Governor at Raymond. In a jacket loaned him by a Homeland Security investigator, Walz gets an up-close look at mangled tanker cars from a Burlington Northern train derailment.
Governor: Less fireball if tankers triple-hulled
RAYMOND, Minn. – Governor Tim Walz knows something about railroad safety. When he was in Congress, he was on the House Transportation Committee and pushed for requiring the rail industry to update their fleets to crash-resistant triple-hull tanker cars. Whether the cars that blew up in a derailment near Raymond were triple-hull, Walz couldn’t tell from a distance as he surveyed the tangled of wreckage near Raymond. Less than seven hours earlier a Burlington Northern freight had gone off the rails. Tankers carrying ethanol blew up, forcing the evacuation of the area. In St. Paul Walz had been awakened by a state trooper at 2:30 a.m. about the accident. He made the two-hour trip from St. Paul by 9 a.m. to survey the damage. About new-style encapsulated tanker cars, Walz noted the railroads were supposed to phase them in. “There was a timeline to do this,” Walz said. “It’s my guess that that’s probably why this contained a little bit more.” As the governor looked on, the punctured cars were still leaking ethanol with occasional mini-bursts of flame. “With triple hulls, he said, you don’t have a massive fireball.”
Earlier: Ethanol explodes in train wreck; evacuation follows
When informed of the Raymond wreck, Walz said his first reaction was whether anybody was injured. Thr answer was no. After that, he said he asked about evacuation efforts and what needed to be done. Then, he said, his thoughts turned to the devastating train derailment on February 3 in East Palestine in Ohio. “Certainly all of us, since the situation in Ohio, are very concerned. ‘What are we breathing? What’s in the air?” Walz said the Dallas-based Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad was quickly forthcoming about what the train was hauling and about the threat to nearby residents. Walz said that U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also was on the phone right away. National Transportation Safety Board investigators were immediately en route. So too were Federal Railroad Administration investigators.