Derailment Sparks Calls For Container Car Caps
Following the derailment of a freight car carrying construction and demolition debris in Jamaica on May 14, Civics United for Railroad Environmental Solutions (CURES) has renewed its calls for lids on all container cars to spillage and minimize the release of foul odors and toxins into the air.
New York & Atlantic Railway (NYAR) is the company tasked with transporting freight cars through tracks leased from the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) traveling through central Queens neighborhoods. The train carrying the overturned freight car was traveling eight miles an hour when it derailed in the vicinity of a switch.
CURES Co-Chair Mary Parisen, a Glendale resident, lives about 100 feet from these tracks and said she deals with vibrations that resemble “a seismic earthquake” when freight trains rumble by her home.
“It shakes my house,” Parisen said. “The structure of my home has been affected.”
The derailment of a car carrying construction and demolition debris (C+D) is just the latest concern for CURES.
“This is a systematic problem,” she said of the global problems of freight transport through neighborhood backyards in many parts of central Queens. She also finds the terminology inaccurate, referring to this material as “garbage,” not C+D debris, which is the preferred railroad nomenclature.
To really address this problem, Parisen believes NYAR, “freight cars need to be containerized” to avoid health risks and contamination of soil and drinking water. Though freight cars are equipped with nets to prevent material from flying off, hurting people or damaging property, at even moderate speeds dust can be released into the air where resident’s breathe it in, Parisen said.
When it rains heavily, leakage and run-off is also a problem, she added.
Two types of garbage are transported through the area: what the freight industry calls C+D debris, classified as uncontaminated solid waste, including furniture, tires, carpets and municipal waste, and household garbage from homes, motels and hotels. The former “doesn’t have to be containerized, but it should be,” Parisen said.
The organization was begun in 2009 to “address freight rail issues in our community” Parisen said. It was formed to advocate on behalf of the health of residents in communities affected by freight traffic traveling through their neighborhoods.
Since its formation, by members of civic associations in Glendale, Maspeth, Middle Village, Forest Hills and Ridgewood, CURES has advocated stricter standards for freight rail through the borough be adopted to protect residents health and quality-of-life.
Among its campaigns, the group has forced rail companies to employ modern, lower emission locomotives, and to retrofit others. And in general, CURES works to elevate awareness of the possible hazardous health effects freight traveling through central Queens can have on residents, as well.
She has observed unsafe freight cars at the intersection of 69th Street and Otto Road in Glendale, with “containers overflowing like muffin tops,” she said.
Through her work with CURES, Parisen is “trying to work with the federal government to get stricter standards,” though NYAR “claims what they are using is sufficient.”
With nets covering freight cars, Parisen notices foul odors emanating from the tracks, but has been told these are isolated incidents, and that if she does observe something, she should inform officials, which she claims to have done, but the problem never completely goes away.
But Parisen believes, “the burden should not lie with the residents,” and that “at this point we know problems exist.”
“(It’s) odor problems coming through these neighborhoods,” she said. “In the summer months is when the complaints start. It could be anything from asbestos waste to tires to carpeting.”
In addition to containerization, Parisen also wants to see rail “infrastructure improvements and better inspections of trains and wheels,” to both make it environmentally safer, and to reduce the noise levels.
