Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on how to fix freight rail (Feb. 26):
No community in America wants to be the next East Palestine, Ohio. It will be known for generations as the site of the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern train derailment and the lingering scars of that day. A slew of toxic chemicals burned in a black cloud over the town and ran off into nearby waterways killing thousands of fish and other aquatic life. Families had to evacuate swiftly. Weeks of panic have followed. Government and company officials have struggled to address safety concerns.
The No. 1 priority now is ensuring the well-being of nearby residents. Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw vows to “do the right things.” Republican Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine insists the company will “pay for everything.” That has to include immediate clean-up and long-term health monitoring. The town of Paulsboro, N.J., should serve as a warning of what could lie ahead. A similar derailment there in 2012 also released vinyl chloride. Some residents did not encounter serious health problems until years later.
Equally urgent is stopping anything like this from happening again. The accident was “100% preventable,” National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said. Her agency issued a preliminary report Thursday outlining what is known about what happened: On the 23rd car of the 9,000-foot-long, 149-car train, a bearing connecting a wheel to its axle was worn out and overheated. Norfolk Southern’s warning system went off. The crew tried to stop the train, but couldn’t in time. In other words, Norfolk Southern’s safeguards didn’t fail; the problem was, they were inadequate.
In the past decade, America’s freight rail companies have become zealots for efficiency. Trains are longer, and they don’t stop as often. Unprofitable customers are gone. Scheduling is meticulous. Nearly 60,000 jobs disappeared since 2015. The companies’ stock prices and profitability have surged. Still, derailments are at historic lows. But the East Palestine accident has shown how deficient the industry has been when it comes to investing in upgrades. Many trains still rely on a Civil War-era braking system, and they aren’t using the latest detectors that experts say could have caught the deteriorating bearing months before that fateful day.
Disappointingly — but predictably — the accident has become political fodder, with Democrats blaming former President Donald Trump for loosening safety rules, and Republicans claiming the Biden administration was slow to react. But even amid the finger-pointing, there are some concrete steps that all sides should agree upon and implement quickly. Here are four:
Catch bearing problems early: By the time Norfolk Southern’s alarm system warned that the 23rd car on the 149-car train had a problem, it was too late for even a state-of-the-art braking system to avert a calamity. This was the equivalent of a car’s fuel gauge coming on when it was a block away from running out of gas.
The current system to monitor the health of bearings relies on temperature. Every few miles, a “defect detector” takes the temperature of hundreds of bearings as the train rolls by. The preliminary report spells out the data from this accident: The 23rd car was 38 degrees above ambient temperature initially. Ten miles later, it was 103 degrees above. The next detector — which came 20 miles later — “recorded the suspect bearing’s temperature at 253°F above ambient,” the NTSB report said. That’s when the alarm went off.
The best way to prevent this kind of debacle would be to detect the bearing problems much earlier. One option, rail safety experts say, is to require more detectors so there isn’t a 20-mile gap. A better one, several said, is to install devices that monitor the vibration of bearings, not just temperature.
“This bearing likely started to fail as early as September,” said Constantine Tarawneh, director of the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety in Texas. “Onboard (vibration) sensors are the answer. They tell you when the bearing starts to fail.”
Such monitors can be installed on individual rail cars (the most expensive option) or at various points along the track. They would flag when a bearing is beginning to weaken, giving crews plenty of time to examine and replace faulty parts. Making this upgrade across the rail system should be a top focus of Congress, President Joe Biden and regulators.
Better tank car design: What escalated the severity of the East Palestine derailment was the need to release and burn vinyl chloride from five rail cars on Feb. 6 — three days after the derailment. There was fear that those cars might explode as the temperature inside one tank car continued rising.
It’s still not clear exactly what went wrong, but the preliminary report indicates National Transportation Safety Board investigators are turning much of their attention to tank car design. In particular, they plan to examine the relief valves and other components on the train cars carrying the vinyl chloride.
“The industry needs to improve the way the tank cars are made,” said Magdy Elsibaie, a former director of research at the Federal Railroad Administration. Safety experts say it’s likely that NTSB will recommend stronger tank cars with thicker walls, especially on ones that carry dangerous materials. Some steps in that direction were taken a decade ago after headline-grabbing derailments involving gas, including the tragic 2013 derailment in Quebec that led to an explosion that killed 47 people.
Better brakes: One of the biggest criticisms of America’s seven major freight rail carriers is their collective resistance to upgrading the brake systems on trains. Widely in use now are antiquated air brakes, which work by sending an air signal throughout the train. It takes time for the signal to reach the caboose, which means that cars in the front brake sooner than those in the back. This is especially true as freight trains have gotten longer.
About three decades ago, a much faster electronic braking system came along, in which all parts of the train get the signal at the same time.
In 2015, in the wake of high-profile gas train derailments and explosions, the Obama administration pushed hard for widespread adoption of these more modern systems, known as electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, or ECP. But the Trump administration repealed the mandate in 2017 after heavy lobbying from the freight industry.
It’s costly to retrofit trains. For ECP to have worked, all 149 cars traveling through East Palestine would have had to be using the updated braking system. While those brakes would almost certainly not have prevented the derailment, they might have lessened its severity. The Biden administration should revive the ECP mandate. It would take time to phase in, but an industry that has seen such a surge in profit margins in recent years can afford to make this safety investment.
