By Constanza Vieira
TUCURINCA, Colombia, Jun 11 2013 (IPS)

José “Goyo” Hernández has never been given a mask to keep him from breathing in the coal dust blowing off the 13 trains that pass daily through this village in the municipality of Zona Bananera in the northern Colombian department of Magdalena, during his 12-hour shift at the railway crossing.

The trains speed by at 80 kilometres an hour, with nothing covering the 160,000 tons of coal that pass through the village daily, extracted from the open-pit mines 226 kilometres to the southeast, in the neighbouring department of Cesar, by the U.S. mining company Drummond, Swiss-based Glencore Xstrata (through its subsidiary in Colombia, Prodeco) and Colombian Natural Resources, owned by U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs.

Goyo wears the uniform of a private security firm contracted by Fenoco S.A., the private railway company awarded the Atlantic railway concession in 1999, whose shareholders include the same mining companies.

He guards the railway crossing where the coal train tracks cross the main street of Tucurinca.

Signs painted in English on the 120 train cars pulled by three engines indicate that each weighs 19.1 tons and has a maximum cargo limit of 60,750 kilograms.

The cars are filled to the brim with high-grade thermal coal. In compliance with an environmental permit for the coal’s transport, the surface layers have been moistened to minimise the amount of coal particles blown off by the wind.

But a report released by the Comptroller General’s Office in December 2012 concluded that this moistening is not sufficiently effective “in neutralising the release of coal particles.”

Studies have only been conducted on the land-based operations and activities in ports, the report stresses, which means there is no way of determining the “synergistic impacts” of all of the activities related to the export of coal, include its transportation on trucks, trains and ships.

When the train is approaching, Goyo sets up the “crossing signal”: two orange plastic traffic cones connected by a rope, and hanging from the middle of the rope, a small red metal plate with hand-painted white letters proclaiming “PARE” (STOP).

There is nothing even remotely resembling a safety barrier at this level crossing. Only a one-square-metre sign posted six metres from the railway line warns of the danger.

The people of Tucurinca love Goyo. They say that he and his co-worker, who handles the other 12-hour shift, have saved the lives of three people who attempted to throw themselves in front of the train.

Tucurinca has no sewer system, but it does have an aqueduct, although it only operates for six hours every two days. That is why it is not unusual to see women washing clothes at 10:20 in the morning in the ditch that runs alongside the railway tracks.

This is when the day starts heating up, with temperatures rising to 34 or 36 degrees Celsius by midday.

The women stand in the water up to their waists, soaping, scrubbing and rinsing the clothes. They also wash their hair. They smile and chat while they work. One of the women in the water, Amparo Padilla, says the coal dust doesn’t produce soot, so when clothes are hung up to dry they don’t get dirty.

Ana Rosa Figueras explains that the aqueduct does not reach her hut on the other side of the tracks from the ditch. “I live all alone, and where would I get the strength to haul water?” she commented to Tierramérica*.

In her yard there is an air quality meter, housed beneath a metal cover. “A couple of men come every two days, open it up, look at a paper and write something down. They come to check on the coal dust,” says Figueras.

“They study it, to see if it makes people sick,” she added, never pausing in her scrubbing and rinsing, as if worried that the ditch water would run out.

While she is washing, the slender woman picks her way with difficulty across the railway tracks carrying the clean clothes back to her yard. There she hangs them on the scaffolding where the meter is installed, which she uses as a clothesline.

María Josefa Arteaga, an elderly woman in a bright orange t-shirt, points out that the big coal companies do not pay any compensation for disturbing the life of the village.

People now complain of ailments that were not as widespread before, “when there used to be a train” – in other words, when the train was a passenger train, which carried people and goods to and from the village. Now the train comes but it never arrives: it just keeps on going with its cargo of coal.

People in the region say that the trains spread “illness” and that everything is contaminated by the coal dust, which breeds asthma and chronic bronchitis.

But there are no statistics, or they are not reliable, as noted in the Comptroller General’s report with regard to studies on the different impacts of the coal industry.

The environmental permits do not require the monitoring of suspended particulates smaller than 2.5 microns, something that is “essential for the adoption of measures that could decrease or mitigate the effects on human health that could result from the presence of particulate matter produced by coal export activities,” the report stresses.

Other more obvious impacts of the trains are the continual vibrations, which causes cracks in houses, and the noise, with decibel levels between 10 and 85 times greater than “normal” noise.

“The doors and windows shake. There are houses that are cracked. The owners fill in the cracks, and they split open again,” says cattle merchant Luis González, leaning against the wall outside his home across from the railway tracks.

“At night, the train passes every 15 minutes, 20 minutes at most. I’m used to it now and I don’t wake up anymore. It used to blow its whistle at night. You could hear it coming,” he recounts.

“Of course the train bothers me,” says his neighbour Ramona María Moreno, who was born in 1924 and adds that, if she had protested alone, she would never have reached such an old age.

“If the people don’t take action, there’s nothing that can be done. What good would it do me to complain if the others don’t join in?”

Colombia exports between 92 and 95 percent of the coal it produces and is the world’s fifth largest producer. According to the British Petroleum Statistical Review of World Energy 2012, 35.3 percent of the coal consumed in Europe is Colombian.

