Photo by Culberson County Sheriff’s Office
By Lisa Morton
I-10 was closed Monday morning after a Union Pacific train derailed 35 miles East of Van Horn near Kent. The incident location is not an isolated one for derailments as a train left the tracks losing 7 rail cars very close to this spot a couple of years ago.
Initially the Texas Department of Transportation, (TxDOT), identified one of the 6 cars marked as containing hazardous material as leaking but soon discovered the frost like substance on cargo marked butane was just dirt dust. The Interstate was reopened about 3 hours after the accident.
Union Pacific Railroad officials say that railcars being towed from Fort Worth to West Cotton,
California, derailed about 6:30 a.m. The Culberson County Sheriff’s office was dispatched to the scene
and an area around the crash was set as an evacuation zone, which included a section of Interstate 10 forcing the detour. No injuries were reported in the wreck.
