The financial impact of wildfires and heavy rains on the Union Pacific railway so far this year could top $100m, as intensifying effects of climate change brought cascading disruptions to the company’s 32,000-mile network.
“It’s real money. It’s a real impact,” chief executive Lance Fritz told the Financial Times in an interview. “Weather is becoming more violent and we see that.”
In June and July, the Lava and Dixie fires took Union Pacific bridges out of commission in California to “gigantic” effect, Fritz said.
The Lava fire destroyed the Dry Canyon Bridge, a 150ft-tall, 1,200ft-long structure that is an important segment of a route from southern California to northern Washington state. Deconstruction and reconstruction of the bridge took 35 days, which “really screwed up the network”, necessitating reroutes that added more than 200,000 train miles to the network, Fritz said.
Union Pacific is North America’s largest listed freight rail operator, serving cities as far east as Chicago and New Orleans and west as Seattle and Los Angeles. The Omaha-based company took in $19-5bn in revenue last year.
Much of the US west has been in drought this summer, with bouts of roasting temperatures. California may experience what were once-in-a-decade wildfires almost every other year, scientists have said, due to more extreme heat and drier conditions.
The fires on the west coast forced Union Pacific to reroute trains through Salt Lake City, Utah, an effort that required redeploying labour, equipment and locomotives from elsewhere in the network at a time of deep strain in global supply chains.