On Friday night, Feb. 3, a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, due to some kind of “mechanical failure” in one of the cars. A massive fire began releasing dark smoke for hours. A couple of days later, amid fears of toxic gas release and explosions, residents of the area were forced to evacuate. The biggest environmental and public health concern was that the train contained toxins like vinyl chloride—a deadly chemical that is used in the United States for plastics manufacturing.
According to reports, the train consisted of more than “100 cars, about 20 were carrying hazardous materials.” Ten of the cars derailed and at least half of those derailed cars carried vinyl chloride. Having evacuated the site of thousands of residents in a town just 15 miles south of Youngstown, authorities began the process of trying to figure out how to contain a potential catastrophe. This included blowing tiny holes into the five railway cars with the hazardous material. According to CNN, the “hazardous substance spilled into a trench, where it was burned away.” On Tuesday night, the evacuation order was lifted.
WKBN in Ohio reports that at least three class-action lawsuits have been filed against the operators of the train, as well as against the Norfolk Southern Corporation. The lawsuits include claims of depreciated market value of homes, as well as loss of business as the area remains both figuratively and literally choked off from commercial traffic.
A new report says documents show the company that owns the railway has a lot of explaining to do.
RELATED STORY: Railway company spent billions more of its 'record' profits on stock buyback than on workers
Investigative outfit The Lever reports that it has obtained documents showing how Norfolk Southern lobbyists were able to skirt certain safety requirements in two very important ways. The first, according to federal officials who spoke with The Lever, is the train that derailed, the one with the deadly toxic odorless vinyl chloride, does not fall under “high-hazard flammable train” (HHFT) regulations. How is that possible?
In 2014, after a series of railway accidents, the Obama administration made moves to regulate trains carrying “hazardous materials.” This included things like operation safety requirements, such as speed limits. It also included infrastructure requirements, like train car brake upgrades and container upgrades. After intense pushback from the railway lobbyists, including Norfolk Southern’s people, the Obama administration created a long runway for improvements to be made, and more importantly, narrowed what was considered “hazardous” cargo. Only crude oil was now classified as hazardous.
However, the Obama administration did leave in a mandate for safety upgrades on those train cars. The hope, according to the administration, was that with the compromise, the big railway companies would be forced to make the safety upgrades that they should have started applying to their business model long ago.
About four years later, while railway interests donating “more than $6 million to GOP campaigns,” there was an enormous public safety disaster in the White House named Donald Trump. Trump’s administration rolled back all kinds of safety regulations for transportation and for fossil fuel interests. Trump’s Department of Transportation rolled those minimum safety requirements back. Specifically, even those trains would not be required to be outfitted with the newer, safer, electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes. ECP brakes promise faster stopping and less destructive derailments, in part because they offer a more robust deescalation of speed for each individual train car.
This is done by applying the brakes to each car, as opposed to the current air-braking system which applies brakes from the front to the back, which leads to cars bunching up. This means that while it may not be able to stop all derailments, it promises to lessen the inertia of the following cars, thus reducing the potential severity of an accident.
Here’s Sen. John Thune, probably best known for being a shill of a man with less integrity than a phone line at Mar-a-Lago, lauding the repeal of ECP brake mandates under Trump:
“Repealing this rule puts sound science and careful study by the independent National Academies of Sciences and Government Accountability Office over flawed guesswork the department used in 2015. While new technologies offer potential improvement to railroad safety, regulators have a responsibility to fairly evaluate effectiveness and avoid arbitrarily mandating new requirements. I applaud the department’s new leadership for reacting appropriately to the findings of independent experts and fixing a mistake.”
That “sound science and careful study” was bullshit, as the AP reported about two months later that the Trump administration’s “careful study” was bullshit. Funny that Sen. Thune forgot to jump back up on his soap box at the time to call for reimplementing the mandate. Guess he was too busy licking boots and doing dirty work in trying to cover up the Trump administration’s crimes at the time.
Norfolk Southern is one of the big railway companies that has adopted the Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR) that was used as an excuse for why they couldn’t figure out a way to take some of their enormous profits and spread it to sick leave for workers. Instead, the big railway companies spent a lot of their profits on stock buybacks. Community member xaxnar has a good story all about the big railway companies, their greed, and their terrible labor practices here.
The Washington Post reports that there are “roughly” 1,000 derailments every year in the United States. Supporting labor safety is supporting community safety. The only thing lost is increased profits for a select few.
An important reminder: Profits aren’t lost; they are distributed to the people providing us all the service.
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