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Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009

Train derails after hitting truck in Monroe County

A Bibb County man suffered life-threatening injuries when a train struck the truck he was driving in Smarr on Wednesday morning.

Johnny Wynes Jr., 71, was taken by helicopter to The Medical Center of Central Georgia, where he was in stable condition late Wednesday. The accident happened at about 11:30 a.m. at the intersection of Rumble Road and U.S. 41. The Norfolk-Southern train, which consisted of two locomotives and four rail cars traveling north, derailed just beyond the crossing. All three members of the crew were hospitalized as a precaution but were expected to recover.

Monroe County Emergency Services spokesman Shane Cook said he spoke briefly on the phone with Wynes after he was hospitalized. Wynes told him that he stopped at the crossing but did not see or hear the train, Cook said. There is a sign but no gates at the crossing, which is comprised of two parallel tracks. The side rail nearest Wynes was occupied by parked box cars extending along the track in both directions.

Wynes’ six-wheeled truck was obliterated, its make and model left unrecognizable. According to the sheriff’s office, Appling Brothers of Gray owned the vehicle, and Wynes was transporting mechanical lubricant. He probably was not wearing his seat belt, officials said, which is not required for the type of vehicle he was driving.

The force of the strike drove his truck into one of the parked box cars, toppling the box car down an embankment. Sections of track beneath were bowed outward and twisted sideways. The train itself remained upright and looked mostly intact, although there was some visible damage to the cowcatcher on the front of the lead locomotive and Norfolk-Southern was cleaning leaked diesel fuel, Cook said Wednesday afternoon. Wynes’ truck also spilled diesel fuel but firefighters were able to contain it.

Tony Diaz, who witnessed the wreck while working on the outside of his mother’s house across the street, said Wynes was slowing down as he approached the crossing. But he did not seem to see or hear the train that was blowing its horn as it barreled toward him.

Wynes was looking straight ahead, Diaz said, and if he ever noticed the train, he noticed it too late. They collided.

“It sounded about like two sticks of dynamite,” Diaz said. He thought the train, whose approach was already difficult for drivers to hear or see because of the parked box cars, looked like it was traveling “unusually fast.”

Another man working nearby, Dino Malloy, said he was the first to arrive on the scene. He had heard the sound of crunching metal and at first thought the train had struck one of the parked box cars.

What he discovered was more grisly: Wynes was trapped inside the truck that lay in pieces between the two tracks. His feet were sticking up and out of the driver’s side of the cab, and his head rested against his arm, Malloy said. But Wynes was conscious, able to talk and had some fight in him.

“I said, ‘So are you all right?’ And he said, ‘I’m alive, ain’t I?’ ... I just told him to hang in there,” Malloy said. “He wasn’t a quitter, no doubt.”

Around that same time, the train’s three crew members had jumped from the locomotive and made their way to Smarr’s tiny U.S. Post Office on the other side of U.S. 41. They asked Postmaster Teresa Register to call 911 and said she should evacuate — they thought they had just hit a gas truck. One of them was in enough pain or shock that he lay down on the ground outside, she said.

“Oh, it was awful. ... He was blowing his horn for a long time, more than normal,” she said. “I don’t even know. At first I thought that the train hit the parked (box) cars. I couldn’t imagine it was anything else.”

Monroe County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Allison Selman-Willis disputed some witness accounts that the stationary rail cars would have made the train difficult for Wynes to detect. He had at least 400 feet of visibility with which to see the train and hear the train, she said.

Susan Terpay, a spokeswoman for Norfolk-Southern, said the train was traveling from Macon to Griffin. The route is one of two that Norfolk-Southern operates between Macon and Atlanta, she said, although not a lot of traffic is moved over it. The railroad has rerouted one of its trains to minimize the accident’s impact on operations. She said she was not sure how long it would take to clear away what was left in the wake of the wreck, as well as repair 200 feet of track that was damaged.

“We have some equipment coming in to pick up those cars and put them back on the rails,” she said.

Wednesday’s accident was a first for Diaz’s mother, Ellen Ham, who has lived in the white house in front of the train crossing for nearly 40 years. Nothing like it has ever occurred there in her time, she said. But without electric arms to guard the crossing, Ham said — watching from her front lawn as firefighters, sheriff’s deputies, railroad officials and tow truck operators crawled through scene — the worst was bound to happen.

“I’m glad I didn’t see it,” she said. “I would have had a heart attack.”