This is one of those things that sounds just a little bit too outlandish to be true, but it is. Back in the 1990s, I rode the M/V Rusty Flowers with the mate and the relief captain from the M/V Clyde Butcher, they told me of their experiences, but the outlandishness of the accident had reached me long before I worked with them. If you doubt me on this one, do a google search for “train hits towboat wisconsin”, and you should get a short Journal Of Commerce article about it. I can no longer find the accident report on the NTSB website.
Anyway, here we go...
Towboats regularly have to wait their turn for lockage. Above and below each lock, there are agreed-upon areas where they can push or back their tow into the bank, and wait on traffic and their turn at the lock. This brings us to the star of this tale, the Motor Vessel Clyde Butcher. The Clyde was owned by the American Commercial Barge Line and had been built by their subsidiary shipyard, Jeffboat, in 1966. Back then, it ran the Upper Mississippi through the navigation season, and elsewhere during the winter.
This tale takes place on the Upper Mississippi, upstream of Lock 5A, near Fountain City, Wisconsin, early on the morning of July 8, 1991. The dam spans the river, and the lock is approximately in the middle of the river. As there is no place for southbound traffic to wait immediately above the lock, they back in along the bank on the Wisconsin side of the river to wait. That side of the river is also the Burlington Northern (now it's BNSF) railway's mainline between Chicago, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, and this line sees a considerable amount of train traffic.
The Clyde was southbound with a full tow of fifteen loaded barges, and they had to wait on northbound boats to complete their lockage, so they backed in along the bank by the BN trackage on the Wisconsin side of the river. When the northbound boat cleared, the Clyde attempted to back out into the channel, but couldn't. They had developed a bank suction.
This occurs when a tow of fully loaded barges sets tightly against the bank, and then, when the boat tries to move the tow away from the bank, it can't develop enough “twisting force” to overcome the weight of the water on the outside of the tow to allow the water to flow in on the side facing the bank.
A good way to overcome this is to knock out (i.e. disconnect the boat from the tow) and move the boat to the channel side stern corner of the tow, put a capstan line on it, and then pull at right angles to the stern of the tow. This develops much more usable pulling power, but it takes time and effort to do this.
This isn't what the pilot of the Clyde chose to do. For some reason. he was allergic to the idea of knocking out and pulling at right angles. What he did do was to put the flanking rudders (you use those to steer when you're backing up) hard down to port, and backed on it full astern.
The problem here is that this doesn't develop enough force to overcome the bank suction, and the full discharge from both propellers was directed right onto the bank, which eventually started eroding it. Bear in mind that there's a heavily used double track railroad mainline on top of this bank.
The pilot kept it up, backing full astern on both engines, for two and a half hours. More and more of the bank was being washed away by the water coming out of what amounted to two 2500 horsepower pumps with impellers that are nine feet in diameter. The bank kept falling into the river, and the pilot kept doing the same thing...
Sammy, the mate that I rode the Rusty Flowers with, was standing on the stern corner of the tow, telling the pilot what was going on by radio, and getting no acknowledgment. He knew this was serious enough that he went to the wheelhouse to talk to the pilot. He pointed out what was going on, telling him he was endangering the railroad. He was ignored, the pilot wouldn't even look around to see what was happening. Sammy went back to the tow and continued to radio the damage being done.
His last radio transmission to the wheelhouse was this: “I am standing here, looking at ties and rail hanging in thin air.” The pilot kept backing on it full astern.
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| This is the accident area as seen from Route 35, with a stopped BNSF train. You can see the dam, and the lock is just to the right of the dam, where you can see the radio tower and crane boom. |
Shortly after this exchange, a deckhand that was watching from the second deck screamed, “HERE COMES A TRAIN!!!” Yep, the inevitable... A manifest freight, being pulled by two locomotives, running southbound at 42 miles an hour.
The lead locomotive made it over the washout, but the trailing locomotive and the train did not. The trailing locomotive and about thirteen cars of the train came crashing down the bank. The locomotive plowed its way up the port side of the boat from the rudder room almost to the galley, tearing open the side of the deckhouse all the way.
