I have been on a train when it had an accident, train accidents are pretty common, scary! There was a huge train accident where I live about 30 years ago, believe it or not, the land there was bare for decades!
en.m.wikipedia.org
There was a terrible train wreck near Dunsmuir CA that sickened some of the residents. I had lived there before and knew people who were living there at the time of the accident.
The Golden State had its own version of the Ohio train disaster.
www.sfgate.com
July 14, 1991, was supposed to be a routine, normal evening for Southern Pacific railroad operators traversing Siskiyou County’s bucolic forests near Dunsmuir,
California.
They were transporting nearly 20,000 gallons of
metam sodium, an agricultural pesticide commonly used to kill fungus, nematodes and weeds. But in the dead of night, as the freight train approached the Cantara Loop — a bend that snakes along the 447-mile-long Sacramento River waterway — it suddenly jumped the tracks, leading to one of the worst ecological disasters in the state’s history.
A chemical tank car crashed into the water, dragging multiple other train cars along with it, a 2007 report from the
Cantara Trustee Council (CTC) found. By the time California Department of Fish and Wildlife wardens made it to the wreckage, they realized, to their horror, that 19,000 gallons of potent herbicides had been unleashed into the pristine waterway.
For the next 12 days, California Department of Water Resources and Southern Pacific workers diluted the pesticides, but it was already too late: More than a million fish and tens of thousands of amphibians and crayfish were killed, along with “millions of aquatic invertebrates, including insects and mollusks, which form the basis of the river’s ecosystem.”
“The rocks were clean. There was no moss. There was no life in the river,” former Dunsmuir resident Kristi Osborn told the state Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC).
Following the spill, people living in the area developed an alarming array of symptoms like rashes, diarrhea and chest tightness,
a 2004 report from the California Environmental Protection Agency said. Sick and scared, Dunsmuir residents
stayed inside and shut their windows, unsure of what to do amid the chaos.
www.yahoo.com
