Five tank cars were still burning on Saturday morning, and officials said they would wait for the “very dangerous” inferno to burn out by itself.

Chief Derek Bergsten of the Rockford Fire Department said 74 of the train’s 114 cars were filled with ethanol.

At the height of the fire on Friday night, 14 cars were ablaze, said Patrick Waldron, a Canadian National spokesman.

Eighteen cars, all containing ethanol, left the tracks about 9 p.m. Friday, Mr. Waldron said. The cause of the derailment had not been determined.

Officials evacuated an area on the edge of Rockford, which is about 80 miles northwest of Chicago.

The Winnebago County coroner, Sue Fiduccia, said on Saturday that the person who was killed was a woman who had been waiting in a car for the train to pass through a crossing.

Chief Bergsten said that three people ran from the car when it was bombarded with flying railroad ties and that they were severely burned by flaming ethanol. They were hospitalized in serious to critical condition, he said.

The derailment was being investigated by Canadian National and the Federal Railroad Administration.

Members of the National Transportation Safety Board were en route to the scene early Saturday.

See also:

‘Heat was tremendous’ in rail car blast

ROCKFORD STAR: Jun 20, 2009
SCOTT MORGAN
By Shelley Hendricks and David Shultz

Onlookers walk along the road as firefighters respond to a train derailment and fire Friday, June 19, 2009, on South Mulford Road just north of Sandy Hollow Road in Rockford.Fire officials let the derailed train ‘burn itself out’

Coleen Mork, 67, of Rockford was heading south on Mulford Road on her way home from Bible study at Shiloh Free Church when she came upon the train. She was in the third car back.

“I was sitting there watching the whole thing happen,” Mork said. “The whole thing is unbelievable. It was just awful.

“I am so thankful to God that I got out of there.”

Mork said the train had been traveling across Mulford for some time unremarkably. Then she noticed black tankers, which were filled with ethanol, starting to bounce along the tracks.

“Each car that came by got worse and I thought ‘those things look like they’re going to derail,’ ” she said.

“They started bumping each other and they just kept coming. It got worse and worse,” she said.

Mork describes seeing sparks and hearing bang after bang as the cars jackknifed into the air and piled onto one another like falling dominoes.

“I wanted to back up. Some of the cars behind me were able to turn around and get out of there,” Mork said. “It was really extreme heat.”

People in the truck and car in front of Mork’s ran from their vehicles.

Mork injured her ankle as she was jumping out of her car and couldn’t get up. The man in one of the vehicles in front her helped her to safety.

“I was trying to run, and I couldn’t; my leg was just paining me,” Mork said. “Thank you for helping me!”

Other witnesses said the first sign of trouble was cars bouncing on the track.

Steve and Amy Walker were in a line of traffic about seven cars back from the railroad crossing heading south on Mulford when they saw the railroad cars bouncing up and down.

“Then they started piling up, and the two tank cars exploded,” Amy said. “There was this big fireball that was over the treetops.

“After that, we saw people jumping out of their cars and running back toward us, trying to get away.

“The heat was tremendous. We were sitting in our car with the windows rolled up and the air conditioner running and we could feel the heat through the windshield.”

The Walkers work at the Register Star.

Another Register Star employee, Jeff Tilley, lives close to the scene. He was in his yard picking up storm debris when he heard the rumble of the train.

“At first, I thought it was a tornado,” he said, “because they always say a tornado sounds like a train coming. Then I saw this nuclear fireball, mushrooming above the trees. It was probably 300 feet in the air.”

Tilley said trains pass on those tracks “two or three times a day.”

After the initial explosion, Tilley heard two other explosions.