Another USA hazchem crash

[randyrippley]

MSN

A bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Montana collapsed early Saturday, plunging portions of a freight train carrying hazardous materials into the rushing water below.

The train cars were carrying hot asphalt and molten sulfur, Stillwater County Disaster and Emergency Services said. Officials shut down drinking water intakes downstream while they evaluated the danger after the 6 a.m. accident. An Associated Press reporter witnessed a yellow substance coming out of some of the tank cars.

David Stamey, the county's chief of emergency services, said there was no immediate danger for the crews working at the site, and the hazardous material was being diluted by the swollen river. There were three asphalt cars and four sulfur cars in the river.

The train crew was safe and no injuries were reported, Montana Rail Link spokesman Andy Garland said in a statement. The asphalt and sulfur both solidify quickly when exposed to cooler temperatures, he said.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/us/f...1e430c5f6979eee&ei=12&fullscreen=true#image=2

 

[MarkyT]

One of the midstream support pillars appears to have failed, dropping the steel trusses into the water. The river level looks quite high in the photos, which might be relevant.

 

[stuving]

One of the midstream support pillars appears to have failed, dropping the steel trusses into the water. The river level looks quite high in the photos, which might be relevant.

Some of the reports refer to the site as "Twin Bridges", and on Gogle Earth you can see the road and rail bridges next to each other. But the road bridge was removed two years ago (or else it would block some of those pictures). This is from Yellowstone Public Radio:

The concrete pier under the old Twin Bridges Road bridge has been so eroded by water and debris flow over the past 90 years that the Montana Department of Transportation determined it was in imminent danger of collapsing into the river and needed to be demolished.

You can see the piers of the rail bridge have had new bits of concrete to shore them up - but maybe that middle one needed a new foundation.

Here's a picture (from billingsgazette.com) of the road bridge being demolished, with the water down at its more usual level (and off the right side of this view. The peirs are in line with the railway bridge's, so you'd think digging one out might affect scour at the other, wouldn't you? Yet none of the reports I can find about the road bridge mentions the rail bridge having similar problems. Now the rail bridge is not the Montana Department of Transportation's responsibility, but still isn't that odd?

Construction crews remove a section of the failing Two Bridges Road bridge across the Yellowstone River east of Reed Point on April 3, 2021.

Further reporting from early 2021 at ktvq.com includes a video of both bridges at low water, and this:

REED POINT — The bridge over the Yellowstone River on Twin Bridges Road near Reed Point is under threat of collapse due to heavy scouring of the riverbed on a bridge pier in the river channel, said Stephanie Brandenberger, bridge engineer for Montana Department of Transportation, Wednesday.

"Over the years, the river has actually moved the material around that pier to the very bottom of the foundation, and in fact it is going underneath the foundation in some locations. There’s not a good foundation under that support for the bridge," Brandenberger said.

“We do want to try to get at least the portion of the bridge out that’s in the active channel of the river before high water. That’s when the most damage is going to continue to occur on that footing," Brandenberger said.

The bridge has five piers. Pier four, in the main river channel, has the most damage. Divers measured a three-foot-deep hole under the footing recently. Two other piers in the river channel are showing less severe scaling damage, Brandenberger said.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

Some more pictures of the collapsed rail bridge here:

MSN

www.msn.com

The text suggests there was a derailment on the bridge which brought it down, rather than being caused by the river flow.

“On 24 June 2023 at approximately 0600 there was a train derailment on the rail bridge that crosses the Yellowstone River in Stillwater County Montana,” the agency said, in a statement.
“The bridge collapsed and there are multiple rail cars in the Yellowstone River. We have not determined the cause of the derailment,” said Stillwater County Disaster and Emergency Services.

The line is part of Montana Rail Link, a spinoff of the former Northern Pacific Railway when its successor BNSF decided to downgrade the line.
It will be a long diversion for trains, via Great Falls on BNSF.

Edit: I'm out of date. MRL leased the line from BNSF, and exited the lease earlier this year.
So it's squarely a BNSF problem to reinstate the route.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Rail_Link

In January 2022, MRL and BNSF agreed on an early lease termination to return control of the line to BNSF. This was later approved by the Surface Transportation Board on March 8, 2023.

 

[yoyothehobo]

That picture looks like it already has some pretty nasty scour issues on the rail bridge!

 

[AndrewE]

"hot asphalt and molten sulfur" may be HazChem, but at least they are fairly innocuous as these things go. The sulphur will just set to a yellow solid, (as is visible in the pictures) and maybe oxidise slightly at the surface if exposed to air but won't be a problem if it doesn't catch fire, and the asphalt will probably just congeal too. I guess some of that might emulsify and allow hydrocarbons to escape downstream, but thankfully this one looks likely to have little environmental impact.

 

[ABB125]

Out of interest, does anyone know why sulphur might be transported molten? Surely that's much less efficient than ambient temperature, given that it solidifies at around 110°C? (Usual Wikipedia caveats apply!), then melting as required at the processing plant it's being sent to?
Similarly for the asphalt, although it may just be that I've only every seen hot asphalt being moved on a lorry from the batching plant to site in the UK

 

[randyrippley]

Out of interest, does anyone know why sulphur might be transported molten? Surely that's much less efficient than ambient temperature, given that it solidifies at around 110°C? (Usual Wikipedia caveats apply!), then melting as required at the processing plant it's being sent to?
Similarly for the asphalt, although it may just be that I've only every seen hot asphalt being moved on a lorry from the batching plant to site in the UK

easier to handle as a liquid
also sulphur has a number of different solid phase states (e.g. crystals, plastic) which can affect use and handling.
allowing it to cool in the tanks could cause thermal stress and safety problems when you try to reheat it, and would probably turn the sulphur black

 

[MarkyT]

Some more pictures of the collapsed rail bridge here:

MSN

www.msn.com

The text suggests there was a derailment on the bridge which brought it down, rather than being caused by the river flow.


The line is part of Montana Rail Link, a spinoff of the former Northern Pacific Railway when its successor BNSF decided to downgrade the line.
It will be a long diversion for trains, via Great Falls on BNSF.

Edit: I'm out of date. MRL leased the line from BNSF, and exited the lease earlier this year.
So it's squarely a BNSF problem to reinstate the route.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana_Rail_Link

I don't think that report really establishes what happened first. There's a bit of an obsession with derailments in the US at the moment following East Palestine, so it's perhaps not surprising inexpert reporters are sensationally imagining trains spontaneously jumping off tracks behind all incidents when structural issues might be a more compelling explanation in this case. This Railway Age article suggests the bridge's structural failure is more likely:

Reports: MRL Reopens Railroad Bridge 28 Days After Collapse - Railway Age

Montana Rail Link (MRL) has resumed traffic over the Twin Rivers Railroad bridge in Stillwater County, Mont., which on June 24 collapsed, sending one of the regional’s trains, hauling hot asphalt and

www.railwayage.com

The AP noted that “the Yellowstone saw record flooding in 2022 that caused extensive damage to Yellowstone National Park and adjacent towns in Montana. The river where the bridge collapsed flows away from Yellowstone National Park, which is about 110 miles (177 kilometers) southwest. Robert Bea, a retired engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley who has analyzed the causes of hundreds of major disasters, said repeated years of heavy river flows provided a clue to the possible cause.

“‘The high water flow translates to high forces acting directly on the pier and, importantly, on the river bottom,’ Bea said Saturday [June 25]. ‘You can have erosion or scour that removes support from the foundation. High forces translate to a high likelihood of a structural or foundation failure that could act as a trigger to initiate the accident.’

A previously derailed train did bring down a span of a similar style but much longer steel truss bridge at Tempe in Arizona in 2020, leading to a major fire. From the NTSB report: "Contributing to the severity of the derailment was the absence of an inner guard rail preceding the steel bridge structure, which allowed the derailed equipment to move laterally into the bridge structure and cause its collapse”. There was a short wooden trestle at the south end that didn't have guard rails allowing derailed cars to move foul of the profile of the first truss. The replacement structure built at Tempe was equipped with guard rails from the point at which track left the approach earthworks. There was a thread about that one here: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...ails-in-flames-causes-bridge-collapse.207149/

 

[Taunton]

That's a big destruction of the bridge. Looks like scenes from Europe in 1945. If Montana Rail Link hadn't handed the line back to BNSF recently, it would likely have been the end for their company.

 

[stuving]

This is taken from an updated report (uk.news.yahoo) of the cleanup operation:

Contractors and a large crane were on site to stabilize and remove cars from the river once a plan is set, officials said.

Some rail cars that did not go off the tracks were removed from the area, and two cars carrying sodium hydrosulfide had their contents transferred to other cars and moved to safety, Archer said.

Montana Rail Link will be responsible for all cleanup costs, CEO Joe Racicot told a news conference.

Sixteen cars derailed, and 10 of them ended up in the river downstream from Yellowstone National Park Saturday morning.

Six mangled cars that carried hot asphalt, three holding molten sulfur and one with scrap metal remained in the rushing water on Monday in an area surrounded by farmland near the town of Columbus, about 40 miles (about 64 kilometers) west of Billings.

Two of the cars were submerged, and a dive team was deployed to gather more information, Archer said in a statement.

Looking at the earlier pictures, I reckon that the pier on the far side (the patched one) has tilted over and has a big crack right across it near the waterline. Some failure! But it still doesn't tells what the sequence of events was or the original cause.

Here's another recent report, from the Montana Free Press, which has this explanation of why MRL may still be responsible for the track as well as the train being theirs:

Railroad officials have not offered a timeline for how long it might take to clean up the site and reopen the rail line — a critical route for cargo to the Pacific Northwest — but it is likely to take weeks. While that happens, freight that normally traverses MRL lines will be diverted onto other routes, including BNSF Railway’s main line across the northern part of the state. MRL leases its track from Huntley (near Billings) to Sandpoint, Idaho, from BNSF. Last year, BNSF and MRL announced that they would terminate that lease early and that the larger BNSF railroad would once again take control of the route across southern Montana. (BNSF operates 32,500 miles of track in 28 states; MRL operates on about 900 miles of track in two states). Earlier this spring, federal regulators approved BNSF’s plan to resume control of the line and the deal is expected to be complete by the end of the year.

Depending on the terms of that lease, the question of whether the train derailed and broke the bridge or the bridge fell first might matter a lot to MRL.

 

[LNW-GW Joint]

I see Ryanair is concerned that this bridge collapse might delay delivery of their new Boeing 737 Max jets.

RYANAIR REPORTS Q1 PROFITS OF €663M – Ryanair's Corporate Website

corporate.ryanair.com

Despite uncertainty over H2 Boeing deliveries, accentuated recently by the collapse of a Yellowstone River bridge in Montana,

The fuselages for 737s are transported by rail from Wichita, Kansas, to Seattle for final assembly.
Trains are still being used for the journey, with trans-shipment across the river by road transport to bypass the failed bridge.
Boeing are hoping to keep to the customer delivery schedule.

Boeing keeps 737 delivery goal despite collapse of bridge used to transport fuselages

Boeing still expects to meet its 737 delivery target this year despite facing a significant logistical hurdle imposed by the recent collapse of a railway bridge used to transport fuselages.

www.flightglobal.com

Boeing says it is working with “crane and trucking services” to bypass the bridge. The fuselages are being shipped by train from Wichita to near the collapsed bridge, then transferred by crane onto trucks for transport across the river. The fuselages are then being loaded back onto trains, bound for Boeing’s assembly site in Renton.
...
Crews have since removed train cars and bridge debris from the water. The work of building a new bridge has been started, but “there is no timeline currently available regarding completion”, says the county.

It might be remembered that a train of fuselages derailed and fell into the Clark Fork river, also in Montana and on Montana Rail Link, in 2014.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/derailed-train-montana-sends-boeing-fuselages-river-n149321

A total of 19 cars in the 90-car train derailed in the incident about 18 miles (30 km) east of Superior, Montana, said Rail Link Montana. The rail company links with BNSF to carry freight from Billings in southern Montana through the state to Spokane, Washington where it links back to BNSF.
Of the derailed cars, three cars carrying 737 plane fuselages went down an embankment and into the Clark Fork River.
Spirit Aerosystems, based in Wichita, Kansas, builds all of Boeing’s 737 fuselages and Boeing currently produces 42 finished 737s a month. So the six fuselages involved in Thursday’s derailment represent 14 percent of Boeing’s monthly production of 737s.