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A number of freight practice vehicles derailed onto the banks of the Lehigh River, a tributary of the Delaware River, in Pennsylvania on Saturday in a crash involving three trains that spilled diesel gasoline and plastic pellets into the water, the authorities stated.
The Nationwide Transportation Security Board was deploying a staff of specialists to the positioning of the crash, which concerned an eastbound practice putting one other practice that had stopped on the identical monitor.
“The wreckage from the putting practice spilled onto an adjoining monitor and was struck” by a westbound practice, resulting in the derailment of an unknown variety of vehicles, the N.T.S.B. stated.
Northampton County Emergency Administration Providers and the Lehigh County hazardous supplies staff responded to the derailment in Decrease Saucon Township, Pa., about 10 miles east of Allentown.
There have been “no evacuations, no accidents and no leaks from any containers,” Northampton County said on its Facebook page.
Photos of the derailment, which occurred round 7:15 a.m., shared on social media present two locomotives on the banks of the river, one in every of them partially submerged, and a number of other container vehicles derailed.
“A few of the vehicles that had been derailed had been marked as holding hazardous materials, however they had been empty,” Lamont McClure, the county govt, stated in an interview. “Air monitoring is exhibiting that every one is regular.”
Diesel gasoline and polypropylene plastic pellets spilled into the Lehigh River, the Decrease Saucon police chief, Thomas Barndt, said at a information convention. Containment booms had been set as much as seize the spill.
Practice crew members had been stranded on the river financial institution and had been helped with ropes to climb the riverbank as much as the highway, Chief Barndt stated.
The Lehigh River provides drinking water for a whole bunch of hundreds of individuals, and as a tributary of the Delaware River, it contributes to a ingesting water provide for 15 million individuals, in response to American Rivers, an environmental nonprofit.
Norfolk Southern owns the Lehigh Line, a significant freight railroad route that snakes by means of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Connor Spielmaker, an organization spokesman, stated in a press release that the railroad firm’s “crews and contractors will stay on scene over the approaching days to wash up.” He added that Norfolk Southern would assist the N.T.S.B. examine how the crash occurred “to forestall others prefer it.”
The N.T.S.B. stated final yr that it had opened a special investigation into safety practices at Norfolk Southern.
In January, Norfolk Southern agreed to hitch a federal safety reporting program after scrutiny of the disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. In that crash, dozens of freight vehicles carrying hazardous supplies derailed and caught hearth, enveloping town with poisonous smoke and contaminating ingesting water provides.
The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees the security reporting program, despatched security personnel on Saturday to assist the native authorities within the Lehigh Valley, the company said on social media.
The accident in East Palestine pressured an examination of how the rail industry is regulated and its security document.
Derailments rose on the prime 5 freight railroad firms in 2023, in response to regulatory reviews.
The 5 Class 1 freight railroads working in the USA — Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Canadian Nationwide — reported 256 accidents on their mainlines final yr by means of October, an 11 p.c improve over the identical interval in 2022, in response to knowledge compiled by the Federal Railroad Administration.
From 2018 to 2022, Northampton County recorded 26 rail accidents or incidents leading to 13 reported accidents and no fatalities, according to a hazardous mitigation plan.
