MORE ON THE TRAIN DERAILMENT: I didn’t say much about this yesterday beyond this post because, well, I thought it was mostly a local story and no one would care. (Post-9/11, I’m somewhat desensitized to such things.) I was wrong, apparently. First it’s a lot bigger than I realized yesterday afternoon — one local TV station says 30,000 people were evacuated, which seems high to me, but if you add the mandatory-evacuation and the voluntary-evacuation areas together there may be that many people involved. Other accounts say “several thousand people,” which seems closer. And it’s gotten a lot more attention nationally.

The derailment is a mystery — the track is straight through that section, and there’s not obvious reason why it should happen. One eyewitness said the train was braking when the lead engine abruptly stopped and the rest of the train telescoped into it. (The train crew seems to be okay). This suggests track problems. There’s nothing in any news reports about terrorism or sabotage, but people are speculating darkly, of course — though it’s not as if trains don’t derail all the time in the absence of sabotage. (Here’s a link to the Knoxville News-Sentinel’s coverage, which has links to other information and streaming video.) And sulfuric acid is nasty stuff, but if I were a saboteur, I’d target a train carrying something worse.

Local talk-radio host Hallerin Hill is doing a terrific job (as he did on 9/11/2001) of putting together and relaying information on his program. I think that disaster-recovery and terrorism plans should take account of the important role that talk radio can play in relaying information and educating people; as callers have raised questions, he’s gotten the answers together very rapidly and has done a better job than the regular news broadcasts. I also notice that a lot of people who were evacuated actually evacuated themselves — I heard a couple of callers say that they checked the location of the wreck in relation to their own house “on the Internet” (probably via Mapquest) and then decided to leave on their own.

We learned on 9/11 that distributed information and communications play an important role in dealing with attacks or disasters. It’s important to take that into account when planning. People can self-organize if they have the information and means.

You can smell it as a faint acridity, and I notice that my eyes are a bit bloodshot, as are a lot of other people’s, but they are reporting that the air quality is a lot better now and some people will be able to get back to their homes today, while others will have to wait until tomorrow. In general it’s being taken in stride, and the local authorities, at first glance at least, seem to have been quick and efficient in their response, and I saw one representative saying that the incident is “good practice” for the terrorism-response teams. I guess after 9/11 this sort of thing seems a lot less shocking to everyone.

UPDATE: Fellow Knox-blogger SKBubba has more. I like his dig at MSNBC for its utterly erroneous statement that the derailment occurred in a “rural area.” I guess Tennessee = rural to those guys, population density notwithstanding.