By Aaron Gifford
The Post-Standard (Syracuse, New York)
Copyright 2007 Post-Standard
All Rights Reserved
ONEIDA, N.Y. — Rob Brown knew what to do as he drove toward the orange sky Monday.
At first, the Oneida resident thought the explosion was a house fire. Then he feared a pipeline had broken. Finally, he realized it was a train wreck.
And he kept driving.
“It’s probably the stupidity of doing this for so many years,” he said sheepishly in an interview Friday. “But I figured I was a safe distance away.”
Brown, a former Oneida firefighter and city councilor who is now a lieutenant with the Syracuse Fire Department, pulled over on Cobb Street a few minutes after the derailment and found the train’s conductor and engineer walking toward him. Both men were still out of breath from running.
Brown is well-versed in hazardous-materials training and quickly asked the engineer for his “consist,” a manifest that details everything the train is hauling and in which car it’s located. And he handed the engineer his cell phone and had him read the information to Oneida firefighters who were preparing to come to the scene.
“I called the taped line, so they could play it back in case they missed something,” said Brown, who remembered the department’s inner workings from his career there in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” Brown stressed. “Those guys (Oneida firefighters and police) are the ones who did a great job.”
Deputy Fire Chief Jim Dowd said Brown was a huge help. The consist document allowed commanders to inform city firefighters and the Oneida County hazardous-materials team that the train had propane on it as well as toxic toluene and other potentially dangerous substances.
When such valuable information isn’t available, firefighters have to refer to hazmat’s general rule: “Don’t go if you don’t know, because it might blow.”
Firefighters referred to their quick hazmat reference guide once they found out which gases and chemicals they were dealing with. When the engineer informed them that liquid propane was aboard, they immediately cited a page in that manual that states a one-mile evacuation in every direction from the scene is necessary.
Firefighters knew they would need 1,000 gallons of water per minute for 15 minutes to extinguish the propane fire. They didn’t have that capacity, so they stayed a safe distance away themselves when they knew the train’s crew escaped, and ultimately decided it was safest to let the fire burn.
Dowd said they didn’t immediately know if the propane cars were venting. Had that gas not been allowed to escape, the cars would have ruptured, creating an explosion that would have dwarfed the initial fireballs.
“Until noon, we were waiting for that explosion,” he said. “If that happened, the tank cars would have been in Durhamville.”