BUCKLAND — Town officials are annoyed that Pan Am Railways delayed notifying local authorities that a freight train derailed as it traveled through the thickly settled village of Shelburne Falls early Sunday.
According to Pan Am, an eastbound train carrying 114 grain cars derailed about 2:40 a.m. beyond the Elm Street railroad crossing on the Buckland side of Shelburne Falls.
The derailment, still under investigation, only affected the last four cars on the train.
“The last two cars tipped over and the others are still upright,” said Pan Am spokeswoman Cynthia Scarano. “They’re investigating the cause at the moment,” she said Monday. No one was injured, but both the railroad crossings at Ashfield Street and at Elm Street were badly damaged, with twisted rails and broken chunks of pavement.
But town officials are alarmed that no public safety officials in town were notified of the accident until several hours later.
According to selectmen’s Chairman Rob Riggan, the State Police dispatcher was notified at 5:57 a.m., and the town’s police chief was told at about 6:20. Shelburne Falls Fire Chief Rick Bardwell first heard about the derailment around 7:40 a.m., when a Homestead Avenue resident called to tell him about it.
And, according to Riggan, at least one truck drove across the damaged Elm Street crossing before railroad personnel closed it — hours after the mishap.
Riggan said the Ashfield Street crossing was closed around 6:30 a.m. and the Elm Street crossing was closed sometime later. He said railroad personnel working in the dark might not have seen the full damage and town officials should have been told.
“This was a grain train, but it went right through the center of town, where there are a lot of homes,” said Riggan. “We should be informed — even if it’s nothing.”
Riggan said a railroad dispatcher working in the Deerfield rail yard “shouldn’t be making decisions for Buckland.”
“The story here was that no emergency people were notified in Buckland,” said Riggan. “They’re furious they didn’t get informed. These are people’s houses, people’s lives.”
“This is a main line,” said Riggan. “A dozen or more trains come through here. And they are big trains.” He said railroad authorities “have an obligation to let people know if anything is wrong. It’s utterly inexcusable,” said Riggan.
When contacted Monday, a Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) spokesman Christopher Besse said MEMA hadn’t been notified. When asked if the railroad is require to notify MEMA of a derailment, Besse said, “The protocol is working out that they usually notify us, so we are made aware of it.”
Buckland Fire Chief and Emergency Management Director Herb Guyette first learned of the derailment around noon on Sunday, when his son discovered a posting of it on Facebook. “They should have called Shelburne Control,” said Guyette. “Shelburne Control would have notified us, and we would have responded.”
“Communication is always an ongoing issue,” said Shelburne Falls Fire Chief Rick Bardwell. “We had two (railroad) crossings in town that couldn’t be used … it would have been nice to have known that. I really was in the dark, as much as anyone else was,” he said. When a firefighter living near the tracks told Bardwell about the derailment, sometime after 7:30 a.m., Bardwell said he called Shelburne Control to tell them.
“It doesn’t cost anything to say, ‘We’ve had a derailment.’ It’s more of a courtesy, a simple courtesy in a timely way,” said Bardwell.
On Monday morning, Scarano said, the Ashfield Street crossing was being repaired, and the Elm Street crossing would be fixed next. Pan Am has two parallel tracks, and one of the tracks was repaired and re-opened at about 8:30 p.m. Sunday.
The derailed cars are still on the track, with the wheels removed, apparently in preparation for removing the cars from the track.