On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying miscellaneous goods derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Thirty-eight cars came off the tracks and 11 of them contained hazardous materials. A fire broke out, which created the risk of a chemical explosion.
To prevent an explosion, the chemicals were vented and burned. Norfolk Southern crews have safely performed similar operations before, which involve draining liquid compounds from cars into a trench and burning them. The resulting fire created clouds of smoke that filled the sky.
No one died or was injured in the accident. Residents were ordered to evacuate on February 5 by Governor Mike DeWine to allow the controlled burning to take place and were told it was safe to return on February 9.
“Since the start of the fire on February 8, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air monitoring has not detected any worrisome levels of [de toxicidade] community health that is attributable to the train derailment,” said EPA Regional Administrator Debra Shore on Feb.
“The spill flowed into the Ohio River, but the Ohio River is a very large, body of water capable of diluting pollutants quickly,” said Ohio EPA Chief Tiffani Kavalec. “We do not anticipate anything from this point forward impacting any of our future drinking water supplies.”
Rail service was restored on 7 February. Norfolk Southern has set up a support center in a nearby church. He has distributed over US$1 million (R$5.2 million) to over 700 families to help pay for housing and supplies. It has also donated $220,000 (R$1.15 million) to the East Palestine Fire Department and $25,000 (R$115,400) to the Ohio Red Cross, and is working with authorities to conduct environmental monitoring.
East Palestine is close to the Pennsylvania border, south of Youngstown and midway between Pittsburgh and Akron. The Norfolk Southern Fort Wayne Line, which connects Pittsburgh to Chicago, runs through East Palestine. The train that derailed was coming from Illinois and heading to Conway Yard, Pennsylvania, one of the largest rail yards in the country.
The section of the line running through East Palestine has safety devices called “hot box detectors”. On average, there is one detector every 40 kilometers on Class I freight railways. One cause of derailments is overheating of wheels and axles, which can burn out in one to three minutes.
These detectors are rail-side devices that use infrared sensors to measure the temperature of the wheels. If the temperature exceeds the safety limits, the equipment sends a signal to the locomotive cab. The engineer then stops the train to inspect the wheels.
“Train accident rates caused by axle and bearing related factors have dropped by 81% since 1980 and 59% since 1990 due to the use of hot box detectors,” said the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) in 2019.
Despite the fact that the Fort Wayne Line had these safety devices, the accident did occur, and it was exactly the type of accident these detectors are supposed to help prevent. We still don’t know the cause of the accident and the National Committee for Transport Safety is investigating.
A preliminary report is expected to be released in about a month. He is examining the wheels that started the derailment and, once they are decontaminated, the tank cars that were transporting the chemicals. The evidence we have so far indicates that the accident may have been due to extreme bad luck.
William Vantuono, editor-in-chief of trade publication Railway Agehe wrote:
A Railway Age found that the derailment was likely due to a combination of factors and unfortunate timing. The train passed a railside hot box detector which reported zero defects. Shortly thereafter, a wheel bearing began to overheat, which in turn caused a axle to severely overheat as the bearing warmed up. This eventually resulted in a shaft failure which unfortunately occurred a few moments after the train passed a second hot box detector which signaled the problem, alerting the crew. The engineer immediately applied the brakes, but the axle had already failed and the train derailed.
If true, that means the driver did exactly what he was supposed to do in response to that signal. Investigators are examining the hot box detectors to see if they were faulty. No system will ever be 100% fail-safe, and the evidence we have so far suggests an unpredictable crash.
Commenting on the response to the crash, Vantuono wrote: “Disinformation, driven by ignorant reporting in local and national media, fueled by various groups who appear to be taking advantage of the derailment and its aftermath to support their own agendas, has been spreading faster than expected. the fire that resulted from it.”
This includes Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who speculated that the official response to the incident was prompted by the fact that East Palestine residents are white and primarily voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Comedian Jon Stewart said the incident “it looks like Chernobyl.”
The problem with these reports is that a similar incident happened in Paulsboro, New Jersey, in 2012. A train derailed when crossing a bridge over the Mantua Creek (a tributary of the Delaware River) and more than 75,000 liters of vinyl chloride spilled into the water. The volume of chemicals was lower than in East Palestine, but it is the same substance, with a similar risk of environmental damage.
Authorities responded in kind, at the local, state and federal levels involved, establishing an evacuation zone and ordering schools to close. Unlike East Palestine, Paulsboro was a Democratic Party stronghold, having voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a margin of 79% to 20% in 2012.
Authorities removed all traces of vinyl chloride from the derailed cars just over a week after the accident, and the chemical had become undetectable in the air a few days before that. The population of Paulsboro is currently about the same as it was in 2012.
Politicians also agreed with the assessment of the Railway Age. Republican Senators JD Vance (Ohio) and Marco Rubio (Florida) wrote a letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg demanding answers about the derailment. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna (California) tweeted that the derailment was “the result of years of deregulation and anti-labor practices”.
The letter from Vance and Rubio informs the length of the train, 150 cars, and says that the vehicle had three crew members on board. “It is unreasonable to ask whether a team of two railroad workers and an intern is capable of effectively monitoring 150 railcars,” the senators wrote. But having three crew members on board meant that the train had one more crew member than usual.
Two-man crews are the industry standard (and advances in technology have made the second crew less important than in the past). All three of the crew on that train would be sitting in the locomotive’s cab, looking at the same instruments and gauges; it’s not like they’re monitoring individual cars along the train. Countless trains of 150 cars or more are safely operated by two-man crews every day across the country.
The four questions that Vance and Rubio asked Buttigieg pertain to the Precisely Scheduled Railroad (PSR) program, which is an industry practice that railroads have adopted in recent years to improve productivity and reduce costs.
Unions opposed the PSR because it reduces the number of employees needed to operate a railroad. They also tried to turn the PSR into a safety concern, which is the line of questioning that Vance and Rubio also took, looking to find out whether the East Palestine accident is to blame for the PSR.
PSR was first implemented by Canadian National in 1998, and as of 2019, six out of seven Class I railroads reported using it (railway company BNSF is the exception). While accidents have been rare throughout this period, freight trains are safer today than they were 20 years ago. This is due in part to the adoption of safety technology such as positive train control, which, after gradual adoption, has been in operation on all major US freight lines since 2020.
The Government Accountability Office has already studied the PSR and found in a report released in December that the evidence for the effect of the PSR on security is inconclusive. “FRA officials stated that while the data does not currently show a decrease in safety due to operational changes associated with the PSR, these changes may increase the risk, and the FRA is engaged in various efforts to monitor and address these potential risks,” says the report.
Khanna’s concerns, as Reason Foundation transportation scholar Marc Scribner has pointed out, are misplaced. Rail freight has undergone economic deregulation, not safety deregulation. These tasks are performed by entirely separate government agencies (economic regulation is by the Board for Surface Transport and safety regulation is by the FRA).
Economic deregulation played a role in improving safety by making the freight railways more financially viable so they could invest in infrastructure improvements. Since 1980, when the Staggers Act deregulated rail freight transport, rail accident rates have dropped by 76% and employee injury rates have dropped by 85%.
Freight trains in the US today are extremely safe despite the accident in East Palestine. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured in the accident, despite the horrific footage and the massive fire that resulted from the controlled burning. For the sake of all involved, commentators and politicians alike should let investigators do their job and avoid irresponsible speculation about the cause of the accident or the motivations of the local, state and federal authorities who responded to it.
©2023 National Review. Published with permission. original in English.
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