Thousands of creosote-soaked railroad ties caught fire in Dunnellon, leaving residents to fear for their health and for the impact on the nearby Rainbow River. (Photo via Marion County Fire Rescue)
Have you ever seen an out-of-control fire? I have. Seeing flames leaping wild and high, spreading smoke and ash everywhere, was one of the scariest sights ever.
Now imagine seeing a fire like that next to your neighborhood, but it’s burning a form of toxic waste that leaves you choking for breath.
That’s what happened on Feb. 1, when tens of thousands of wooden railroad ties caught fire in the Central Florida town of Dunnellon.
“A large stockpile of chemically-treated railroad ties caught fire on Sunday morning in Marion County, sending huge plumes of potentially irritating smoke into the air,” WOFL-TV reported.
Because the ties were soaked in creosote, “it can produce heavy, irritating smoke,” the TV station reported. “When it burns, it can release toxins into the air, officials said. Due to this, the fire is also being treated as a potential environmental and public health incident due to toxic smoke and contamination risks.”
How tens of thousands of creosote-coated railroad ties wound up burning just a couple of blocks from the Rainbow River is quite a tale. It involves Florida history, corporate sneakiness, bureaucratic fumbling, and public outrage.
The neighbors in Dunnellon had warned local officials that a fire there would be a disaster — and then the very thing they warned everyone about happened.
“This is not how it’s supposed to work,” said Jyoti Parmar of the Sierra Club Florida, who started tracking the railroad tie company at its original location near Gainesville.
Yet this is the dysfunctional way things DO work in our state these days. And to heck with all the people who have to live with the results.
The flesh preserver
Here’s something for you to choo-choo on: A lot of Florida cities owe their existence to the railroad.
The first steam-powered train in Florida history was one that, in 1836, began hauling cargo from the boomtown of St. Joseph in the Panhandle to the Apalachicola River.
By the 1880s, rail had become the primary method for transporting people and goods long distances. Two men, both named Henry, became the state’s railroad barons: Henry Flagler and Henry Plant. The latter expanded his line down the state’s west coast, primarily in Tampa. Flagler, the more ambitious of the two, pushed his East Coast Railway down the Atlantic coast, from Jacksonville to Key West, building new hotels that boosted tourist traffic along the way.
When Flagler’s train reached Miami, the town’s population was a mere 300. The railroad brought in so many people that in 25 years it became a bustling city of nearly 30,000.
Plant’s rail line eventually became part of the massive CSX system, which since 2003 has been headquartered in Jacksonville.
While a lot has changed in rail transportation over the years, one thing has not: Wooden railroad ties support the metal rails. To prevent them from being attacked by termites and wood rot, they have been treated with tar-like creosote since 1875.
“Creosote,” by the way, is a made-up word. A German scientist named Carl Ludwig von Reichenbach came up with the word by merging the Greek words “kreas,” which means “flesh,” and “soter,” which means “preserver.” It’s a substance distilled out of coal.
And coal, as any backyard chef can tell you, can really burn.
Keeping track of Track Line
A creosote coating doesn’t mean the ties last forever. They have to be replaced. What if, instead of dumping them in landfills, the old ties could be used as fuel somewhere?
A Texas company set up shop in the town of Newberry to do just that. The company planned to grind used railroad ties into dust to be used as fuel in cement kilns nearby.
It would be the first operation of its kind in Florida, making this small Alachua County town a hub for railway recycling — whether they wanted to be or not. The company didn’t bother to get any permits from local or state government before it started work.
But grinding railroad ties produces lots of dust and fumes. Complaints from coughing people began pouring into the offices of Alachua County’s hazardous materials program. The head of the county agency drove over to Newberry to see what was going on.
“He was surprised to see a flurry of activity,” WUFT-FM reported. “Workers hauled in ties …, offloaded them to an open expanse and ground them outdoors, uncovered.”
The operation was run by a company called Track Line Rail, founded in 2020 by a former railroad official named David Malay. He claimed to have gotten a verbal okay from a now-departed Newberry city manager to proceed with no permits or approved plans, but the city staff couldn’t find any paperwork to verify that.
In quick order, the city and county both took action to shut the operation down. City officials told Malay he had to submit a site plan and a development plan and gave him a deadline. He missed it, and they ordered him to close the Track Line site.
“When they told us to stop, we stopped,” Malay told WUFT. He appealed the decisions, but told another news organization, Main Street Daily News, that he didn’t think the outrage was justified, calling it “a bit of a witch hunt.” I guess he was feeling railroaded.
He asked the county commission to cut him a break, telling them he had a pending $130 million investment backed by a Track Line client that had just brought an additional concrete kiln into the area.
He talked of having spent $6 million on equipment and eventually hiring perhaps 50 people as a benefit to the town. A real estate agent who had worked with Malay called him a good corporate neighbor.
But the commissioners refused to budge. One said, “I have a problem with companies that think they can come into the city and begin operation … then use pressure tactics such as warning us of loss of jobs.”
After seeing which way the wind was blowing, Malay quietly left town.
