Transcript
Zach Goldbaum (0:00)
Wondry subscribers can listen to new episodes of Lawless Planet early and ad free right now. Join Wondry in the Wondry app or on apple podcasts. It's 7:02am on November 30, 2012. One minute before sunrise. Gary Stevenson is just waking up when he feels his entire house shake. A scream pierces the air. It's his wife, Raelyn. Get down here for God's sake, she says. Gary has lived his whole life Here in Paulsboro, New Jersey, a tiny 2 square mile town near Philadelphia. It's a perfect location for him and his wife, across the street from his parents house, right on the waterfront of Mantua Creek, a little tributary of the Delaware river with a view of a rusty old railroad swing bridge. Gary happens to be Paulsboro's deputy fire chief, so he throws on some clothes, grabs his radio and runs downstairs. He looks out of the back window of his house and can hardly believe what he sees. Two massive freight cars are derailed on one side of the creek. Behind them are five tanker cars dangling from the bridge, some of them bobbing in the creek. It looks like what happen when a toddler gets a kid's train set for the first time. Gary is the first person on the scene. It's quiet. There's no fire, just a thick fog rolling off the creek. So thick, in fact, that he can't even see his hand in front of his face. Strange, he thinks. The fog is not usually so bad this time of year. Then, just as mysteriously as it arrived, the fog lifts. But by this point, Gary's throat is already scratchy. His eyes are red. The air tastes sweet. Gary notices one downed railroad tanker has a gash in it. He can make out a placard number which tells you what the car is carrying. It reads 1086. He radios it in. The dispatch responds. Vinyl Chloride Vinyl chloride is a chemical used to manufacture things like PVC pipe or the vinyl siding on suburban homes. It's transported as a liquid in cold storage tanks, but above 7 degrees Fahrenheit it becomes a gas when you breathe it in. It's a deadly carcinogen linked to brain, liver and lung cancer, and at this point, 24,000 gallons of vinyl chloride have spewed into the air behind Gary Stevenson's house. It's been an hour, and now there are other firefighters and cops on the scene. There's a lot of confusion about what to do. Eventually, someone makes the call. Evacuate the town. But it's too late. Within hours, the residents of Paulsboro will experience symptoms similar To Gary's headaches, rashes, trouble breathing. 700 residents are evacuated, but they won't know the full scale of the impact for years to come. Even so, the people of Paulsboro may be the lucky ones. A railroad worker would later tell Gary that 99 out of 100 times when this sort of thing happens, the train catches fire, which is scary when vinyl chloride is involved. This particular derailment was caused by malfunctioning locks on the century old swing bridge behind Gary's house. Federal investigators found that the rail company had been warned 23 times about the faulty bridge in the year prior to the accident, but did nothing to address the dangers. Later it issued this we regret this incident and its impact on those it affected. We've also redoubled our efforts to work with the first responders to address hazardous material response. The terrible train accident in Paulsboro, New Jersey could have been a moment to enact tougher regulations for trains carrying hazardous chemicals to prevent something like this from ever happening again. I'll let you guess how that turned out. From Wondry I'm Zach Goldbaum and this is Lawless Planet. Each week we tell a new story about the true crimes fueling the climate crisis and the people fighting to save the planet or destroy it.