Railroad Expanding Foam Mess by the Truckee River


Although cured expanding foam is not considered hazardous by the EPA, it needs to be disposed of properly.

Apparently, the railroad ran rests with expanding foam and left several hundred cured "mushrooms" over a quarter mile stretch by Floriston, CA. The task of collection and disposal was avoided, and all those hard probes were left as trash right next to Truckee river. Terrible!

Eventually all of these will pollute the nearby soil, the river and many will wound up in Pyramid Lake where the Truckee river terminates. After a while, sun exposure makes them brittle, so these become a form of microplastics pollution. 

There are also several older and weathered expanding foam probes, which suggests that this is repeated practice.

Both AMTRAK and freight railroads run on these tracks. I have no idea who owns the track, and who conducted these tests.

I reported this environmental pollution incident to EPA’s Pacific Southwest (Region 9) office in San Francisco. 



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