In the 1901 annual report of the Commissioner of Railroads for the state of Michigan, the author mentioned that “Railroad rules have been written in blood.” The idea was that safety rules were only implemented when enough blood had been spilled.
As we reach the one year anniversary of the East Palestine rail disaster, no new safety regulations are in place to prevent the next such disaster. While no blood was spilled in this disaster, a lot of polyvinyl chloride was and it resulted in the town being poisoned. This despite the National Transportation Safety Board stating that the East Palestine rail disaster was “100% preventable.” The lack of new safety regulations isn’t because none were proposed. A bipartisan Rail Safety Bill was introduced by U.S. Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and JD Vance (R-OH) and while it was immediately watered down and does not address the real ways to vastly improve rail safety, it was a start. Even that was not acceptable to the corporations that profit from unsafe rail transport of hazardous materials in the U.S. The lack of new rail regulations is more confirmation of the broader issue of the current failed regulatory system in America.
The concept of safety rules being written in blood also made an appearance in 2024 in a CNN article on the amazing results of a fiery Japan Airlines plane collision. Even though this accident resulted in the plane being quickly engulfed in flames, all 379 passengers and crew survived and the staff's training and airline’s commitment to safety were believed to be a big reason for this success. The basis for this success is the corporate culture of Japan Airlines, which prioritizes safety, after it experienced the deadliest airline incident ever in 1985. The rules and training that followed were written in the blood of the 520 people who died in that accident. And subsequently saved lives.
However, it is important to note that Japan Airlines was not directly responsible for causing the 1985 accident but took measures to make sure it never happened again. Who was responsible for the accident? “...that accident was not the airline’s fault and was due to defective repair performed by Boeing.”
And history is showing us that the American company Boeing took a different path than Japan Airlines after 1985. Prior to the two deadly crashes of Boeing’s 737 Max in 2018 and 2019, internal company emails revealed a culture that did not put safety first, with one stating, "This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys." And then 346 people died when two of those clown-designed planes crashed.
In October 2022 a Texas judge ruled that “in sum, but for Boeing’s criminal conspiracy to defraud the (Federal Aviation Administration), 346 people would not have lost their lives in the crashes” and “Had Boeing not committed its crime” pilots in those doomed aircraft would have “received training adequate to respond to the MCAS activation that occurred on both aircrafts.”
Despite all of this, five years after the deadly crashes, Boeing continues to have problems with its new aircraft including doors and wheels falling off. Meanwhile, Boeing continues to do a great job on stock buybacks. And we never learned whether they gave President Obama the gold watch he expected.
In 2014, Deborah Hersman, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, asked a panel of oil and rail executives how it came to pass that they were moving large amounts of volatile Bakken oil in unsafe rail tank cars, after these trains kept derailing and blowing up, including killing 47 people in Lac-Megantic. “How did it get missed for the last ten years?” Hersman asked. But as we have learned after every major corporate disaster, it didn’t get missed. They knew. Employees knew about Boeing’s issues. Employees have warned us for over a decade about rail safety issues. In the U.S. the regulatory approach is to let industry do whatever it wants until something goes really wrong. Then some angry member of Congress proposes new regulations, those regulations are typically watered down by lobbyists — and may never pass at all. The only good regulations proposed for the rail industry in the past decade were either never passed or repealed.
Elon Musk, champion of self-driving cars that have resulted in accidents and deaths because they aren’t really self-driving cars, understands the lax regulatory environment in the U.S. and explained it to his investors in November 2022.
“In the US, things are legal by default. In Europe, they’re illegal by default. So, we have to get approval beforehand. Whereas, in the US, you can kind of do it on your own cognizance, more or less.”
And it continues. The “self-driving cars” were recalled and “fixed” but concerns remain.
“We don’t think that the recall, as far as what Tesla did to address these concerns, fixed the issues that we have reported on in the past,” Kelly Funkhouser, associate director of vehicle technology at Consumer Reports’ auto test center, told the Wall Street Journal in January.
As things being legal by default is a recipe for disaster, many people have tried to change this. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) tried for years to get new pipeline regulations after an explosion in her district killed eight people. She expressed her frustration with this process multiple times in Congressional testimony, at one point stating that “the system is fundamentally broken” and that “PHMSA is actually a toothless kitten, a fluffy industry pet that frightens absolutely no one.” [PHMSA oversees pipeline regulations]
After years of researching this issue and reaching the same conclusion as Congresswoman Spier, I spoke to someone who changed my mind about the system being broken. This woman had worked at a regulatory agency and when I used the term “regulatory capture” she corrected me and said that the system is working as designed — to put corporate profits over safety. For regulatory capture to exist, we would have had to design a system that put safety first. We didn’t.
Perhaps the anniversary of the East Palestine disaster will not get the attention it deserves as other bigger corporate crimes make the headlines in our “do it on your own cognizance” economy. That will be a shame, because the people of East Palestine are still suffering, and it is a case study in all that is wrong with the American regulatory system. Last March I wrote about a Senate hearing where they questioned the CEO of Norfolk Southern, the railroad that operated the train that crashed and burned in East Palestine. When repeatedly asked if he would support new rail safety regulations he refused to answer, instead saying, “We are committed to the legislative intent to make rail safer.” The reality is that the chief executives at corporations like Boeing and Norfolk Southern have shown the only thing they consistently commit to are stock buybacks.
In the 1901 annual report on the state of the U.S. rail industry the author noted that, “the amount of income for the year 1900 to be the greatest for the railroad business in this State.” But these profits required spilling some blood as, “There was the usual record of accidents and some of them were dreadful in the extreme.”
120 years later and America is still very good at protecting corporate profits while accepting extreme and dreadful accidents. However calling them accidents is also part of the problem as NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy pointed out after East Palestine:
“We call things 'accidents.' There is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable,” Homendy stated after the East Palestine disaster. It is much more accurate to call these corporate disasters the cost of doing business. And it is a cost that CEOs are more than willing to pay despite the blood on their hands.
Justin Mikulka is an investigative journalist and author of the book Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk
