OFFICIALS STILL CLEARING SITE OF DERAILMENT CHANDLER, TX -- Union Pacific officials are not sure how long it will take to remove train cars from the site of a March 4 derailment. Twenty-eight cars left the tracks about three miles east of Chandler, near the Neches River. Joe Arbona, Union Pacific spokesman, said work crews cleared spilled cargo and oil that had leaked into the Neches River by Friday. "We left a boom out there just as a precautionary step, just to be safe. It will be removed in the near future, but the water readings so far have come back normal," he said Wednesday. However, heavy rain and inaccessible terrain have made removing the rail cars a chore. "We'll have to take those rail cars that are still down there and most likely cut them to pieces and haul that away, and that unfortunately can take a while. I don't know specifically how long that will take," Arbona said. Work crews completed repairs to damaged cross ties, and a new rail switch was brought in early last week. Arbona said the main rail line reopened Thursday. Jim Moffeit, Chandler city manager, said the city has incurred some costs as a result of the derailment. He said sections of Old Tyler Road were heavily damaged after tractor-trailers hauled in gravel to make a vehicle path to the wreckage site. "Those heavy trucks on that asphalt just caused the road to crack and deteriorate," Moffeit said. "With the heavy rain, the water got down in the cracks, and we are losing our sub-base. It's pretty visible. Right in front of the cemetery, it's really bad." Arbona said Union Pacific plans to reimburse the city for those damages as soon as the wreckage is cleared and the accident investigation is complete. "We have a department that actually works with the landowners and with the city to make sure that we find exactly what damage may have been caused," he said. "I know, for example, the police and the firefighters who were there the first day worked overtime to be able to get everything cleaned up. Of course we will reimburse the community for it, if we haven't already." Union Pacific officials have not discovered the cause for the derailment, and Arbona said he doesn't know how soon an answer will be available. "We just need to make sure we don't miss anything, and the last thing in the world we'd want is to provide speculation for something like that," he said. "We always get to the bottom of it, and when we do, we post it to the Federal Railroad Administration." - Cindy Mallette, The Tyler Morning Telegraph
