A freight train smacked into a truck carrying garbage and careened off the tracks in Rosedale on Tuesday, triggering an explosion felt across a broad swath of Eastern Baltimore County and sending up a plume of black smoke visible for miles.
Authorities identified the driver of the truck as John Alban Jr., a retired Baltimore County firefighter who owns a waste collection company near the scene of the crash. The Essex man was listed in serious condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center on Tuesday night, a hospital spokeswoman said. No other serious injuries were reported.
Officials shut down surrounding roads for several hours, slowing traffic through the region. The roads were reopened by Tuesday night.
Michael “Vincent” Brown, the operations manager at a business near the crash site, was sitting in his office at about 2 p.m. Tuesday when it began to “rumble and shake.”
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“I screamed at my employees, ‘Everyone get in their cars and get out of here now,’’’ Brown said. “We were on Lake Drive, and I asked if everyone was there, and as soon as I said that, the train blew up. It blew me against my car.”
The two workers aboard the two-locomotive, 45-car train — the engineer and a conductor — were not seriously injured, a spokesman for CSX Corp. said. The spokesman, Gary Sease, said “about a dozen cars” appeared to be involved.
County officials said two rail cars that were carrying chemicals used to make plastic caught fire. Sease said at least one car that might have been involved in the derailment contained sodium chlorate, classified by the U.S. Department of Transportation as a hazardous material.
The crash occurred in an industrial section of Rosedale. Authorities did not order evacuations, but asked residents in 70 homes to leave their homes voluntarily and provided rides to shelters, Fire Chief John J. Hohman said.
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“The evacuation would be much more significant if there were toxic chemicals” on fire, Hohman said as firefighters trained a mix of water and foam on the blaze. The smoke was visible from downtown Baltimore into the evening.
Sease said four of the cars potentially involved contained terephthalic acid, which is used in the production of plastics. It is not listed by the Department of Transportation as a hazardous material. Sease said another car might have contained traces of the hazardous material fluorosilicic acid.
The state Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said its initial assessment was that the risk to the general public is low. A spokeswoman said neither terephthalic acid nor sodium chlorate should produce an imminent hazard to the public, and reports of preliminary monitoring from the site did not indicate the presence of highly toxic chemicals.
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Health officials advised residents to avoid direct exposure to smoke. And CSX set up a “community outreach center” at a nearby motel to assist those displaced by the derailment.
The train, which was traveling from Selkirk, N.Y., to Waycross, Ga., did not strike any buildings, but the force of the crash damaged several structures nearby and blew out windows at businesses as far as a mile away.
Brown, the operations manager at Baltimore Windustrial, said a picture of his children and his fiancee fell off his desk, and the building felt as if it was about to collapse. He ran to the front door and found it was too hot to touch.
Outside, he saw an overturned blue tank and flames shooting into the air. He realized workers had to go.
Michael M. Rutkowski, owner of Baltimore Windustrial, which distributes valve pipe fittings, said the building was “completely demolished.”
The National Transportation Safety Board announced that it was sending a team to Rosedale with rail and hazmat investigators.
Derailments are the most common type of train accident in Maryland. Of 50 accidents recorded in the state in 2011 and 2012, 26 were derailments.
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