Reported here: And another link here: https://northplattepost.com/posts/9a94e8cb-08ec-4a1f-b51a-5e1bd49f0552 Seems the car involved was an intermodal car with a shipping container. https://www.knopnews2.com/2023/09/1...ear-bailey-yard-north-platte-due-toxic-smoke/ A hazardous material seems to have been involved, but no injuries or derailment occurred.
Me neither, especially since the media totally went bananas over the one in Palestine last year!! If you hadn't posted, I'd never knew about.
Media - If it bleeds it leads. Bailey Yard - no blood, no mangled metal in a pile, nothing really to report.
It is a bit of a surprise they let it slide considering there have been a couple of stories really bashing UP this week on safety https://omaha.com/news/local/busine...cle_cf7178f6-b8f7-52bb-8f4f-9ae5f187ff4c.html https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/oth...cific-not-maintaining-safe-trains/ar-AA1gz54W
I dealt with perchloric acid in school chem lab, nasty stuff. Stronger than Sulfuric or Hydrochloric acids. Here's a brief description. Perchloric acid is a strong acid used for complete digestions of organic material. It is normally supplied in bottles of up to one gallon in capacity at 70-72% strength. In many respects, its hazards are similar to those of nitric acid, as both are strong oxidants. It was carried in the container in glass bottles. It can be carried only in glass. There may have been combustible material also in the container. Possibly the container was dropped or jarred drastically which broke some of the acid bottles. All that had to happen was for the acid to find a combustible: cardboard, wooden crate, pallet, dirt residue on the container floor. Bingo, instant fire of near explosive proportions. Heat then would have caused a chain reaction.
Hank, Thanks for the mini-chemistry lesson! The prefix of the material "Per-" means it has 1 additional oxygen in the compound (ClO₄) over the basic oxy radical (ClO3), and as you noted is a strong oxidizer; the material willingly gives up this oxygen and liberates lots of energy (heat, etc) when the chemical "bonds" break. There's many scenarios that could be in play here--poor packaging, rough handling, incompatible packaging or materials in the same container. We know what the material is, based on waybills or shipping papers, so undeclared HAZMAT is probably not the issue. Short of an investigation, which I suspect the DOT is interested in, we may never know.
Basically the problem was how the shipper packaged the material or the product was loaded into the container, neither of which was done by the railroad.
