DUNNELLON – Johnny Washington was on his way from Crystal River to Dunnellon for church Sunday morning when plumes of black smoke caught his eye. He drove in their direction, toward his childhood home of Chatmire, a community just north of Dunnellon.
“The closer I got,” he said, “the darker the smoke became.”
Just beyond the community’s south end, flames engulfed stacks of thousands of wooden railroad ties.
On the other side of the tracks, behind the treeline, ashes blew into Maylen Assael’s yard. She tried to turn on a hose to put out the smoldering piles, but the morning’s chill had frozen her spigot. “Here we are panicking and the fire just continued to come,” she said.
Assael’s neighbors put out the embers on her property while Marion County firefighters doused flames on the tracks with water. Crews contained the fire by mid-afternoon and no one was hurt.
Dunnellon residents warned the site could be a fire hazard when a grinding company ousted from another Florida town began stockpiling chemically treated railroad ties by the tracks in the fall. In the aftermath of the blaze, they worry about the human and environmental health impacts of their “what if” becoming a “what now?”
The fire
Investigators don’t yet know what started the fire near East McKinney Street and North Williams Street early Sunday morning. Fifteen firetrucks and 54 firefighters flocked to the scene throughout the day, wrapping up their work Monday morning.
The tar-like creosote coating the ties made the fire burn especially hot and gusty winds spread the flames. Officials said the fire was a challenging one to fight, but crews came prepared.
Two months prior, Dunnellon Mayor Walter Green asked Marion County Fire Rescue Chief James Banta to outline how his team would respond if the ties were to catch fire.
“If these ties ignited, MCFR would immediately be forced into a series of challenging tactical decisions,” Banta wrote.
Firefighters could try to extinguish the fire as fast as possible with water and foam, he explained, but that approach would risk funneling chemicals into the Rainbow River through runoff. If instead crews contained the fire and let it smolder, they’d generate more black, potentially damaging smoke.
In the end, they did a little of each.
“We immediately started with extinguishment,” said MCFR public information officer James Lucas. “We concentrated on the two ends and kept the fire from spreading to adjacent piles, which went down for thousands of feet.”
Once it was safe, crews let contained piles smolder.
Lucas said his team couldn’t quantify how many ties burned.
Track Line Rail, the Texas-based company that stacked the ties in Dunnellon in anticipation of opening a grinding site, agreed to remove them in December after pressure from residents and city and county officials. The property owner, CSX, carted ties off to Alabama.
Dunnellon Mayor Walter Green reported the companies removed 17,700 ties before the fire. Austin Staton, director of media relations at CSX, separately estimated crews had hauled away about one-fifth of the ties. They’ll transport 28 more rail cars’ worth next week.
The aftermath
Marion County officials warned residents to keep their windows closed and avoid time outside on Sunday and Monday as the smoke settled.
The Environmental Protection Agency classifies creosote as a probable human carcinogen. The sticky, black goo forms when burning coal in air-tight ovens. Railroad professionals use it as a preservative to extend the lifespan of wooden supports.
The EPA classifies about one-third of the chemicals within creosote as “high priority pollutants” because of their toxicity, prevalence and persistence.
At a standing-room-only meeting Monday night, Mayor Green announced continuous air quality testing was underway and “no air quality issues have been reported.”
Testing on Sunday didn’t reveal issues either, he said, leading to his decision not to order evacuations of Chatmire or Blue Cove.
The Florida Department of Environmental Protection will lead air, water and soil quality testing in the fire’s aftermath and Marion County Fire Rescue will start independent air monitoring in Blue Cove Tuesday morning.
Mayor Green declared a local state of emergency on Sunday that will last for a week. Several residents at Monday’s meeting called on the state to do the same.
“We have been extremely pleased with how this council and this community has come together to try and address the dangerous and hazardous situation in this community,” said Rev. Jerone Gamble, president of the Marion County branch of the NAACP. “Tonight, our concern is for who is accountable to deal with the short term and long term implications of this.”
FDEP and Track Line CEO Dave Malay didn’t return WUFT’s request for comment.
This isn’t the first time Track Line Rail has been forced to clean up its stockpiling site.
The FDEP required the company to clean up seven truckloads of railroad tie mulch and underlying soil from its former Newberry location last summer after regulators found it operating without permits. The agency’s testing deemed the mulch nonhazardous.
