Dan Stone felt it on the fifth floor of the cast-iron building he owns at 300 W. Pratt St. In a tavern downstairs, manager Christine Groller felt it, too, believing it was an earthquake.
It wasn’t like that for Chad Cadden, but he was in a tunnel some 30 feet underground, the engineer of a thrumming diesel hauling 60 freight cars of paper, chemicals, wood pulp, soy oil, bricks and steel north to New Jersey.
Cadden felt the train lurch, then a light flashed on the instrument panel – the pneumatic control indicator – signaling that the emergency brakes were on. The train groaned to a halt in the darkness. Something had gone wrong.
It was 3:07 Wednesday afternoon, and an exhausting drama of fire, flood, worry and disruption had begun to unfold beneath the heart of Baltimore. At its south end, thousands of baseball fans sat unaware, watching the final innings of an Orioles loss. At its north end, more than a mile and a half away, the manager of a high-rise apartment building watched a plume of black smoke unfurl past the 11th floor, wondering if her longtime fears were about to be confirmed.
Soon, both ends of the tunnel would be cloaked by rolling black smoke. Because of it, the fire would yield its secrets stubbornly, and for an entire night there would be just enough mystery to trigger Civil Defense sirens and fears of a toxic disaster, while fire companies fought a two-front war against an enemy they could neither see nor understand.
But that wasn’t all. A water main just above the tunnel would burst three hours after the derailment, gushing so much water that the level of Druid Hill Reservoir would drop 3 feet in four hours.
Only by sundown of the next day would the consequences seem clearer – a derailed tanker car leaking hydrochloric acid, several downtown buildings flooded by a torrent of 60 million gallons, enough broken telecommunications lines to disrupt e-mail around the world, two postponed Orioles baseball games (and another yesterday), and enough downtown gridlock to produce a year’s worth of headaches and missed appointments.
Yet, for all the smoke and bother, not a single life would be lost, pending the unforeseen discovery of anyone who might have hopped aboard an empty boxcar. In this disaster, for once, every member of the cast would come out alive. But not without a few second thoughts about what might have been, had their luck turned for the worse.
3:07: The earth moves
It takes only a crew of two to run a freight train. The engineer mans the controls of the diesel engines while the conductor generally operates the brake, calls out passing signals and maintains the waybill, which carries the information of what’s on board.
Cadden, 27, of Stewartstown, Pa., and conductor Edward Brown, 52, of West Baltimore, had just boarded the train a few minutes earlier, six miles short of the tunnel during a crew change at Curtis Bay. If there was trouble ahead, you wouldn’t expect to encounter it in the tunnel, as straight a stretch of railway as you’ll find on the CSX route through the city.
A signal just before the tunnel indicated the track ahead was clear, so the train continued. It was 3:04, and the train was lumbering along at just over 20 mph, black exhaust snorting from three engines at the front.
Looming to the left were the grandstands and warehouse of Camden Yards. The train entered the tunnel, its four headlights on, accelerating on a slight downgrade to about 23 mph before beginning the long, slow climb on the gradual rise beneath Howard Street.
That’s when Stone and Groller were at work, in the building just above the tunnel at Howard and Pratt streets. And at 3:07, the earth moved.
“It seemed to be a grinding noise and a grinding sensation,” Stone said. “I’ve been here for 11 years, and I’ve never felt anything like it.”
“It lasted maybe 10 seconds,” Groller said. “I honestly thought it was an earthquake.”
Cadden and Brown weren’t sure what to think, according to federal transportation officials who interviewed them. There was the lurch, then the flashing indicator, then the stopping of the train. Black fumes were everywhere, but that’s often the case when three engines are running in a tunnel.
They tried to radio the CSX dispatcher, but no luck, probably because they were underground. Cadden used his cell phone, reaching the train master. It was 3:15. They were still unaware of the brewing disaster to their rear.
With the fumes growing worse, they shut down two engines, then uncoupled all three from their cargo, and drove them out the tunnel’s north end underneath the high roof of the old Mount Royal Station at the foot of Bolton Hill. Now the radio worked and they reached the dispatcher. It was 3:25.
