Efforts to get Norfolk Southern to clean up a local deer kill are stalled
BY MARK MILLER
The railroad tracks that travel north-to-south through Bluffton are owned and operated by Norfolk Southern, the same company in the news for the catastrophic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just over a month ago and yet another two derailments in the past week.
Bluffton resident Alan Daugherty has been trying to get the company to address a comparatively minor issue here, but it happens to be right outside his back door.
“It was only a day or two before that event in Ohio,” Daugherty told the News-Banner. He described it as a “head-on collision between a train engine and a small herd of deer.”
Daugherty writes a weekly column for the News-Banner about nature-related events on his pond and property at the southwest corner of the North Oaks addition which also borders the railway. He assumes the three-fatality accident occurred during the night or around dusk or dawn.
“I can only surmise that they stood on the track with that ‘deer-in-the-headlights’ occurrence,” he commented. He discovered the deer during his daily morning walk around his property within a 24-hour span of the massive derailment in Ohio. Two of the deer carcasses were immediately adjacent — and perhaps straddling — his property line shared with Norfolk Southern. He found a third, decapitated, on the western berm.
Daugherty found an emergency number on Norfolk Southern’s website, but decided this wasn’t an emergency, and tried an administrative number he found, “but I was eventually forwarded to the emergency department,” he said.
“A very friendly person very patiently took all the information,” he continued, “and promised they would forward it to the maintenance department.” Four weeks later, nothing has happened. “I know they have bigger fish to fry and frankly I didn’t really expect, at least at the time, they might come out.”
His next call was to the office of the Wells County Health Department, who informed him that “a dead deer — or even three — do not pose a threat to human health,” he related. “They also shared that the county highway department will pick up dead animals along the county’s roadways, but this was more than a quarter-mile north of 200 North.”
A call to the sheriff’s office, more for advice than anything else, found a sympathetic ear who promised to also contact the railroad company through their channels.
“Even if they would just move them maybe an eighth-of-a-mile south away from any residences,” he explained.
A follow-up call to Norfolk Southern this past week found another sympathetic employee who confirmed the report had been received and forwarded, but also explained that maintenance projects were prioritized.
“I understand they have their hands full in Ohio,” he continued the story, “and when I expressed to her that Bluffton’s deer collision compared minimally with New Palestine, the response on the railroad’s end of the phone was an extended silence.” Apparently, she did not want to talk about that.
“We’re not terribly upset about this,” Daugherty said, “but also not looking forward to when it gets warmer.”
He was encouraged, however, when a neighbor two doors north shared that the railroad had hauled away two dead deer from his yard sometime in the past couple years, “but he happened to be outside when a maintenance crew just happened by and volunteered to remove them. He hadn’t even called them,” he said.
So the deer may be removed yet, but the whole incident has increased Daugherty’s concern about the hazardous materials hauled through Bluffton by the railroad company and how they’ve handled their problems in Ohio. He has observed a very loose spike while checking out the deer but has been assured that’s not unusual, particularly in the spring, and poses no immediate safety hazard.
“I’ve lived next the railroad so long, I don’t even hear the trains anymore,” he said, “but with what’s happened in Ohio, you wonder if that couldn’t happen here, too. It would be a little reassuring if they could clean this up.”
miller@ news-banner.com
