Anniversary of Fayette derailment and explosion

MOUNT CARBON, W.Va. — Most residents of Boomer who were home on February 16, 2015 were looking out their windows at the intense snowfall.   Around lunchtime, a loud noise reverberated across both mountains which flanked the Kanawha River followed by the unmistakable sound of an explosion.

“It shook my whole house to the point I screamed,” one resident of Boomer told Metronews.

“It sounded like a jet airplane flying over my house and then I heard an explosion,” said another witness. “I looked out the window and thought a jet airplane had crashed.”

Residents looked on in horror as flames rolled into the sky in a mushroom like formation and realized a tanker train had jumped the tracks and its cargo had ignited.  It touched off some panic since the contents of the rail cars weren’t immediately known.  Soon however it was revealed the material was highly flammable Bakken Crude oil being hauled from the Dakotas to the shipyards of Newport News, Va.

The rail cars stacked up in the yard of a nearby home and eventually the house exploded, leaving nothing but the concrete foundation.  A man inside the home managed to scurry out the backdoor and out of harm’s way.   Miraculously nobody was killed or even injured.  The derailment happened less than 200 yards from a subdivision where numerous houses stood near the tracks.

“I’d like to apologize for this significant disruption in the lives of a lot of people there,” said CSX Spokesman Gary Cease at the time. “Let me pledge we are working to get everything back in order as quickly as we can.”

CSX set up shop in nearby Montgomery.  Flatbed trucks hauling specialized equipment to clean up the mess stood end to end from one end of town to the other.  Workers spent well over two weeks untangling the twisted and melted steel of the cars and rails. The work was made even more difficult by temperatures which plunged to -20 during the night and never got above zero during the day.

The Federal Railroad Administration was immediately on the scene and supervised the cleanup, collecting evidence for their investigation as each piece was removed.

Later in the year, the FRA’s probe would reveal the cause of the derailment was a hairline crack in one of the rails which was actually detected during a rail inspection several months earlier. However, the operator for a company contracted to perform the inspection work for CSX, believed it was a false reading and didn’t follow up with a visual inspection of the faulty rail.





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