By then they’d begun checking the waybill, reviewing what they’d left behind. And that’s what troubled them when they began to notice the black smoke pouring out of the tunnel. Something was on fire, and it might be anything from paper to toxic chemicals.
4:15: No false alarm
Seven blocks away, on the other side of Bolton Hill, Capt. James Smith, 34, sat in the firehouse for Engine Co. 13, at 405 McMechen St.
A call came in: smoke coming from the train tunnel. Ho hum. Probably yet another panicky person who’d seen diesel fumes, a common occurrence. But when the truck pulled beneath the Mount Royal shed at 4:15 p.m., Smith said, the volume of smoke made it clear this was no false alarm.
“That,” Smith said, “knocked it up a notch.”
‘It’s the tunnel’
A block away, Elaine Macklin wondered what all the fuss was about. As resident manager for 21 years of the high-rise Sutton Place Apartments, it’s been her job to find out such things, and the sirens were blowing. She, too, was familiar with the frequent false alarms, but she’d read enough newspaper stories about the sort of cargo that came and went on those tracks to wonder if one day a call might be for real.
“I just had a feeling,” said Macklin, 72. Years ago, she’d told her three scoffing children, “Someday, something will happen in that tunnel.”
Now, after more than two decades of living and working next door, that day had come. But she didn’t know until she rode an elevator to an empty apartment on the 11th floor for a better look. She was joined by her longtime assistant, Patricia Stanitski, who said: “The school’s on fire,” referring to the old Mount Royal Station, which houses part of the Maryland Institute, College of Art.
“No,” Macklin said, watching the smoke rise past the top floor. “It’s the tunnel.”
She hoped there was nothing hazardous burning.
A foray into darkness
Chief Terry Ryer wondered the same thing when he heard the call go out to Engine Co. 13.
Ryer, 49, was listening to the radio at the firehouse in Brooklyn, where he commands the 6th Battalion, with its hazardous materials squad.
It was a later part of the call that sent him into action. Not only had a train possibly derailed, but hazardous materials might be involved. Ryer opened his office door and told the firefighters relaxing in the bay to stand ready. Less than a minute later they got the call.
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The son of a city firefighter, Ryer, like his dad, signed on for duty at age 18, so he’s been around long enough to know that some fires aren’t the sort that should be rushed into, and this sounded like just such a fire.
Captain Smith was discovering that firsthand. He and three others were the first to enter the tunnel. Within a few feet they were submerged in darkness. Each wore 80 pounds of equipment, picking his way across rail ties, chunky stones and the rails themselves. They talked to each other, touching, anything to keep from separating in the blackness, while wondering what would happen if the fire suddenly intensified. They weren’t even sure what was burning.
A situation like this ran counter to almost all their training, which teaches them to constantly be aware of “escape routes” and “safety zones.”
“In a dwelling fire,” Smith said, “you’re usually never more than 12 feet from a window or some stair, a door, a ladder. This really played with your mind. … We were concerned it may have been a caustic [substance].”
They made it a hundred yards, at most, before agreeing to back out. A second attempt also failed.
By then, news media were gathering at both ends of the tunnel, and the word going out wasn’t good. Chemicals, including three types of acid, were on board, and no one knew yet what was in all that black smoke. The Orioles had just canceled the second game of their day-night doubleheader.
At Sutton Place, Macklin tried to calm the tenants, though most didn’t seem too concerned. Then, in walked seven firefighters in full gear, fanning out floor by floor to tell everyone to shut their windows and stay indoors.
Miles to the southeast, somewhere near the Bay Bridge, Mayor Martin O’Malley was on his way home from the annual J. Millard Tawes Crab and Clambake in Crisfield, talking on the phone with officials who were trying to assess the situation. Police had shut down Howard Street, rerouting traffic, with cars stacked up all over downtown. Civil Defense sirens sounded the alarm, blasting like some warning from the Cold War.
