Firefighters declared victory last night over a railroad tunnel fire they had battled for more than four days, and investigators and engineers began working to determine why the incident occurred and how long it might continue to disrupt life in Baltimore.
The short answers: Weeks of continued headaches on the roads and rails are ahead, and it will take months to determine a cause.
And watch out for this morning’s downtown rush hour, transit officials warned.
“The hardest part is definitely over,” said Mayor Martin O’Malley, said in an interview last night. “The rest is a headache and inconvenience, but nothing that we won’t get through.”
Early this morning, firefighters struggled to remove the charred remains of the last car of the 60-car freight train that derailed Wednesday in the Howard Street Tunnel.
The steel cars, burned nearly to ash in some parts and still smoldering, were being shipped to an undisclosed location to be examined by company inspectors and government officials.
“Now we have a whole lot of light at the end of the tunnel,” said acting Fire Chief Carl E. McDonald.
Smoke lingered below ground and wisps rose from vents near the derailment site, but after nearly 100 consecutive hours of work, McDonald said, his department’s job was all but complete and “we’re ready to get some rest.”
Investigators and repair crews faced daunting tasks both above and below ground.
The freight cars derailed almost smack in the middle of the 1.7-mile tunnel, unleashing enough smoke, fire and hazardous chemicals to tangle travel in the city for days.
Several cars caught fire and because of their distance from either end of the tunnel, firefighters had difficulty getting to them. Within hours of the derailment, a water main above the tunnel broke, helping to extinguish the fire but also sending millions of gallons of water cascading across streets and seeping into the ground.
Adding another task for repair crews, a storm drain was discovered to have collapsed on Howard Street near Lombard Street. The damage will cause further problems for light rail service.
Authorities said yesterday that they were turning their attention toward determining how badly the tunnel is damaged and whether that stretch of Howard Street is safe for traffic.
Their answers will help determine how many more days or weeks of inconvenience hundreds of downtown businesses and thousands of commuters will have to endure.
The tunnel fire had the effect of creating a mile-long above-ground wall. East-west traffic across Howard Street has been closed from Mount Royal Avenue south to Pratt Street, creating huge traffic snarls in the area.
Officials said roads would almost certainly be closed for this morning’s rush hour and likely for the evening commute as well.
The job of bringing the city back to normal falls to the Department of Public Works, which must tear up part of Lombard Street to replace the 40-inch water main and then reconstruct the Howard-Lombard intersection that was damaged when the pipe broke.
O’Malley joined CSX engineers, city and state officials and representatives of the news media yesterday on a tour of the southern stretch of the blackened tunnel.
O’Malley, unshaven and wearing firefighter’s pants and boots and a gray T-shirt, rode into the south tunnel entrance about 3:20 p.m. in one of four CSX sport utility vehicles specially equipped to ride on the tracks.
After about 50 minutes inside, he climbed up a ladder and through a manhole at the water-damaged intersection of Howard and Lombard streets.
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“This was the first opportunity the structural engineer from CSX had to inspect that portion of the tunnel, which was the portion he was most worried about, and we wanted to be there when he went in and saw what he saw,” said O’Malley, adding that the CSX engineer was encouraged by the brief inspection.
The mayor also said that Gov. Parris N. Glendening wants to form a task force to develop long-term strategies for minimizing the chance of similar accidents.
Public Works Department spokesman Kurt L. Kocher said city inspectors and officials from CSX and the Mass Transit Administration hope to re-enter the tunnel this morning for a more detailed check of its strength.
Another department spokesman indicated that there was a slight possibility that some of the Howard Street crossings would be reopened for the morning rush hour.
Firefighters had said throughout their four-plus days trying to extinguish the fire and remove the train that the accident was particularly frustrating. That remained true to the last car.
Fire crews had gone into the dinner hour yesterday believing all cars would be removed by 8 p.m. But then the smoke inside the tunnel increased again, delaying recovery efforts.
After that, workers who intended to recover the last car by pulling it out with a tractor-like machine found that they had to cut wrought-iron fencing to make room for all the equipment. By midnight, they were still working and said they intended to have the final car removed from the tunnel by daybreak.
Public works officials have had to delay fixing the broken water main until they receive the Fire Department’s all-clear signal, which won’t be given until the last heap of burning train is removed.
The main sits about 9 inches above the tunnel’s ceiling, and fire officials were concerned that work on it could compromise the safety of the fire crews below.
About 60 feet of new pipe arrived yesterday by truck from Iowa. City workers must dig up the site and take measurements before ordering specialized pipe clamps from Arkansas.
The main will take at least two days to fix. And the department is dealing with its newest problem: the collapsed storm drain on Howard Street, just south of Lombard Street. Last night, crews began ripping up the street, with forced them to cut light-rail tracks passing over it.
The new section of water main will also require the severing of additional light-rail tracks.
“We were trying to avoid doing that, but that can’t be helped,” Kocher said.
City Public Works Director
George L. Winfield said yesterday that the entire intersection will have to be rebuilt, as might sections of Howard Street between Lombard and Pratt streets.
A bright spot: The stream of water that has flowed incessantly from the broken pipe since Wednesday should dry up. Crews planned last night to replace a broken valve at Lombard and Paca streets that has prevented them from completely shutting off the flow of water.
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board toured the tunnel for the first time yesterday, but a federal official said the public should not expect to learn the cause anytime soon.
“We’re talking about nine months to a year before we determine a cause, or maybe more,” said board spokesman Keith Holloway.
Investigators took notes on the condition of the tracks. They are looking for stress marks to help determine where the rails broke and how – and whether the tracks were damaged before the accident or as a result of it, Holloway said.
An agency metallurgist is expected to visit the scene today and remove a track sample to be analyzed in a lab.
Holloway said investigators could not get too close to the four smoldering rail cars that were in the tunnel when they entered it. But he said the board has impounded the cars so wheels and other parts can be scrutinized.
Holloway said investigators will also explore whether the water main malfunctioned before the fire, possibly contributing to the derailment by softening the rail bed or causing debris to fall from the tunnel’s ceiling.
“We can’t rule that out,” he said.
But Kocher said the pipe should not be suspect because it showed no sign of trouble before the train wreck.
“If there was a leak there, you’d know it. All we know is the road was bone dry until 6:15” Wednesday evening – three hours after the train accident.
Sun staff writers Gady A. Epstein and Stephen Kiehl contributed to this article.