazardous-material spills in the transportation system by obtaining computer tapes of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Hazardous Material Incident Reporting System.

Richard O’Reilly, Times director of computer analysis, examined 67,657 spills reported to the Department of Transportation from January, 1982, through December, 1991. Spills, most of them quite minor, were reported in or near 6,109 towns and cities in all 50 states.

The data detailed episodes involving 2,900 trucking, railroad, air freight and marine freight companies, both common and private carriers. They were carrying 1,062 different hazardous chemicals and substances for 12,377 shippers nationwide.

The fates of 239 distinct kinds of shipping containers, ranging from cardboard boxes to carboys full of radioactive liquid, were recorded.

The analysis pinpointed two hazards that dwarfed all others in significance: gasoline tankers on streets and highways and old-style tank cars on railroads.

Transporting Hazardous Materials

Amid explosive growt in the use of chemicals, the transportation of hazardous materials on America’s roads and rail lines poses an ever-present danger. The Times conducted a computer analysis of U.S. Department of Transportation data for the 10 years from 1982 to 1991 to explore the dimensions of the risk.

A DECADE’S TOLL ACROSS THE NATION

DEGREES OF DANGER: Most hazardous materials spills-and most of the resulting deaths and injuries-occured in truck transit on the nation’s highways. But incidents on rail lines were responsible for the largest evacuations.

Highway Rail Air Other Total INCIDENTS 81.4% 14.6% 2.4% 1.6% 67,702 INJURIES 70.9% 19% 6.7% 3.4% 2,827 DEATHS 98.2% 0.9% - 0.9% 108 EVACUATED 37.7% 61.2% - 1.1% 25,513 DOLLAR DAMAGE* 69.9% 28.7% - 1.4% $223.4 million

* Dollar figures are not adjusted for inflation. Because they are self-reported by transportation companies-usually soon after an incident-they usually understate the actual costs by a large degree.

SOURCE: Compiled from Department of Transportation Hazardous Materials incident Reporting System data by Richard O’Reilly, Times directors of computer analysis.

*

WORST HAZARDS: Though ever-more exotic chemicals are being used by industry, common liquids transported in huge volumes by rail and truck were responsible for most of he spills.

Chemicals causing death or more than 50 injuries, 1982-1991

People Chemical Incidents Deaths Injuries Evacuated Gasoline 3,544 52 82 1,648 Compressed gas 965 13 89 361 Flammable liquids 5,098 6 187 378 Crude oil 1,055 6 14 300 Fuel oil 2,330 5 10 12 Naphtha 849 4 13 673 Aviation turbine fuel 238 3 4 15 Hydrochloric acid 2,807 2 146 1,934 Anhydrous ammonia 584 2 81 3,125 Paint drier fluid 1,807 2 15 44 Hexane 97 2 1 2,518 Corrosive liquids 4,944 1 140 1,389 Sulfur dioxide 42 1 77 3 Hydrogen peroxide 476 1 49 102 Aluminum phosphide 17 1 18 0 Alcohol 1,587 1 7 10 Hydrogen gas 51 1 4 425 Morpholine 34 1 4 70 Butadiene inhabited 45 1 3 10 Cement 894 1 3 0 Propellant 1 1 0 0 Sulfuric acid 2,779 0 238 57 Sodium hydroxide 1,688 0 84 208 Chlorine 67 0 55 6 Pyridine 141 0 51 37 Ethyl mercaptan 26 0 51 0

*

GROWING PROBLEMS: After dipping in the mid-1980s, the total number of hazardous materials incidents on highways climbed from 1988-’91. Transportation Department officials say the growth reflects a regulatory crackdown and more thorough reporting. If so, figures for prior years may understate the extent of incidents. RAIL (Incidents reported) ‘91: 1,130 HIGHWAY (Incidents reported) ‘91: 7,583 *

A CALIFORNIA CASE STUDY: DUNSMUIR

1. Sunday, July 14, 1991. As a 97-car Southern Pacific freight train approaches the Cantara Loop bridge, six miles north of the small town of Dunsmuir on the Sacramento River, crew members apply sand to the rail to try to give the slipping locomotive better wheel traction. At 9:40 p.m., after an unusual surge forward, the automatic air brakes slam on. One locomotive and sever rail cars derail, including an unreinforced tank car filled with an unspecified “weed killer” that falls 40 feet into the river below.

2. The locomotive is leaking diesel fuel. But in the dark, the crew cannot see the two holes in the end of the tank car that are spewing herbicide into the river. The car’s waybill gives no indication that the weed killer, metam sodium, becomes highly toxic in contact with water. In photo, workers get a closer look at the wreckage after daybreak Monday.

3. At 11:14 p.m. Sunday, a Southern Pacific official calls a chemical industry hot line for information about the week killer. At 11:30 p.m., state officials learn that dead fish have been sighted as the spill plume moves downriver. Just after midnight, Southern Pacific tells the state that metam sodium is nontoxic. At 1:18 a.m., the hot line faxes a data sheet to an SP office near the spill, warning that breakdown products of metam sodium can be “highly poisonous.” The river’s unnatural sheen Monday morning hints at the chemical’s true potency.

4. During the day Monday, Dunsmuir residents downstream of the spill complain of trouble breathing as well as burning skin and eyes; about one in seven townspeople seek medical attention. Fish and plants die as the sickly yellow-green plume drifts downriver at about 1 m.p.h.

5. Shasta County sheriff’s deputies post warnings late Tuesday afternoon cautioning visitors to Shasta Lake, California’s largest freshwater reservoir, that contamination is likely. At 3 a.m., Wednesday, the herbicide reaches the lake.

6. On Saturday night, Southern Pacific finally begins aerating the water, implementing a government plan to combat the pollution. The chemical’s manufacturer says that exposing metam sodium to sunlight will cause it to break down into a substance that does not harm humans or the environment. Within days, Shasta Lake water is declared safe to drink.

* A year after the spill, state officials predict that the environmental damage eventually will be overcome. Some of the willows along the river will be back in four to seven years; most of the wild trout in seven to 10 years. But the distinctive Indian rhubarb along the river bank will likely take longer than that-and a mature alder tree takes 40 years to grow. Of the eight pregnant women known to have been exposed to the fumes, two have had abortions-at least in part from fear of birth defects in their children. Health authorities have yet to see any suspicious increase in defects in newborns in the area, however.

SOURCES: California Public Utilities Commission, Department of Fish and Game, Department of Health Services and California Environmental Protection Agency, Southern Pacific, Chemtrec.