AIKEN, S.C. – Thousands of Graniteville residents faced being kept from their mill town homes for a third day – and possibly longer – as authorities worked around-the-clock to remove toxic chlorine after Thursday’s railroad crash.

It will take today, and possibly Sunday, for a contractor to patch a fist-sized hole in the still-leaking tanker car, smashed early Thursday in the wreck. At least eight have died.

“Best case, three days; worst case, seven days,” said Aiken County sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Michael Frank late Friday afternoon, referring to how long residents would be displaced.

The names of the dead were released Friday, while authorities continued to search for a missing man who worked at Avondale Mills.

The concentration levels of the deadly gas were so high immediately after the crash that the chlorine discolored the clothes of the eight dead and began to corrode metal and plastic they wore, Aiken County Coroner Tim Carlton told The State.

All eight men – five mill workers, the train engineer, a resident and a truck driver – died of chlorine inhalation, Carlton said.

The pre-dawn accident also left 234 people injured – at least 58 of whom were hospitalized. It was believed to be the worst fatal chemical spill in the United States from a train wreck since a 1978 Tennessee accident that left 15 dead.

Hersman said Friday night that no evidence of foul play or sabotage had been found at a switch that directed a moving train onto a spur, where it hit a parked train. Investigators have recovered the train’s event recorder, which measures things like train speed, its direction and braking, she said.

Given the level of contamination, stopping the leak will be tricky work, authorities acknowledged.

The contractor, Hulcher Services Inc., will have to remove the remaining chlorine from the leaking car and the other two tankers, which derailed along with 11 other cars. That could take several more days, officials said Friday.

“It’s going to depend on how quickly and how well the contractor is able to perform the work,” Frank said.

Officials Friday warned of a possible “secondary leak” from the leaking car or another severely damaged car.

Berry said emergency workers likely won’t be able to make a better assessment until other damaged cars are removed.

DHEC workers also discovered a “sizable fish kill” Friday in nearby Horse Creek that apparently occurred when chlorine gas traveled down a storm drain under the mill, Berry said. Dead animals also were found in the area, he said.

The public drinking water supply is not threatened, he said.

Berry said any concentrations of chlorine greater than 10 parts per million are considered “extremely dangerous.”

The reading needs to be below 1 to be considered safe, Berry said. Two readings of greater than 1.5 parts per million were found at the crash site, he said, though actual levels could have been much higher than that. But officials don’t know for sure because that was the capacity of the air monitor at the site.

“The one-mile area around the crash site still is not deemed safe,” Frank said Friday.

The evacuation, which authorities said moved about 2,000 people from within a one-mile radius of the crash site, was ordered Thursday afternoon, more than 12 hours after the spill.

Asked Friday why it took so long to order the evacuation, Frank replied, “When you consider the enormity of this incident and the resources that were brought to bear to respond, this required an extraordinary amount of coordination between local, state and federal agencies. You cannot just go into a scene like that and begin containment and cleanup.”

Officials also said they were still trying to contact “several” of the mills’ employees, though they stopped short of calling them missing. They urged plant employees to contact Avondale Mills.

The cars were among 14 that derailed about 2:40 a.m. EST Thursday when a 42-car Norfolk Southern freight train heading from Augusta to Columbia slammed into a train engine parked on a side track next to the mill in downtown Graniteville. The collision killed the moving train’s engineer, identified Friday by authorities as Christopher Seeling, 28, of West Columbia.

Seeling had been hired by Norfolk Southern in 1997, the National Transportation Safety Board said.

The conductor on the moving train, whose name was not released, is still hospitalized.

The chlorine spill resulted in a large, thick, yellow-orange cloud that left many of the approximately 500 Avondale Mills workers and others in the surrounding area gasping for air or vomiting.

Robin Chapman, a spokesman for Norfolk Southern, said Friday that 25 cars that didn’t derail have been moved about seven car lengths from the crash site, and five damaged cars were moved away from the tracks. Chapman declined to discuss details of the crash, referring questions to NTSB, which is leading the investigation.

NTSB officials said Thursday night that the side track was operated by a manual switch, which normally would be the responsibility of the crew of the parked locomotive. But they stressed they were not blaming the crew, who were off-duty at the time, pending their investigation.

An attempt apparently was made to brake the moving train before it hit the stopped one, Hersman said.

NTSB investigators have interviewed one of the parked train’s three crew members. Hersman said each has at least 25 years’ experience.

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In another development, Frank announced that four people were arrested, primarily for violations such as disorderly conduct, during a dusk-to-dawn curfew overnight Thursday.

He said the curfew would remain in effect indefinitely within a two-mile radius of the site.

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Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

AP-NY-01-07-05 2252EST

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