Remembering a Disaster – The Duffy Street Incident

SAN BERNARDINO – It was a demon. A monster of steel and almost unimaginable power and force, thousands of tons of train and trona moving faster with every foot traveled.

It was a special designated Extra 7551 East, six locomotives and 69 hopper cars overloaded with sodium carbonate and lacking the braking power necessary to slow or stop. Cajon Pass had never seen such a thing before or since.

It unleashed death and destruction on a small residential neighborhood in San Bernardino but the horror and death wouldn’t end that day. An unlucky 13 days later Duffy Street exploded in a ball of vaporized gasoline spewed from a ruptured 14-inch pipeline that paralleled the track and burned and burned for about 13 hours because a faulty check valve failed to prevent the pipeline full of thousands of gallons of gasoline from rushing back down the mountain and feeding the beast, keeping it alive.

But on that first day not quite two weeks earlier, by the time the 7551 reached the Muscoy curve it was hitting about 110 mph. Its wheels and those insufficient brakes were melting from the friction-generated heat.

Retired Battalion Chief Allen Simpson of the San Bernardino Fire Department said they couldn’t use heavy equipment to free Shaw because the danger the bulldozers might harm him. They had to remove the debris covering him a piece at a time.

Thirteen days after the derailment, observers looking northwest from City Hall saw what looked like the explosion from an atomic bomb, only the mushroom cloud had a reddish cast, the pipeline, which had been disturbed during the cleanup after the derailment, ruptured under pressure.

It had been pumping more than 2,300 barrels of gasoline per hour at an estimated pressure of more than 1,600 psi. It spewed a towering fountain of gasoline into the air atomizing it and it fell like misty rain.

Simpson said it was “hunting for a heat source and it probably found a pilot light in a neighborhood water heater.

The first fire department officer on the scene, Simpson said he thought they had saved a couple of the houses but as other fire units arrived and began to hook up their hoses, the water pressure dropped to near nothing, because Muscoy didn’t have sufficient capacity.

“To lose the water was just awful,” Simpson said. “We lost all we had gained and had to watch them burn.” He said they finally dragged a hose from the San Bernardino system across Highland Avenue and down Donald Street. “It had plenty of pressure but by then it was too late,” he said.

Story by Redland Daily Facts