The San Bernardino train disaster happened on the morning of May 12 1989 in San Bernardino, California A Southern Pacific freight train (SP 7551 East) ran away down the Cajon Pass before derailing and ploughing into a residential area on Duffy Street.[1] The conductor, head-end brakeman, and two children in their homes were killed in the crash.[2][3] Seven homes were destroyed.[4] Two metres under the train's wreckage there was the Calnev Pipeline (a main petrol pipeline), which was damaged during the cleanup of the train's wreckage. The pipe burst thirteen days later, causing a large fire that killed two people and destroyed eleven more homes.[5][4] The total property damage was $14.3 million.[6] Many residents moved out after this, and homes are no longer allowed to be built next to the railroad lines.
The accident was featured in an episode of the Crash Scene Investigation documentary series.
Cause
The train was carrying trona (a material used to make glass) that had been mined and loaded onto the freight cars for shipment to a buyer. The buyer had purchased 6900 tons of trona; thus the mining company contracted for 69 100-ton hopper cars. When the mining company turned in the final contract to the clerk for the bill of lading, they had not filled in any weight, assuming that the railroad would know that they had filled the 100-ton cars to capacity. The clerk filled in the bill of lading as 60 tons per hopper car, going by a visual comparison of 100 tons of coal. This made the profile of the train to show that the train was much lighter than its actual weight.Vorlage:Fact
Engine #2 of the first three engines did not have any dynamic brakes, just air brakes. Engine #5 (the last one of the two helper engines in the back) also did not have dynamic brakes. This information about the last engine was not passed on to the lead engineer. Thus, he had faulty weight information and faulty information about his braking power to work with when calculating his maximum descent speed down the steep mountain pass. When he realized that the train was gathering too much speed, he did all he could to brake the front engines and asked the helper engine engineer to do as much as he could to help also (not knowing that he had only one working engine braking in the back). The train reached a speed of 110 miles on a curve at Duffy Street designed to hold the train at 40 mph. At that speed and with the friction of the brakes, the wheels were actually turning molten when the train left the track in its destructive crash.Vorlage:Fact
References
- ↑ Railroad Accident Report— Derailment of Southern Pacific Transportation Company Freight Train on May 12, 1989 and Subsequent Rupture of Calnev Petroleum Pipeline on May 25, 1989— San Bernardino, California. (PDF) National Transportation Safety Board, 19. Juni 1990, S. vi–vii, abgerufen am 3. August 2006.
- ↑ Ibid, pp. 9–15.
- ↑ Ibid, pp. 15–17.
- ↑ a b Ibid, p. 38.
- ↑ Ibid, pp. 31–33.
- ↑ Ibid, p. 39.