Buttigieg urges rail safety changes
OMAHA, Neb. — Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wants the nation’s freight railroads to immediately act to improve safety while regulators try to strengthen safety rules in the wake of a fiery derailment in Ohio that forced evacuations when toxic chemicals were released and burned.
Buttigieg announced a package of reforms Tuesday — two days after he warned the railroad responsible for the derailment, Norfolk Southern, to fulfill its promises to clean up the mess just outside East Palestine, Ohio, and help the town recover. He said the Department of Transportation will hold the railroad accountable for any safety violations that contributed to the Feb. 3 crash near the Pennsylvania border.
“While ensuring the safety of those impacted by this crash is the immediate priority, we also have to recognize that this represents an important moment to redouble our efforts to make this far less likely to happen again in the future,” Buttigieg said.
Even though government data shows that derailments have declined in recent years, there were still 1,049 of them last year. Most are ordinary and don’t cause any major problems, like the derailment in Nebraska on Tuesday morning that toppled more than two dozen Union Pacific railcars, spilled coal and blocked the tracks.
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency plans to return to the town of 4,700 Tuesday along with the governors of Ohio and Pennsylvania and Norfolk Southern’s CEO to discuss the cleanup and efforts to keep people safe. Also on Tuesday, officials plan to open a medical clinic
staffed by contamination experts to evaluate residents’ complaints. State and federal officials have reiterated that their testing of air and water samples in the area doesn’t show dangerous levels of any toxins, but some people have been complaining about constant headaches and irritated eyes as they worry about returning to their homes.
Buttigieg said railroads and tank car owners should take action themselves to accelerate their plan to upgrade the tank cars that haul flammable liquids like crude oil and ethanol by 2025 instead of waiting to comply with the 2029 standard Congress ultimately approved after regulators suggested the earlier deadline. He also said freight railroads should quickly agree to use a confidential hotline regulators created that lets employees report safety concerns without fear of retribution, and reach more agreements to provide their employees with paid sick time to help prevent fatigue.
He also wants railroads to stop asking for waivers from inspection requirements every time they develop new technology to improve inspections, because he said the technology should supplement but not replace human inspections.
Railroad unions have also been raising concerns that car inspections are being rushed and preventative maintenance may be getting neglected after widespread job cuts in the industry in recent years that they say have made railroads riskier. Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s Transportation Trades Department coalition, said Ohio’s derailment should prompt reforms.
“I do think that there’s a moment to look in the mirror as an entire industry and decide what we can do better,” Regan said. “I think the industry by and large has been reluctant to make the types of changes that are needed. They have obviously fought regulations in the past, but I think they are running out of excuses here.”
Jeremy Ferguson, the president of the largest rail union that represents conductors, said railroads’ reliance on longer trains and fewer employees since they started adopting this new operating model in 2017 is jeopardizing public safety.
Ferguson said the pursuit of higher profits has prompted “rail carriers to abandon fundamentally sound practices for haphazard, inherently dangerous, impetuous movements of freight and locomotives across America’s rail system.”
Buttigieg said regulators will be looking at whether they can revive a proposed rule the Trump administration dropped that would have required upgraded, electronically controlled brakes on certain trains filled with flammable liquids that are designated “high-hazardous flammable train.” The rule was dropped after Congress directed regulators to use a strict cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the rule and they decided the potential benefits couldn’t justify the costs.
Buttigieg said he’ll ask Congress to “untie our hands here” on the braking rule, and regulators may look at expanding which trains are covered by the “high-hazardous” rules that were announced in 2015 after several fiery crude oil train derailments — the worst of which killed 47 people and decimated the Canadian town of Lac Mégantic in 2013. He also said Congress should raise the current $225,455 limit on railroad safety fines at least tenfold to create a better deterrent for the multibilliondollar corporations.