But what was burning? Nobody had the answer. Nor did anyone know that the city’s problems were about to get worse.
6:15: Howard Street flood
It was 6:30 when Dan Stone, who’d felt that first troubling rumble beneath his feet more than three hours earlier, noticed something new happening outside his office at Pratt and Howard Streets.
Water was coming down Howard Street. Buckets of it. Barrels of it. Rivers of it. Something else had erupted underground, and on meters at city reservoirs the event announced itself like a blip on a seismograph.
It had happened at 6:15, almost certainly due to the fire. A water main nearly 3 1/2 feet in diameter burst, blowing open a jagged hole several feet long. Darrell Owens, 41, a supervisor for west-side maintenance with the city’s Department of Public Works, was the first to arrive at the scene.
Owens thought he’d seen it all – burst mains creating huge sinkholes that devoured city blocks; urban streets raging like canyons in a flash flood. But this was a new one – a flood on top of a fire.
“It was a swimming pool, two, three and a half feet deep.” Fire hydrants were submerged. A block away, the torrent swamped the first floor of the Prudential Securities Building.
Deb and Paul Pelaia, meanwhile, had left Lombard and Howard streets a few minutes earlier.
As guests from Thomasville, Pa., staying at the Holiday Inn, they were beginning to wonder what they’d gotten into by visiting Baltimore. Deb had come for a three-day nursing conference. Paul came along for a boat cruise and an Orioles game.
What they got instead was a front-row seat at an urban disaster. The Holiday Inn overlooked the flood, itself perhaps 30 feet above the derailed and burning train. Already, Paul’s baseball game had been canceled. The bus that was to take them to the harbor cruise got stuck in traffic. So, they walked to the Inner Harbor, wondering at the smoke pouring from manholes.
During their cruise on the Bay Lady, word of the flood spread. Someone said they’d heard the Holiday Inn was closed. The boat returned to find the Coast Guard had closed the Inner Harbor, and docked instead at Pier 5. It was 10 p.m., but traffic was still bumper to bumper, and the bus had to drop them off short of the hotel – still open after all – because of the river in the street. They returned to their room to find water in the tap running brown, at low pressure. Welcome to Charm City.
White smoke raises fears
At the ends of the tunnels, where news of the water main break was a little slower in arriving, the first effects of the flood were cause for alarm.
One thing firefighters always pay attention to is the color of the smoke, and suddenly the smoke had gone from black to white. Did it mean something toxic was on fire? The answer was the same as before. No one knew.
However, readings taken by the Maryland Department of the Environment soon put fears to rest. It was steam, caused by water from the burst main. Fire crews asked Owens to leave the line open. Used to simply shutting things off as soon as possible, he was now faced with an unenviable assignment akin to that of a basketball player asked to guard a high-scoring superstar: You can’t stop it, you can only hope to contain it. He said he’d do what he could.
Third try, first contact
Within a few hours more, it was time for firefighters to make a third attempt to reach the train from the north end. The south end was out of the question due to flooding. Captain Smith and Chief Ryer were on the team of six men. So was Dan MacFarlane, 32, another member of Smith’s Engine Co. 13.
By now, their faces were blackened by soot and they knew what to expect. This time they rode in slowly on a CSX truck equipped with railway wheels. Each man took two oxygen bottles, a 70- minute supply. After a while, the truck stopped and four of the six set out on foot, flashlights pointed at their feet to light the way. Over the radio, someone at the mouth of the tunnel called out the elapsed time every five minutes. It took a half-hour to go 2,200 feet, Ryer said.
MacFarlane was ready to give up. “We’re going to pull out,” he radioed. But they took two more steps, and firefighter Pat Hoban, just in front of MacFarlane and Smith, touched the first boxcar. Contact. It wasn’t much, but they’d take it. Now the work of removing the train cars could begin.
‘Mom, you were right’
Fourteen floors above, in her apartment at Sutton Place, Elaine Macklin was ready to turn in at midnight after an uneasy night of watching TV news accounts, windows shut tight.
