By CAT MURPHY
Courtesy of the City of Hyattsville
The Hyattsville City Council agreed to enter into a $310,000 settlement agreement with CSX Transportation, Inc. on Oct. 21, a little more than a year after a CSX freight train derailed near the intersection of Baltimore Avenue and Decatur Street.
One locomotive and more than a dozen rail cars went off the tracks in the September 2023 derailment, spilling an unknown number of plastic pellets — otherwise known as nurdles — along the roadway. The accident, which CSX blamed on broken track components, shuttered a portion of Alternate Route 1 for more than a week.
City Administrator Tracey Douglas said the settlement agreement took nearly 13 months because CSX at first offered a one-time reimbursement that would not have allowed the city to receive additional compensation for its pending expenses.
“This one did take a long time, and they really did push back and say, ‘We’re going to pay the expenses, and then we’re one-and-done,’” Douglas said at the Oct. 21 city council meeting. “They were not interested in allowing us to come back.”
However, city officials said they were determined to keep the door open for further reimbursement negotiations with CSX because, although the derailment has long since been cleared and the tracks repaired, the cleanup itself damaged portions of the road.
The unfinished road repairs were part of the reason Hyattsville officials said the city elected not to pursue litigation for
Courtesy of Bill Friebele
punitive damages. Rather, it sought only to be reimbursed for the actual losses it incurred.
“When we look up other communities that are in litigation with CSX, it’s taken years,” Douglas said. “We’ve got to get that road repaired.”
The ultimate settlement figure — a little more than $310,400 in total — is therefore based mostly on the estimated cost of repairs and the cost of the time spent, plus a “little contingency,” Douglas said.
CSX confirmed in an Oct. 25 email statement to the Life & Times that it had reimbursed the City of Hyattsville for “the cost of infrastructure repairs and personnel expenses” related to the derailment but did not comment further.
“We were deliberate to go after what the city actually lost,” said Reggie Bagley, Hyattsville’s emergency operations manager, who oversaw the city’s derailment response. “We got estimates for the road and infrastructure damage — that was in the neighborhood of $266,000 — and then we compiled the actual personnel-related expenses.”
City documents put the repairs to Emerson Alley at approximately $243,000, with repairs to Alternate Route 1 expected to cost another $24,000. Personnel expenses cost the city approximately $43,000.
Even with the built-in leeway, Councilmember Joanne Waszczak (Ward 1) pushed the city to audit its derailment-related expenses down the road to “make sure that we actually went back and asked for every cent that we are owed on this.”
“It does seem rather low that we only spent $300,000 considering all the time and effort that went into this,” said Waszczak, the council vice president, at the Oct. 21 city council meeting.
Some Hyattsville residents were similarly put off by the city’s settlement agreement with CSX.
“Three hundred thousand dollars — or a little over that — is way, way, way, way, way too little to compensate for the level of environmental injustice that that company has done to our community,” Ward 2 resident Daniel Broder said at the Oct. 21 meeting.
Ward 5 resident Melissa Schweisguth called the settlement “disappointing.”
“The city spent a lot of time and really mobilized, and it just seems like we’re due some more,” Schweisguth said.
However, most everyone seemed to agree on at least one point: that the 2023 derailment could have been much worse.
“The nurdles can cause environmental damage, so I don’t want to diminish that,” Bagley said. “But it could have been a chemical spill. It could have been a radioactive spill. It could have been any number of things that we were fortunate not to have to address.”
This notion is bolstered by CSX’s accident report, which shows that the 158-car train involved in the accident contained 12 cars carrying hazardous materials — two of which derailed.
Several Hyattsville residents voiced concerns about the possibility for future derailments and questioned the city’s emergency preparedness.
“We were fortunate in this case, that this was a nontoxic wake-up call,” Ward 1 resident Greg Smith said. “I wonder if we can get a community update on the discussions … being had by the various parties on understanding what caused this, how we’re going to prevent it going forward and what our emergency response will be given what is rolling up and down those tracks on a daily basis.”
Bagley told residents that the city is “very much concerned” about the possibility of a future derailment, adding that the city is still waiting for the Federal Railroad Administration to issue its final report on the derailment.
Douglas noted that the city will be meeting with county and state officials once the final report is issued “to see if there are any other recommendations that we should adopt.”
“There’s a lot of interest in this, because we are all aware of how much worse this could have been,” Douglas said.
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Cat Murphy is a graduate journalism student at the University of Maryland.
