Karina Bland: Morning rower watches aftermath of derailment.
Patrick Walsh pushed his single scull boat out onto Tempe Town Lake at 5:20 a.m. on Wednesday, when there was just enough of a breeze to send ripples across the water.
Walsh, who’s 73, is a competitive rower, ranked in the top 10 nationally in his age group. He rows four times a week.
It’s a particularly nice place in the morning, even when it’s already 90 degrees. At that time of day, it’s mostly competitive rowers on the water, maybe eight that Walsh could see Wednesday, all in single sculls. Teams aren’t rowing because of the pandemic.
It was quiet as he headed toward the east end of the lake, passing under bridges over Rural Road and McClintock Drive, banking around pillars at the marshy end where osprey and herons rest. He spotted a bald eagle.
Walsh was a half-mile away at 6:15 a.m. when a freight train derailed as it crossed the lake on the Salt River Union Pacific Railroad Bridge. He didn’t see it happen, but he heard two explosions, one just a few seconds after the other.
He could see dark smoke billowing into the air. He wondered if one of the high-rises that sit on the edge of the lake was on fire.
He rowed toward the smoke. He stopped and stared.
Part of the bridge had collapsed, dumping three or four train cars onto Rio Salado Parkway below. Fire snaked along the train on the bridge, burning through the wooden cars, including a flatbed of lumber, heading toward two tanker cars.
Silently, Walsh urged someone to decouple the tankers.
“That flame is about to hit those tankers and who knows what’s inside it,” he thought.
A hundred people had gathered on the north shore to watch. If the tankers blew, those people would be hurt, Walsh thought. A half-dozen police cars pulled
into the parking lots and within a few minutes, had cleared people out of the area.
Relieved, Walsh rowed toward the bridge across Mill Avenue, where he stores his boat in a fenced area near the Rio Salado Rowing Club.
He couldn’t look away. “It was devastating to watch,” he said.
The bridge, built in 1912, had collapsed at the incline where the line runs up through Tempe Beach Park to the station behind Macayo’s Depot Cantina restaurant.
Walsh, who moved to Tempe with his wife, Rosemary, in 1980, has been coming to the lake for years. It’s a peaceful place, where people run, bike, boat and play. It’s not usually a scene of chaos with billowing smoke and sirens.
Now he watched as firefighters got water onto the train out over the lake, working from the light rail bridge about 30 yards away. A boat equipped with a hose arrived.
“If the fire had hit those tankers, and they had exploded, serious damage could have been done,” Walsh said.
He could see debris in the water, mostly burned wood floating on the surface. He wondered what was in the water that he couldn’t see.
Walsh stored his boat and headed home, where he learned that no one had been hurt.
“If people had been at the park,” Walsh said, “it would have just been horrible.”
The lake will be closed for a time, city officials said. Walsh will be back when it opens — and is peaceful — again.