But the industry’s production chain is minimal, which is why it does not directly stimulate the economy, “at least in any appreciable way relative to the value exploited,” states another report from the Comptroller General’s Office, “Minería en Colombia: Fundamentos para superar el modelo extractivista” (Mining in Colombia: A basis for moving beyond the extractivist model), released in May 2013.

That is why in Tucurinca, as in other towns along the way as Colombian coal travels to the world market, the train passes, but it never arrives.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

Indian Railway officials inspecting the burnt carriage in which 32 passengers perished on Monday. Credit: Indian Railways

By Malini Shankar
CHENNAI, Aug 4 2012 (IPS)

At 4:30 a.m. on the morning of Jul. 30, sleeping passengers in carriage S 11 on the Chennai-bound Tamilnadu Express were awoken by a blazing fire, as the train approached the east coast town of Nellore, just two and a half hours shy of its final destination.

At least 32 people burned to death in the train, their bodies charred so badly that hospitals were forced to use DNA analysis to identify the victims for anxious families.

Officials have not ruled out a short circuit in the train toilet or sabotage, considering one survivor reported hearing a loud bang in the burning train car.

Whether or not gas cylinders or other inflammable materials were aboard the train is yet to be established by the Railway’s formal inquiry.

For grieving family members, the inquiry might be too little too late.

But if similar tragedies are to be avoided in the future, authorities must use this accident to draw lessons in disaster management for the colossal Indian railway network, which operates 9000 trains carrying 18 million passengers daily. This number does not include the countless thousands who travel on train roofs, undeterred by the risk of fatal injuries inside mountain tunnels or the possibility of electrocution.

It quickly became apparent to disaster management experts, after the fire had been put out and the survivors pulled to safety, that the lack of emergency preparedness on most Indian trains is a huge liability.

It was the gatekeeper of a railway crossing who first noticed the fire in the passing carriage and notified the Nellore railway station, which halted the train. By then screaming passengers had already pulled at the emergency brake.

The burning car was immediately separated from the train to prevent the fire spreading to other coaches. But this did not make up for the fact that there were no fire alarms in the train cars.

The public relations officer of the South Central Railway, Frederick Michael, confirmed to IPS that there were no fire hydrants in the sleeper car.

“Since it was night time, the passengers had closed all the windows and one door of the vestibule that connects to the rear car was also locked for the night to prevent criminal elements’ entry and mischief,” he said. The other vestibule door, according to reliable sources, was also closed for the night, resulting in a death trap for the passengers.

Inflammable material like synthetic cushion covers and curtains, inadequate emergency exits and fire extinguishers, to say nothing of a poorly trained cabin crew are the main culprits in this avoidable disaster, experts told IPS.

Lower class train cars, which carry millions of Indians, do not contain a single fire extinguisher or hydrant. Nor are passengers instructed in basic emergency evacuation procedures. Further, there is no public address system on board the long-distance non-luxury trains.

Railway coaches are in dire need of inflatable life rafts with a rigid hull, disaster management experts aver. These rafts should automatically unfurl themselves as escape chutes from the hinges of the emergency exits in case of a fire, or during a water evacuation.

These can help save lives and can also double up as easy transport for frail, infirm and physically challenged passengers.

Wide emergency exits with collapsible shutters that can automatically open during emergencies need to be installed by the dozen in every train car. Currently each car has only four emergency exits and four entry doors for carriages that accommodate 72 passengers and probably carry scores of other unreserved commuters.

The spokesman of the Integral Coach Factory (ICF) in Chennai told IPS that ICF only manufactures coaches for Indian Railways but is not responsible for the design of the carriages, nor the rolling stock – hardware such as wheels, steps or sleeper frames – within them.

The fact that the Railway Authority does not provide for the needs of physically challenged persons is hazardous to all passengers during emergencies and seriously hinders rescue operations – with the infirm or the disabled getting left behind, or other passengers stuck behind them.

The average height of the train floor is at least 1.5 metres above the ground. The steps are arranged more like a ladder than a staircase, making it impossible for physically challenged passengers to use them unassisted.

Though the mobile “medical relief van” stationed at all railway stations reached the burning train within minutes, they found they could not access the passengers inside, as the inflammable material and burning heat had caused the doors’ locks to melt and fuse together.

Ambulances rushed the critically injured survivors to the district general hospital after rescue teams cut through the burning car. If the fire had occurred in the countryside it would have led to far more casualties, experts say.

C. U. Rao, general secretary of the Indian Red Cross Andhra Pradesh chapter, the state where the tragedy occurred, told IPS, “The Nellore branch of the Indian Red Cross scurried to (transport) injured passengers to various hospitals, installed freezers to keep the corpses awaiting DNA identification, brought their mobile blood bank to the site of the disaster, and distributed food packets to survivors in the immediate aftermath of the calamity.”

But these services should be the responsibility of the railway authorities. Emergency equipment should be installed in every railway station across the country as part of disaster mitigation efforts, especially since the railway network has been responsible for the deaths of 1,200 people in the last five years alone according to statistics provided by Indian Railways.

Michael believes that “a review of design is urgently called for; hereafter we will have to heed attention to alternative designs.” Wide collapsible doors that automatically roll up in the event of fires are far more effective than doors that have to be opened manually.

Locks and emergency brakes need to be automated to ensure heat does not create vacuum chambers and seal doors shut.

If the Indian Railways fails to learn its lessons from tragedies like the one at Nellore, then it is condemning thousands of other passengers to a similar fate.

(END)