LEXINGTON COUNTY, SC
Sunday’s early-morning crash involving an Amtrak passenger train and a CSX freight train in Cayce that killed two and left more than 100 hospitalized wasn’t the first fatal train crash in South Carolina history.
It was a reminder of another deadly incident from the not-too-distant past. Specifically, the 13-year-old fatal crash between two trains in Graniteville.
That crash also occurred in the early morning, on Jan. 6, 2005. In that crash, a Norfolk Southern freight train smashed into a parked locomotive in the textile community of Graniteville in what is regarded as one of the worst railroad accidents in South Carolina history.
In the Graniteville crash, the violence of the impact between the trains was only part of the story. The crash caused chlorine gas to leak from one of the tanker cars, spreading a lethal fog across Graniteville.
Nine people died as the chlorine seared their lungs. Hundreds of others gasped and fled their homes.
At Avondale Mills, adjacent to where the crash occurred, workers called 911, pleading for help as the chlorine seeped into the complex of buildings in tiny Graniteville.
“My lungs hurt so much,” one worker said on a 911 tape obtained later by The State newspaper. “Oh God. I don’t know if I’m going to make it or not.”
The wreck resulted from human error, federal investigators found. A crew member from a train that had parked on a side track for the night failed to flip a switch. Hours later, a Norfolk Southern train, believed to have been traveling at 47 mph, ran off the main line and onto the side rail where the parked tanker car, carrying chlorine, sat.
The tanker car ruptured, and 11,500 gallons of chlorine seeped out.
Within two years of the 2005 crash, Avondale Mills closed, taking with it more than 1,000 jobs.
At the time of the 10th anniversary of the deadly Graniteville train crash, The State reported some people still suffer from decreased lung functions, the likely result of breathing high concentrations of chlorine from the wreck.
Textile mill workers who were exposed to chlorine after the accident are having more trouble breathing today than mill workers who were not exposed, according to research by Tulane University, the University of South Carolina and others. The findings are consistent with early research showing lung ailments immediately after the accident.
The workers “are not getting as much air,” Erik Svendsen, a Tulane University scientist who is heading part of the studies, reported to The State in 2015. “It’s a consistent problem we are seeing.”
Allendale
Another train crash in South Carolina, that occurred more recently than the Graniteville crash, also led to a chemical spill.
On Jan. 27, 2015, a collision of two CSX freight trains in Allendale County caused a spill. It was determined that wreck posed no health threat, according to a state emergency management spokesman said.
That crash occurred when a CSX train ran off the main track and onto a side rail, where another train was parked.
The crash split open tanker cars and caused some 19,000 gallons of hydrochloric acid to leak out. Another 4,000 gallons of diesel fuel also spilled. A switch that diverted the train off the main track might have been misaligned.
No one was killed in the wreck and authorities say environmental damage wasn’t extensive. A conductor and an engineer were injured in the wreck, although they walked away from it. The collision occurred on a side track near the Archroma chemical plant.
Clemson
One of the most dramatic railroad crashes in South Carolina history happened more than 50 years ago.
It happened just after midnight April 7, 1965 in Clemson, and it resulted in crushed boxcars scattered along a quarter mile which spilled out onto the 250-foot Seneca River trestle that runs parallel to U.S. 123 at the Pickens-Oconee boundary.
Between 34 and 37 boxcars had jumped the tracks, with at least one of them flying off the trestle and into the reservoir. A red caboose had rumbled down the steep embankment and was partially submerged at the edge of the lake.
“Most of the cars jackknifed, plowed up several hundred feet of track and came to rest in a mountain of twisted track and mangled boxcars,” The Associated Press reported in an account of the wreck.
The engineer and three crew members escaped injury, but the loss was estimated at $500,000 – or nearly $4 million in today’s money.
The mess had barely been cleared away before calamity struck again.
On May 31, a freight train was clipped by a bulldozer working beside the tracks east of Easley. The lead locomotive was derailed and pushed out onto the Saluda River Trestle, where it caught fire and burned.
Speculation as to what caused the 1965 Clemson wreck ranged from a broken axle to sabotage.
A Southern Railway detective told reporters at the scene that the possibility of sabotage was being investigated because of an attempt to derail a freight train near Seneca several months earlier, The AP reported at the time.
Train wrecks in South Carolina
Prior to Sunday’s crash in Cayce, South Carolina has had six major train accidents since 1978.
- The derailment of Auto Train No. 4 on the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad in Florence, Feb. 24, 1978.
- Derailment of Seaboard System Railroad Train No. F-690 with hazardous material release, in Jackson, Feb. 23, 1985
- Collision of Seaboard System Railroad Train No. F-481 with standing cars, Robbins, Feb. 25, 1985.
- Derailment and collision of Amtrak Train 82 with rail cars on Dupont Siding of CSX Transportation Inc. in Lugoff, July 31, 1991.
- Collision of Norfolk Southern freight train 192 with standing Norfolk Southern local train P22 with subsequent hazardous materials release, Jan. 6, 2005 in Graniteville.
- Collision of two CSX freight trains on Jan. 27, 2015 in Allendale County.
SOURCE: NTSB
This story was originally published February 04, 2018 1:46 PM.