Railcars almost cleared off S.E. Bonnybrook Bridge
Posted Jun 28, 2013 12:20 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Crews are almost finished clearing six derailed train cars carrying a dangerous petroleum product after Thursday morning’s partial bridge collapse on the S.E. Bonnybrook Bridge.
It’s the good news many were waiting to hear, given officials admitted earlier in the day this was the last thing they needed on a week like this. Calgary Fire believes the situation over the bridge is under control, now that the product has been pumped out.
Acting Calgary Fire Chief Ken Uzeloc says they can now turn their attention to removing those dangling cars from the bridge deck.
He says, “The plan is for that, is we’re going to have locomotives on either end of the cars and we’re going to have two boom lift trucks working off the undamaged bridge that are going to support the railcars, the tank cars, that are on the damaged bridge from the sides.”
Uzeloc adds that should take about four hours to set up and another hour to complete and adds they’ve been pretty happy with how things have progressed.
At last word, they’ve only had a small amount of debris from the bridge fall into the river. None of the petroleum product and nothing off the train has entered the waterway.
There have been about a hundred people working to solve this situation and if all goes well, Uzeloc says they could have a lane of Ogden Road, S.E. open by the Friday morning rush hour.
