[G]ov. Peter Shumlin said Tuesday that all the passengers and crew members taken to hospitals in the wake of the derailment of an Amtrak train had been released and that the cleanup of the accident site had begun.
The locomotive rounded a bend two miles south of Northfield village on Monday morning and smashed into several large chunks of ledge rock that slipped off an adjacent hillside onto the tracks.
The governor reported that the assistant conductor who was not identified suffered the worst injuries. “He incurred some concussion bruises and bumps,” Shumlin said.
Amtrak President and CEO Joseph Boardman shared the podium with Shumlin. As he and other Amtrak officials arrived in Montpelier for the news conference, Vermont 12A in the area of the derailment was sealed off for an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board. Boardman said he had not been allowed access to the site.
Shumlin assured reporters that the cleanup was underway, and that “we’re going to get the Amtrak Vermonter up and running as soon as possible.” Boardman confirmed that the reopening of the line for passenger traffic would take “days, maybe a week.”
“We want people to know the train is still running,” Shumlin said, explaining that Amtrak was operating a truncated Vermonter between its southern terminus in Washington, D.C., and Springfield, Massachusetts, north of which a motor coach would serve travelers, with stops at all Amtrak stations. St. Albans is the Vermonter route’s northern terminus.
Shumlin said the emergency response in Northfield was effective and the accident “has had the best possible outcome it could have.”
Boardman said Amtrak would be “responsible for most, if not all, of the costs” stemming from the derailment. He declined to give an estimate.
The Amtrak chief said his company would await National Transportation Safety Board recommendations for safety improvements, and act accordingly. Boardman said he had no concerns about the safety record of the tracks, which are owned by the New England Central Railroad, a subsidiary of holding company Genesee and Wyoming. Most of Amtrak’s route network is on privately owned track, and Boardman said the Genesee and Wyoming is “one of the best railroads we work with.”
Boardman said the damage and human toll could have been much worse.
The accident Monday morning left the locomotive and the train’s first coach sprawled in a small ravine on the east side of the tracks. The train’s second, third and fourth coaches also left the rails but were not as heavily damaged. The trailing car, a food service car, remained on the tracks. All reports continue to indicate that the derailment resulted from the rockslide alone, with no human error – such as exceeding the track segment’s speed limit – involved.
In 1867, an engineer in too much of a hurry derailed a train crossing the Harlow Bridge, less than a quarter-mile north of Monday’s derailment site, demolishing the bridge and killing 15, according to a pictorial town history published by the Northfield Historical Society in 2014.
NTSB’s job is to determine how and why the train went off the track. The board will investigate the train’s speed, the application of the train’s emergency brakes, the engineer’s condition and video records. Reaching conclusions will take “months,” NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said in a telephone interview.
Department of Environmental Conservation and NECR personnel have been working at the site alongside NTSB, the Northfield Fire Department and state hazmat officials, sources reported.
Contractors will be hauling the cars out of the area as soon as the NTSB investigation and the considerable task of lifting the derailed coaches and the 134-ton locomotive back onto the tracks are completed.
As of late afternoon Tuesday, a contractor had sucked 406 gallons of fuel out of the locomotive’s tank, and as much as 900 gallons remained unaccounted for, but not necessarily spilled, according to Ted Unkles of the Department of Environmental Conservation’s spill response team. Some spillage did occur, he said, but a determination of the precise amount will have to wait for the locomotive to be returned to an upright position, so that its tank can be accessed more effectively.
The location is about a mile from Northfield’s town water wells, Unkles said, but he did not express any great concern about threats to public drinking water, as migration of contaminants is very slow. It appeared that no oil had gotten into the small stream at the bottom of the ravine yet – thanks to the Northfield Fire Department’s installation of booms to hinder its flow – and he anticipated removal of the spillage by excavating the soil affected.
“The cleanup will be aggressive and thorough,” he said.
Whatever Unkles’ assurances, a visit Tuesday afternoon to a public spring alongside Vermont 12A, roughly 275 yards over a hill from where the locomotive is lying, disclosed a notice signed by Northfield town health officer Mark Podgwaite, warning the public that the spring could be contaminated.