All of downtown was sealed up. You could leave, but you couldn’t come back. Police had closed every major road. Helping lessen the sense of isolation, Macklin had heard by telephone from friends and family, some of whom called after radio and TV stations reported that Sutton Place was being evacuated. Officials were standing by to move residents to cots in the Baltimore Convention Center, but never did.
The most satisfying call came from her son Victor, 45, a television producer in California. He’d seen the news on CNN. “He said, ‘Mom, you were absolutely right. You told us 21 years ago something would happen in that tunnel.'”
Perhaps by morning, she hoped, everything would be fixed. But she arose Thursday to see white smoke still rising from the tunnel. When she walked close to her living room window, she could smell it.
Thank Mother Nature
A few blocks south, at the Holiday Inn, the Pelaias and other lodgers saw that the impromptu hotel “swimming pool” was finally under control. Owens and public works crews had contained it, digging a hole in the street that exposed the ruptured pipe. Water was still dumping into the tunnel.
Overnight, a new guest had checked into the hotel. It was Dan Stone, who hadn’t wanted to desert his building at Pratt and Howard streets. Water in the basement had peaked at 9 feet by 11 p.m., when city workers began pumping it out. He hadn’t reached the hotel until 4:20 a.m.
Other workers, meanwhile, were just beginning to head home as the new day’s rush hour began, ending shifts that had continued while the rest of the city slept. Ryer got home at 6:30 a.m., Smith and MacFarlane around 8. Owens made it by 9:30. But for all of the night’s heroes, one of the more unsung ones might have been Mother Nature, in the form of a geological stroke of luck.
Since the first hour of the derailment, hydrochloric acid had been leaking from one of the tanker cars. Yet, there hadn’t been a single problem with air or water flowing from the spot. The possible reason, according to state environmental officials, was the limestone bedrock beneath the tunnel. Being an alkali, it reacts with acid sort of like water with fire, neutralizing its caustic nature.
Day 2: A new strategy
The fire, while still burning, no longer seemed an imminent threat to blow into an environmental disaster. By late afternoon, a firefighting force that had peaked at 150 was down to 50. Not that their jobs were getting much easier.
Some boxcars had already been removed from the tunnel. Others would soon follow. But some were still baking at 400 degrees, and smoke still poured from the north end. The next day, two men – a state official and a chemical consultant – were overcome by smoke.
But it was on Thursday afternoon that the firefighters hatched a new strategy. Dan Stone got a preview of it from his office, when three firemen asked if there might be an entrance to the tunnel through his building. There wasn’t, but they eventually found another: through a manhole, where they poked a hose to douse the fire’s midsection. It was also the entry point for hazardous waste crews that pumped hydrochloric acid from the leaking tanker.
Outnumbering fire crews by then were street crews, digging into the pavement five blocks east of Howard Street to lay new fiber-optic cable. Lines near or through the tunnel had been damaged or destroyed, disrupting e-mail, Internet and phone service from Baltimore to New York to Africa.
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Sorting out events
By nightfall Thursday, another force had arrived on the scene. The National Transportation Safety Board plays an important role in sorting out such events, ultimately assigning blame. Yesterday, the NTSB made itself known to the public through board member John Hammerschmidt, whose briefings were minor masterpieces of bureaucratic jargon.
On for the day’s final briefing was CSX President Michael Ward, who grew up not far from Terry Ryer’s 6th Battalion fire headquarters in Brooklyn.
Ward praised the city, praised the mayor and said his company would continue to err on the side of caution. Then came a question. Once this mess was cleaned up, would his company consider installing sprinklers in the tunnel?
Ward testily called any such question “premature.”
“Hindsight is 20-20,” offered the Fire Department’s Mike Maybin, affirming his department’s skills.
What about foresight? They must have forgotten to ask Elaine Macklin, at Sutton Place, who again went to bed with smoke pouring past her 14th-floor window.
Sun staff writers Scott Calvert, Stacey Hirsh, Fred Rasmussen, Todd Richissin, M. Dion Thompson and Del Quentin Wilber contributed to this article.