HYNDMAN, Pa. -- CSX railroad tracks cut straight through Hyndman, a borough in Bedford County with a population of about 900.
Barb Lehman lives with three grandchildren on Hogback Road, which crosses the tracks. Trains rumble by 20 to 30 times a day.
About 5 a.m. Wednesday, Ms. Lehman got out of bed for a few moments. As she lay back down, she heard a train horn.
Then -- "all of a sudden, we heard the clanging and the banging and the booming," she said. "The house rattled. We didn't know what in the world happened, and all of a sudden, the scanner went off: 'Train derailment, Hogback.'"
Thirty-two cars of a 178-car CSX train had jumped the tracks, hitting a house and a garage. Rail cars containing propane and sulfur caught fire.
Residents who heard the derailment looked from their windows or from outside their homes as fire rose from the tracks.
Curtis Diehl, who works for a construction company and also lives near the tracks, said he heard a screech, then an explosion. He immediately feared escaping chemicals might be fouling the air.
"I knocked on people's doors and told them, ‘We need to get out of here," he said. He fled with only the clothes he was wearing.
First responders and a CSX team came to the area to assess the damage, followed by the Red Cross, the Salvation Army, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the National Transportation Safety Board and others.
On their own or on orders from authorities, people living within half a mile of the derailment site evacuated to a charter school in town. By 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, CSX spokesman Rick Doolittle said, the evacuation zone was expanded to a mile, affecting close to 1,000 people inside and outside the borough. The outreach center was moved to the Tri-State Ministry Center a few miles outside of town.
Fred Zickefoose, pastor of Grace United Methodist in Hyndman, said he and his wife also didn't take much as they moved to a parishoner's house.
"We assumed we'd be back in the evening," he said.
But as the day wore on, it became clear that the evacuation would last much longer. The propane and sulfur fires continued to rage; it was safer for firefighters to let them burn out on their own instead of trying to extinguish them, Mr. Doolittle said.
CSX and the Red Cross set up another outreach center in the town of Bedford. CSX paid for food, incidentals and rooms at area hotels, from Bedford to just across the Maryland border. Barb Lehman said the Salvation Army gave her youngest grandson shoes, which he had left at his house.
Starting late Wednesday, CSX staff and other officials began retrieving pets and vital medications, Mr. Doolittle said. Ms. Lehman got her insulin on Thursday; Mr. Zickefoose got his computer and his Bible so he could prepare for a Sunday service -- though he didn't know whether he could get to his church.
By Friday morning, the propane fire had burned out, though the sulfur was still flaming. At Tri-State Ministry, pet crates of various sizes sat outside the door. People gathered inside to ask questions, secure rides, or file lost wages or other claims with CSX.
Hyndman is a close-knit community, Mr. Zickefoose said. Everyone knows each other. In the service center, residents gave each other hugs, asked where they were staying, discussed the logistics of housing families and pets, talked about how lucky it was that no one was hurt.
But frustration also mounted. Some people could not go to work because their cars or uniforms were still in Hyndman. Some, like Mr. Diehl and Ms. Lehman and her grandchildren, had to leave their hotels Friday morning because the rooms had been pre-booked, and they waited at the church for CSX to find them another place to stay.
"I came here to figure out where to go next," Mr. Diehl said.
By 4p.m. Friday, the sulfur fires had burned out. Mr. Doolittle said air tests came back without "components of concern," but results of another, more thorough test would have to come back overnight Friday to help CSX determine when to allow residents to return to their homes.
Shortly after 5 p.m., after about five hours of waiting at the church, a CSX staff member approached Ms. Lehman and told her they'd found her a room for the night at a motel in Frostburg, Md. They would have to come back to the church the next day to find a place to stay Saturday.
"We get to go to bed tonight," she said.
By early evening, Mr. Doolittle said, everyone had a place to stay, at least for Friday night.
Mr. Zickefoose said he considered himself lucky that he had a home to go back to, and that nobody was injured in the derailment.
"We're going to eventually be able to go home," he said.
But the lesson he and his wife learned, he said, was to be prepared for the long haul.
"When they tell you to evacuate, expect the worst," he said.
First Published: August 5, 2017, 4:00 a.m.