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All acids are transported in double walled, rubber lined tankers. trains as well as trucks. As far as hydrofluoric acid is concerned, one drop on bare skin and it attacks the calcium in the bones. You can not tell it is on the skin until it is too late. Once it starts attacking the bones, you need to be hospitalized and given antibiotics to fight it. If left untended, you can lose a limb and even die. As far as transporting hazardous waste in and thru Utah, Utah has the west's largest recycling facility and also the largest disposal site for haz waste. Phillips has one of the best reputations for safety in the industry. The leak on the train car sounds like it may have been hit by something and that caused the leak. Plus, the rail cars are supposed to be maintained and tested annually by the rail company, not the company using it to transport haz materials. As far as the labelling of any vehicle transporting and even storing haz materials, it is tightly supervised by individual states. Believe it or not, not many things fall thru the cracks and more so less now than before 9-11. All vehicles are required by law to be labelled with a placard with color codes and numbers that tell anyone who cares or needs to know, what the material in the storage vehicle is. When the fire department asked for the company what was in the railcar, they are supposed to have immediate access to all shipping papers. The fire department should also be able to recognize the placards on all 4 sides of the railcars and trucks to be able to deal with any incident that may occur. It looks to me that someone dropped the ball on this incident. People are just human but when it comes to haz materials and haz waste, lives are at risk.

I saw the pics, those holes could have been vandalism.(looked like they had been shot at perhaps)

They may not have seen the damage prior to filling.

Yikes, somebody that knows 49CFR. !

The "Catch 22" here is the fact that the placards could also tell a terrorist what the contents of the tank is.

Say you have a clearly marked tank of Liquid Chlorine.
One well placed RPG round could potentially kill thousands.