The chief engineer had been back in the rudder room, doing some maintenance on the boat's air compressors. He saw what was coming, and ran as fast as he could for the main deck accommodations. As he was yanking open the door into the quarters from the forward engine room, rocks, wood, and dirt were hitting him in the back. It was lucky for him that he was up; if he had been off watch and in bed, he would have been dead, his quarters were a small cabin and the engineer's booth on the port side of the main deck between the rudder room and the engine room. His bunk was on the outboard bulkhead that was shredded by the locomotive.
A couple of the rail cars crashing down the bank were lumber racks. The deckhand who was up on the second deck of the Clyde saw what was coming, and decided that now was the time to terminate his contract to ride that boat, and he dove into the river from the second deck on the channel side. The second deck ended up heaped with lumber.
When the trailing locomotive was done wreaking havoc on the deckhouse of the Clyde, it ended up in the river alongside the boat. Its fuel tank was torn open during the crash, so the diesel fuel was leaking into the river.
Among the rail cars were a couple more boxcars loaded with butter. Nobody that I talked with was sure how it started, but somehow, the spilled butter caught fire, so now there was an honest to god butter fire melting and burning the butter, and setting wood and paper on fire as well. (Only in Wisconsin...) A Coast Guard fireboat was dispatched to the scene from Dubuque, Iowa to help fight the fires and boom off the oil in the water.
The deckhand that jumped suffered some minor injuries, he was treated and released from a local hospital, as was one of the rail crew who was aboard the lead locomotive. Other than that, nobody was hurt. The deckie did cause a bit of a panic, as nobody could find him for a while.
The railroad had to shut down its mainline for a couple of days for clearing debris and repairs, and the Coast Guard shut down nine miles of river for two days as well.
I don't know about the damage to the trailing locomotive, but it had to be substantial. The Clyde Butcher had lost its air compressors in the crash, so it was immobilized and had to be towed downriver to the St. Louis area for repairs. It did go back into service after the repairs.
After everything shook out, the Coast Guard and the Corps Of Engineers made that waiting area a caution zone. You can still see the notation on the Upper Mississippi chart for the area. It's still on Chart 32; a purple box on the right hand edge of the chart that reads,
Critical Zone;
Potential Railroad
Trackbed Erosion
728.8 -729.3 L
The relevant section of Upper Mississippi River navigation chart #32.
A Journal Of Commerce article that I was able to find had put a thumbnail estimate of damages of at least $1.0 million for the railroad alone.
The pilot was not fired for this colossal piece of bad judgment. The company lawyers convinced his bosses that firing him would be an admission of guilt, so he continued to work there. He did earn a new nickname only used behind his back, however.
“Choo-Choo”...
CSX was the majority owner of ACBL while I worked for them (That time. But that's another river story.). I was living in Utica, Illinois at the time I rode a trip with Sammy and the relief captain of the Clyde. I had just come home from that trip, and I was researching a compressed air drain system that I had built intending to patent it. I wanted to look over a locomotive's air drain system, so I stopped by the CSX depot in Ottawa to ask if I could go on the property to look over a locomotive's drain system. The trainmaster was in. I introduced myself and told him that I worked for “the barge line”. He immediately perked up. “Do you know anything about an ACBL towboat getting hit by a BN train over on the Mississippi?”, he asked. I replied, “Is there any coffee to spare in that thermos?” “Yep!” “Pour me a cup and I'll tell you about it, I just got off the boat, and I worked with two of the crew of the Clyde this trip.” He poured, and I told him this story. When we were done, he let out a little whistle and said, “A railroad suing a railroad... Do you have any idea of how long that this will be dragged through the courts?” I assured him that I had no idea. He said, “Lawyers will be hired by both roads, work their whole careers and retire before this is settled.” I never was able to find out if he was right.
Good grief, Tom! How on earth did that skipper get away with such stupidity?? What a disaster! But I don’t understand why two railroads were suing each other. Surely, railroad vs river company would make more sense?
ReplyDeleteVal, sorry for the late reply, they were all being shuffled off to a social category of the in box, where they weren't visible!
DeleteAnyway, the answer about a rail company suing another rail company was because at the time of the accisent, ACBL's majority owner was CSX, an east coast railroad, so... :-)
Having them get control of ACBL took major effort; the Panama Canal Act had to be repealed, as it forbade a railroad from owning marine shipping companies.