Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 22, 1994 TAG: 9405220085
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-4 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LYNCHBURG LENGTH: Medium
State officials have ordered the company to keep up the search.
When rising waters inundated the metal barrels in late March, representatives of the railroad and a local contractor scrambled to recover them. At the time, they said the barrels probably had not washed far downriver from a Campbell County storage site.
But some of the drums have been found more than 50 miles downstream in Buggs Island Lake, near the North Carolina border.
The sealed steel barrels were filled with material scraped up from the area where a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in January, spilling fuel and coal near the river bank. Most of them contain water contaminated with diesel fuel, or absorbent materials used to soak up spilled fuel.
Neil Obenshain, regional director of the Department of Environmental Quality's water division, said none of the barrels appear to have leaked.
Obenshain also said the railroad or its contractor had been making a "continuous effort" to find the barrels for the past two weeks.
But he said the company had stopped the search earlier - apparently to concentrate on rebuilding the road to the muddy, isolated site in the community of Taber, near the Campbell-Pittsylvania County line.
"We didn't give them a deadline," Obenshain said, "but we told the railroad in writing they were to have a continuous reconnaissance ongoing."
The railroad cut back efforts to find the drums in April, when the turbulent river made it dangerous to continue the search, a spokesman said.
Another railroad spokesman, Rick Harris, said the search resumed this week, when the water receded, and is still in progress.
Although many of the barrels stayed put or moved only slightly when the river overflowed and flooded the storage site, some of them were washed miles downriver, Harris said.
The track was repaired a few days after the 171-car coal train derailed after striking a boulder that had rolled onto its path.
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.