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Cranes pushed the wrecked cars to the side of an embankment along the road as bulldozers flattened ground and crews laid new track. The soybean oil is unlikely to have affected groundwater wells or nearby Garvin Brook, pollution control officials said, because of favorable weather and soil conditions and the efforts of cleanup crews Monday and Tuesday.
No injuries occurred in the crash, the cause of which is still unknown. Ten of the 16 cars contained soybean oil, and four of the tankers leaked, spilling the oil into the soil about 1,000 feet from Garvin Brook. The oil formed pools near the overturned cars Monday, but crews managed to stop the liquid from flowing into the waterway.
Minnesota Pollution Control Agency officials estimated Monday the total amount of leaked oil at about 30,000 gallons. Those estimates were changed Tuesday to about 50,000 gallons, said David Morrison, an MPCA emergency response specialist, who called that figure a “very rough ballpark estimate.”
That’s about as much fuel as a Boeing 747 can carry and a fairly large amount to have occurred in a spill. The MPCA deals with between only six and 10 spills that compare in size to Monday’s per year statewide, Morrison said.
“It’s not very frequent that we have a 50,000 gallon oil spill,” he said.
Crews from the MPCA and an engineering firm hired by DM&E extracted standing pools of oil by Tuesday morning, vacuuming the liquid into storage tankers. Contaminated soil was also removed and taken to the La Crosse County landfill, where it will go through a composting process before it is used as cover for waste.
If the oil had flowed into Garvin Brook, a large fish kill could have occurred, Morrison said. Organic oils such as soybean oil will break down in water and consume all of its localized oxygen, suffocating nearly anything in the water. Concerns about local well contamination were eased when the onsite engineers found clay under the contaminated soil. Clay acts as a buffer, impeding the oil from seeping into groundwater and ruining wells, Morrison said
A Minnesota Department of Agriculture food inspector was on site Tuesday, checking the oil and wheat in the other six cars. The department checks that food products that can be salvaged are done in a sanitary way, and that the ones that can’t are disposed of properly, said Michael Schommer, communication director for the MDA. Traffic was limited to one lane on Country 23 on Monday and Tuesday during the cleanup. Officials expected traffic problems to be minimized by Tuesday evening.
The derailment was expected to be cleaned and the line back in service Tuesday night, Herb Jones, a DM&E spokesman, said in a written statement. The derailment has caused minimal disruptions to DM&E traffic, he said.
A spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration said that it will not investigate the derailment, but that DM&E will submit a report on the cause of the crash by the end of October. There have been 16 derailments in 2008 on the DM&E and the Iowa, Chicago and Eastern Railroad, its sister line, through June, according to the FRA. There were 24 derailments on those lines in all of 2007.
Nolan Rosenkrans may be reached at (507) 453-3519 or at nolan.rosenkrans@lee.net.
