“You can have erosion or scour that removes support from the foundation. “The high water flow translates to high forces acting directly on the pier and, importantly, on the river bottom,” Bea said Saturday. Robert Bea, a retired engineering professor at the University of California Berkeley who has analyzed the causes of hundreds of major disasters, said repeated years of heavy river flows provided a clue to the possible cause. Meanwhile, contractors monitoring the air downwind of the derailment for the EPA have not detected any toxic gases, said Rich Mylott, a spokesperson for the agency’s regional office. The water testing is being done by contractors working for the train’s operator, Montana Rail Link, while the Montana Department of Environmental Quality and the federal Environmental Protection Agency are overseeing it, Stone said. “Water quality testing will continue until the cleanup is complete and at this time there are no known risks to the public drinking water,” he said. Both do not dissolve when they enter water, he explained. Preliminary results of water quality sampling did not show petroleum hydrocarbons, which would have come from the asphalt, or sulfur, Kevin Stone, a spokesperson for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, said. The area is in a sparsely populated section of the Yellowstone River Valley, surrounded by ranch and farmland. The seven mangled cars that carried hot asphalt and molten sulfur remained in the rushing river a day after the bridge gave way near the town of Columbus, about 40 miles (about 64 kilometers) west of Billings, Montana. (AP) - Preliminary testing of water and air quality along a stretch of the Yellowstone River where train cars carrying hazardous materials fell into the waterway following a bridge collapse did not indicate any threat to the public, state and federal officials said Sunday.
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