Freight Cars Derail on Lehigh River in Pennsylvania After 3-Train Crash

Several freight train cars derailed onto the banks of the Lehigh River, a tributary of the Delaware River, in Pennsylvania on Saturday in a crash involving three trains that spilled diesel fuel and plastic pellets into the water, the authorities said.

The National Transportation Safety Board was deploying a team of experts to the site of the crash, which involved an eastbound train striking another train that had stopped on the same track.

“The wreckage from the striking train spilled onto an adjacent track and was struck” by a westbound train, leading to the derailment of an unknown number of cars, the N.T.S.B. said.

Northampton County Emergency Management Services and the Lehigh County hazardous materials team responded to the derailment in Lower Saucon Township, Pa., about 10 miles east of Allentown.

There were “no evacuations, no injuries and no leaks from any containers,” Northampton County said on its Facebook page.

Pictures of the derailment, which occurred around 7:15 a.m., shared on social media show two locomotives on the banks of the river, one of them partially submerged, and several container cars derailed.

“Some of the cars that were derailed were marked as holding hazardous material, but they were empty,” Lamont McClure, the county executive, said in an interview. “Air monitoring is showing that all is normal.”

Diesel fuel and polypropylene plastic pellets spilled into the Lehigh River, the Lower Saucon police chief, Thomas Barndt, said at a news conference. Containment booms were set up to capture the spill.

Train crew members were stranded on the river bank and were helped with ropes to climb the riverbank up to the road, Chief Barndt said.

The Lehigh River provides drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people, and as a tributary of the Delaware River, it contributes to a drinking water supply for 15 million people, according to American Rivers, an environmental nonprofit.

Norfolk Southern owns the Lehigh Line, a major freight railroad route that snakes through New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Connor Spielmaker, a company spokesman, said in a statement that the railroad company’s “crews and contractors will remain on scene over the coming days to clean up.” He added that Norfolk Southern would help the N.T.S.B. investigate how the crash occurred “to prevent others like it.”

The N.T.S.B. said last year that it had opened a special investigation into safety practices at Norfolk Southern.

In January, Norfolk Southern agreed to join a federal safety reporting program after scrutiny of the disastrous train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, in February 2023. In that crash, dozens of freight cars carrying hazardous materials derailed and caught fire, enveloping the city with toxic smoke and contaminating drinking water supplies.

The Federal Railroad Administration, which oversees the safety reporting program, sent safety personnel on Saturday to help the local authorities in the Lehigh Valley, the agency said on social media.

The accident in East Palestine forced an examination of how the rail industry is regulated and its safety record.

Derailments rose at the top five freight railroad companies in 2023, according to regulatory reports.

The five Class 1 freight railroads operating in the United States — Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Canadian National — reported 256 accidents on their mainlines last year through October, an 11 percent increase over the same period in 2022, according to data compiled by the Federal Railroad Administration.

From 2018 to 2022, Northampton County recorded 26 rail accidents or incidents resulting in 13 reported injuries and no fatalities, according to a hazardous mitigation plan.