GRANITEVILLE - Kevin Faircloth moved through the gas-laced fog and darkness like a yellow ghost, fueled by the fear of finding the body of a close friend or relative and the knowledge that something deadly was jetting high above the twisted metal wreckage of Norfolk Southern Train 192.
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A single street lamp cast a halo of light too weak to pierce the thick morning mist. The silence was broken only by the insistent clanging of a crossing signal, an unnerving combination to someone familiar with the bass-note hum of the Avondale Mills complex that provides the round-the-clock heartbeat of this Aiken County mill town.
"It was a very eerie quiet," said Mr. Faircloth, a Savannah River Site firefighter whose three-man HAZMAT team provided the first digital images of the Jan. 6 wreck. "If you know Graniteville, you're used to noise from the mills and trains. It was very dark. There was a very heavy fog and it was moving. It was hard to tell if it was the fog moving or the plume."
From the chaotic chatter of radio traffic, this had the feel of a big disaster.
From the sight of fleeing mill workers, firefighters and residents choking and gagging and begging for help, Mr. Faircloth and his partners figured something lethal was pouring from the accordion pile of rail cars. From the train's cargo manifest, they believed they might be dealing with chlorine.
But they didn't know for sure.
Neither did the men who were quickly forming the unified command core in the first hours of this 10-day disaster. Key decision-makers including Graniteville-Vaucluse-Warrenville Volunteer Fire Department Chief Phil Napier, Aiken County Sheriff Mike Hunt, Aiken County Emergency Management Director Rick Powell and Richmond County Assistant Fire Chief Howard Willis needed hard information for the calls they had to make.
IN THE FIRST HOURS after the 2:40 a.m. wreck, intelligence was hard to come by. Like military commanders, the decision makers needed to know the deadly capabilities of the enemy they faced.
They needed to know whether they were dealing with a straight chlorine spill or a nastier brew featuring two or more toxic ingredients. They needed to know whether Avondale Mills employees or Graniteville residents were trapped by chlorine.
They needed to know whether the white powder that frosted the wreck site was the relatively benign kaolin or fertilizer, which might explode in combination with other chemicals.
And they needed to know whether the wreck was an act of terrorism or sabotage.
To find out, they sent in suited scouts like Mr. Faircloth to patrol a lethal no-man's land. On their first patrol, Mr. Faircloth's team freed 18-year-old Mark Broome from the trap of a tree that had fallen across his car.
On their second trip, the team walked around the wreck and could see a plume rising some 25 feet into the air from a gash in the side of the tank car. But it was too dark to see the color. It was also so dark that Mr. Faircloth almost tripped over a down power line draped across the wreck.
Soon the sun was up.
The team geared up for a third trip to the wreck in less than three hours - a grueling task given the confines of their suits and the stress of the unknown.
Armed with a digital video camera, they would gather the first photos of the wreck, images that could be downloaded into the laptops of their leaders.
Mr. Faircloth, 38, and fellow firefighters Bill Elliott and Dwain Smith were breathing hard through the masks of their yellow protective suits, their time limited to the hour's worth of compressed air they carried on their backs.
They picked their way toward the wreck.
"You could see all the colors," said Mr. Faircloth, who has lived in Graniteville since 1978. "You could see car numbers. You could see the billowing of the plume itself."
That plume was a yellow-tinged green, the color of chlorine at its most lethal concentration. It was shortly after 7 a.m. - more than four hours after the wreck.
HAZMAT TEAMS like Mr. Faircloth's, augmented by specialists from Richmond County, Fort Gordon and Aiken County, helped decision makers define the parameters of this disaster in its earliest hours.
Teams started finding bodies at sunrise, five of them Avondale Mills workers. Rusty Rushton, a high school classmate of Mr. Faircloth, was found on the loading dock of the Stevens Steam Plant. Charles Shealey, Mr. Faircloth's cousin, was found in the low, swampy woods behind the Woodhead Division Plant.
Until the fog burned off and helicopters could fly over the wreck, officials had to rely on those early images from a hand-held camera. By mid-morning, information from air quality monitors showed the initial release of an estimated 70 tons of chlorine had dissipated. Chlorine continued to leak from the pierced car, but the poisonous impact was limited to the "hot zone" around the wreck.
Reconnaisance by the HAZ-MAT teams revealed the unwelcome information that the hole in the tank car was too big for the small, steel-framed patches HAZMAT specialists are trained to use, Mr. Powell said.
"When you've got a hole that you can walk through, there's just no way to patch it," he said.
Officials now faced their next set of difficult decisions.
Patching the leak was a job for Norfolk Southern's salvage contractors. These same salvage pros would have to peel wrecked cars away from a second tank car full of chlorine. A third car also held a full, 90-ton load of the deadly chemical.
"Many of the tank cars were covered up and their domes were not visible, so it was not apparent whether we had additional leaks," said Chuck Wehrmeister, the Norfolk Southern official who coordinated the Graniteville cleanup.
Their worst fear was triggering a catastrophic second release of chlorine as they tried to remove wreckage from the flanks of the buried tank car. Based on sophisticated weather and plume models provided by meteorologists at Savannah River National Laboratory, they knew the plume from a release could spread lethal concentrations of chlorine for four or five miles.
IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON, they debated whether to declare an evacuation zone that large. If they did, patients from Aiken Regional Medical Centers and a nearby nursing home would have to be moved. The proposed zone also would cover western segments of Aiken.
They worried whether this would result in death or injury to critical care patients or nursing home residents. They also worried where all the evacuees would go.
Officials decided to declare a smaller, one-mile mandatory evacuation zone, wafered by a curfew zone two miles from the site. But they stood ready to sound a wider alert. In the late afternoon, teams of law enforcement officers swept through the evacuation zone, knocking on doors and urging an estimated 5,400 residents to leave.
That set the stage for the dangerous and delicate job of patching the leaking car and siphoning an estimated 180 tons of chlorine from two other tankers.
As long as that slow work was taking place, the evacuation would remain in place.
"We knew there was a potential there as long as those chemicals remained on the site and as long as those cars remained," said Chief Willis, a 33-year firefighting veteran and Richmond County's emergency management director. "We came up with the consensus that as long as that off-loading was taking place, we didn't want to start letting anybody in."
For suited scouts such as Mr. Faircloth, memories of those moments walking into the unknown will always be tinged by fear, apprehension and awe.
"I saw metal twisted and torn almost to the point you thought metal couldn't be torn," he said.
Walking ground that has been his home for 27 years, Mr. Faircloth also carried a familiar dread.
"That's always been one of my biggest fears - coming up on a wreck and finding someone I know or a relative," he said.
Reach Jim Nesbitt at (706) 823-3904 or jim.nesbitt@augustachronicle.com.
Special Section: Graniteville Train Wreck
On January 6, 2005, a Norfolk Southern Corp. freight train carrying chemicals hit a parked train near an Avondale Mills plant in Graniteville, South Carolina. The impact caused poisonous chlorine gas to leak from three of the moving train's cars. Nine people were killed and more than 5,000 people were evacuated from the site.
For complete coverage of the Graniteville train wreck, visit our special section.
