Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304090279
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NARROWS LENGTH: Long
SETTLING THE DUST
Norfolk Southern Corp. is betting $600,000 that Marianna Fillmore and her family won't choke again this summer on coal dust wafting from passing trains.Fillmore is not optimistic.
The railroad, armed with more than a year's data, expects to start spraying water on loaded coal trains later this month. The plan, part two of Norfolk Southern's research, is an attempt to control the black dust that fouls Fillmore's porch - less than 30 feet from the tracks - and drives her family indoors.
"We've had the wettest March in history, and yet last weekend we had to come in out of our back yard when a coal train came by," she said, exasperated. "What can the spray system do that nature itself can't?"
That's what Norfolk Southern officials want to find out - and more:
Would water sprayed from six nozzles in Narrows, the Giles County home of the railroad's Celco scale, dampen dust until the train reaches Roanoke, or even until the coal piers in Norfolk? Or would the water evaporate long before the coal reaches its destination?
If so, would it be necessary for NS to install wayside spraying stations, reminiscent of days when steam trains replenished their water tanks along the way?
Or would it be more effective to apply latex or asphalt sealants to each coal load, similar to a process being used by mining companies in western Canada? If so, what are the environmental concerns, and would the applications reduce the heating properties of certain coals?
And what about the weather? Should the company take steps to control dust year-round? Or does the problem - already the subject of state Senate hearings and legislation - become acute only during the hottest months of the year?
Fillmore has her own answers, tinged with a self-described cynicism that grows wearier with each passing train.
"I'm not hopeful at all," she said. "I don't see how spraying water on it in Narrows can help us here in Whitethorne," a tiny Montgomery County enclave on the New River. "We're talking about particles so fine they're like talcum powder."
Norfolk Southern depends on coal for nearly one-third of its annual revenue - $1.30 billion from hauling coal, coke and iron ore, out of total of $3.66 billion in 1992 - making the Norfolk-based railroad the third-largest coal hauler in the country.
So when Fillmore and a few others began complaining about the ubiquitous black dust - and talking to state legislators about it - the railroad knew it, too, had a problem.
"I guess we responded in a defensive way," said J.W. Fox Jr., the Atlanta-based general manager of Norfolk Southern's Eastern region. "A lot of other legislatures are watching this, and we're aware of that."
Two years ago, state Sen. Madison Marye, D-Shawsville, introduced legislation that would have required NS and other railroads to cover their coal cars. Convinced the cost of such a measure would drive operating costs dangerously high, the railroad agreed to hire a consultant to help find a solution to its worsening dust problem.
The company already has spent about $600,000 on consultant fees and equipment to ease concerns of unhappy residents without undercutting the railroad's competitive position.
Fillmore can't get over the irony: Just a few years ago there were the dismissive railroad officials who said, "Mrs. Fillmore, there's more in the air than coal dust."
Or "Mrs. Fillmore, we have to wipe off our lawn furniture before we sit down on it at the beginning of the season."
Fox, Norfolk Southern's regional manager, concedes that railroads historically have greeted such complaints with arrogance, saying that attempts to force changes in their operations would abridge protections for interstate commerce.
Now, the company's consultant - Simpson Weather Associates Inc. of Charlottesville - has marshaled enough data to persuade railroad officials that there is a coal-dust problem.
"They're not up there imagining this stuff," Dave Emmitt, Simpson's executive vice president and senior scientist, said of people like Fillmore. "It's coal dust; it's got a high dusting content."
The case for controlling the dust is economic: Lost coal means lost revenue, he said, speaking a language that gets the attention of the railroad's top brass. And Norfolk Southern's failure to control the problem on its own terms could prompt a more costly legislative solution.
Company officials admit as much.
Fox called the railroad's response to the dust complaints a "proactive and positive approach" designed to preempt unsavory legislative remedies.
Canvas tops for the coal cars would cost $700 each, Fox estimated. With 45,000 coal cars in Norfolk Southern's fleet, the capital investment would total $31.5 million - excluding the "couple of hundred dollars" in labor costs each time the tops are moved.
"We really think the tarp thing is . . . unacceptable," he said. "That would be devastating."
Enter Emmitt and his new tools.
There's RTEPS - Rail Transportation Emission System - which measures the surface temperature of coal inside rail cars, monitors wind speed and rainfall and uses a "transmissometer" to gauge the density of airborne coal dust.
Emmitt and his crew mounted RTEPS across a trailing coal car, wiring the instruments to monitors and computers in a specially equipped caboose. Beginning Jan. 21, 1992, Simpson officials conducted six separate experiments on NS coal trains making runs from Bluefield through Western Virginia to the company's coal piers in Norfolk.
Simpson also developed CLPS - or Coal Load Profiling System. "Clips," as Emmitt calls it, uses computers and robotic visioning to assess changes in a loaded coal cars during transit.
Emmitt and other company officials think CLPS - what appears to be a string of large white beads laid across black coal - eventually might be used to monitor the effectiveness of coal-dust treatments.
Norfolk Southern's research is considered "the most extensive in the industry right now," said Jay Westbrook, a spokesman for CSX Transportation Inc. The Norfolk railroad intends to share its results with CSX and other railroads, which then could formulate their own policies if necessary.
So far, the study has concluded what Fillmore has known for years:
Coal dust problems are exacerbated by warmer, drier weather; dusting has worsened in recent years as some coals - especially metallurgical coals often bound for export from Norfolk - have become more pulverized by the mining process.
"We're trying to put numbers on these perceptions - how it dusts, where it dusts, what conditions it dusts under," Emmitt said. "Everybody knows coal dust comes off trains; the challenge is controlling it with the least cost.
"We'd like to be a little more discriminating. We know there are some coals that do very little dusting. Coal loss is more than an environmental concern; it's economic."
Comes now Phase II, the spraying.
The Narrows facility, astride company rail lines between U.S. 460 and the New River, draws well water into a 25,000-gallon storage tank. An electronic eye reads "AEI" - automatic equipment identification - markings on the side of locomotives and coal cars to trigger the sprayers, three on each side of the tracks.
"We weigh it at 6 mph and spray it at 5," assistant trainmaster Danny Caldwell said, referring to the Celco scale several hundred yards west of the sprayers. "It's an ideal situation."
Drain lines from catch basins beneath the sprayers carry the soiled water to catch ponds, where the water will be recycled before being used on additional coal cars.
"What you're talking about is a changing game for the rails and for the mines - partly because the product is changing," Emmitt said, pointing also to increased public sensitivity to industrial emissions.
"Twenty years ago this would have been laughed off, [with railroads saying] `This is just business.' "