Blue cheese salad and sealant spill into California's largest lake

A canal with blue cheese salad dressing and concrete sealant adorn the Southern California desert after a freight train crush.

Photo: Blue cheese salad and sealant spill into California's largest lake

Spills of sealant, blue-cheese dressing and other food products made it into a canal about a mile (1.5 kilometers) from the north shore of the Salton Sea, California's largest lake, hazardous materials specialist Robert Becker said.

The Coachella Canal was mostly smeared with salad dressing.

"There was blue cheese - a lot of it," Becker said.

The Los Angeles-bound train derailed for unknown reasons Tuesday afternoon north of the 35-mile (56-kilometer) long Salton Sea, which lies just north of El Centro in Southern California. Twenty-eight cars derailed, 14 of them overturned.

The three crew members aboard the train were uninjured, but a firefighter was taken to a hospital for heat exposure, fire officials said.

The canal was dammed and there was no threat to the Salton Sea, Becker said.

Union Pacific rail spokesman Joe Arbona said the train carried a variety of cargo on a run from Dupo, Illinois, to Los Angeles.