Here comes the iceberg!
Dunnellon, a town of about 2,000, lies roughly 45 miles south of Newberry. The first inkling people in Dunnellon had that their town was now the center of the Florida railroad tie recycling industry was a legal notice that appeared in the local paper last fall.
The notice said that the Florida Department of Anything Goes — er, excuse me, Environmental Protection — was considering issuing an air pollution permit to Track Line to operate in the historically black neighborhood of Chatmire.
“Obviously, this is not just an environmental issue but also an environmental justice issue,” Parmar of the Sierra Club told me.
Chatmire holds about 400 people, many of them low-income folks in wooden homes and mobile homes who like the laid-back, rural feel of the place. Cathy Redd of Concerned Citizens for Chatmire told me most of it is in unincorporated Marion County, not the city limits. The area just got a central sewer a year ago, she said.
Normally in Florida, the people in power pay little attention to pollution problems in enclaves of Black and brown residents, which is perfectly legal under state law.
But the fact that this site was in the springshed of the Rainbow River meant that it got lots of attention. The spring-fed river is a wildly popular tourist draw, attracting people (me included) who want to float or paddle down a sparkling waterway.
The notion of cancer-causing creosote leaking into the soil and then making its way into the river “created alarms for everybody,” said Bill White, vice president of the Rainbow River Conservation group.
Initially, White’s organization and others tried to stop the DEP from issuing any pollution permit to Track Line. Then they figured out that resistance, as they used to say on Star Trek: The Next Generation, was futile.
As long as Track Line checked the proper boxes on its application, the DEP would never reject its permit, White explained. The DEP would not take any action to protect the environment unless the company violated the terms of the permit.
“It was a real eye-opener for me,” he said. “I didn’t know things worked that way,” When he said that, dear reader, I had to bite my tongue reeeeally hard.
What many residents worried about was whether the site might catch fire. It was not an idle fear.
In 2021, a fire broke out at a railroad tie recycling plant in Selma, Alabama, that was so big it could be seen on weather radar. In 2023, a similar blaze broke out at a tie recycling plant in North Carolina, one that smoldered for nearly a week and spewed plumes of purple smoke several stories high.
At their urging, Marion County’s fire marshal toured the site and wrote a three-page report that talked about the danger should a fire break out. Then one did.
“It was like telling the captain of the Titanic two hours ahead of hitting the iceberg that he was going to hit an iceberg,” White said.
Burning questions
Nobody knows yet what sparked the spectacular Dunnellon blaze. There are lots of them breaking out all over Florida right now — 650 so far this year, thanks in part to our worsening drought.
The blaze sent ashes and pieces of wood raining down on roofs and lawns in the nearby neighborhood. Redd got a call from her adult daughter at 5:30 a.m. to ask if she knew about the fire. It was all that people were talking about on Facebook, her daughter said.
“I looked out the door and saw flames all over,” she told me. If the wind had shifted and sent the fire toward Chatmire, she said, it could have wiped out everyone in her neighborhood.
The next day, people fired up about the fire crowded into Dunnellon’s City Hall to talk about how awful it was and what should happen next. I haven’t seen a transcript, but I bet somebody mentioned the old-fashioned practice of riding someone out of town on a rail.
“This catastrophe is a once-in-a-generation event, especially in a place like Dunnellon,” White said, noting that the town is so small, the mayor’s salary is $150 a month. “It’s beyond the normal scope of what this place has to deal with.”
Marion County had already ordered Track Line to get out of town, sending a notice of violation in October and a cease-and-desist letter in November. During a community meeting in December, Redd said, local officials announced that Track Line had agreed to remove all of its ties.
But by the time the fire started three months later, Track Line had hauled off only 20% of its pile, leaving tens of thousands still ready to fuel the flames.
Now not only are the remaining timbers being removed (to Alabama, if you’re wondering), but so is the soil under them, because of the creosote contamination. The most recent DEP update to Dunnellon, dated last week, said 37 truckloads of soil have been hauled away for disposal.
The DEP is also paying a contractor to conduct air quality tests, which Redd said are badly needed because a number of Chatmire residents have gone to the emergency room with breathing problems. Meanwhile, I think everyone is holding their breath to see what effect this has on the Rainbow River.
CSX has been cooperative with local and state officials, which is smart since the timbers were piled on its property. One person no one has heard much from: Malay. I tried several times to reach him for comment, to no avail. He’s been as quiet as he was when he moved those timbers from Newberry to Dunnellon.
I watched a video of Marion County Commission Chairman Carl Zalak III saying they were “taking action at every turn.” That’s more than I can say for our laissez faire DEP.
In fact, the next time you hear some dopey politician talking about cutting bureaucratic red tape, yanking away the power of local government, and allowing business to flourish in a rules-free environment, remind them of the Dunnellon disaster.
The local government tried to stop what happened before it happened, business showed no concern for anyone else, and the agency that’s supposed to protect the environment did not.
Maybe, if we remember these lessons, we can avoid another trainwreck like this one