High-hazard flammable train definition: Ohio’s governor has zeroed in on another key point: Though the train had numerous cars carrying substances that were toxic and highly flammable, it did not technically meet the definition of a “high hazard flammable train.” Which meant, as Dewine said, that Norfolk Southern “was not required to notify anyone here in Ohio about what was in the rail cars coming to our state.”
It’s time to revisit the definition. The reality is most freight trains carry different types of cargo, including hazardous and flammable materials, though they may be in only a few cars on a 150-car train. The federal government requires railroads to carry hazardous materials, in part because freight rail has a much better safety record transporting this cargo than trucks do. But the regulations likely need to be revisited.
Other ideas to improve freight rail safety have come up in the wake of the East Palestine tragedy: Increasing fines for companies that violate safety regulations (the current maximum is $225,455, according to federal rules), shortening the length of trains (150 cars is more than double the average train length from 2008 to 2017) and requiring more crew. All have merit, but experts say they are unlikely to be as impactful as addressing bearing monitors, brakes and car design, along with revising the rules around hazmat trains.
Better technology exists for freight rail. Let’s use it.
The Los Angeles Times on legal protections for internet companies (Feb. 22)
The Supreme Court seemed reluctant this week to narrow legal protections for internet companies so that families of the victims of terrorist attacks could sue social media sites they think bear some responsibility for their loved ones’ deaths. The justices’ caution is appropriate.
Congress should determine whether there are to be changes in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, not the court. That 1996 law protects interactive websites such as Youtube and Twitter from lawsuits stemming from content posted on those sites by third parties, while making it clear that such platforms can exclude objectionable material including content that is “excessively violent.”
On Tuesday, the justices heard oral arguments in a case brought by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, who was killed in Paris in 2015 when Islamic State terrorists fired into a restaurant where she was dining with friends. A lawyer for the family argued that Google, Youtube’s parent company, should be subject to a lawsuit under an anti-terrorism law because the site’s algorithms create recommendations for pro-terrorist videos — for example, by displaying thumbnails of similar videos.
Section 230, a provision that looms large in arguments — some of them misinformed — about government regulation of the internet, serves an important purpose. By protecting websites from lawsuits based on content posted by third parties — while allowing websites to exclude dangerous material — the law has encouraged the growth of companies that rely on user-generated content, to the overall benefit of consumers.
Section 230 also has been good for public-service journalism. A friend-of-thecourt brief filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press notes that the law “protects the free exchange of ideas and information on the online platforms on which journalists rely to identify sources, investigate stories, provide accurate coverage on events of public concern, and engage personally with their audiences.”
This doesn’t mean that Section 230 is sacrosanct and can’t be revisited more than two decades after its enactment. In fact, it’s a good idea given how much the internet has evolved over the past 27 years. But Tuesday’s argument demonstrated that the task of refining the law is best left to the branch of government that created it. We agree, as dysfunctional and partisan as the current Congress may be, it’s still the appropriate venue for updating internet regulation. As Justice Elena Kagan put it, the justices of the Supreme Court are not “the nine greatest experts on the internet.”
It’s possible that another case, argued before the court Wednesday, might make it unnecessary for the justices to rule on the scope of Section 230. In that case, the question is whether Twitter (and other social media companies) may be sued under the federal Anti-terrorism Act for allegedly failing to take meaningful steps to exclude Islamic State material. The anti-terrorism law, which also figures into the Gonzalez case, defines aiding and abetting to include “knowingly providing substantial assistance” to a person who commits an act of international terrorism — a difficult standard. During Tuesday’s argument, Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked whether “we even have to reach the Section 230 question” if the court were to rule for Twitter.
The Supreme Court has a unique role to play in determining whether laws regulating the internet are consistent with the First Amendment. That question looms large in challenges to laws in Florida and Texas that provided for fines and damage claims against Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites if they discriminate against some political points of view. But when it comes to Section 230 immunity, the court should let Congress decide what, if any, changes are to be made.
The Guardian on backing the dissenters to Putin’s war (Feb. 22)
Although official Russian channels still insist on referring to a “special military operation” in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is preparing his country for a protracted war. In a long speech this week, the Russian president portrayed the conflict as an existential geopolitical struggle in which the main adversary and initial aggressor was NATO.
This reheated Cold War rhetoric predates the invasion of Ukraine. It is the central plank of Putin’s self-image as national savior, restoring glory to a people whose homeland — defined by the borders of the old Soviet Union — has been dismembered by the West.
That rhetoric has become increasingly important as a distraction from failures of domestic governance. As the Russian economy has stagnated and living standards fallen, the imperative has been to whip up nationalist fervor via aggression against neighbors, and cast dissenting opinion as treason. Last February’s invasion was both a continuation of that pattern and a vast escalation. Failure to achieve a swift military victory turned an already authoritarian system more paranoid and vindictive, for fear that the supposed Kremlin mastermind would be exposed as a fraud.
A report published Wednesday by OVD-INFO, a leading Russian human rights organization, documents the scale of repression since the war began. Nearly 20,000 people have been detained for attending demonstrations, defacing pro-war posters and breaches of a law against “fake news” and “defaming the army,” by telling the truth about Russian war crimes, or the mere fact of a war, in Ukraine. OVD-INFO records cases of people detained on the basis of things said in private conversations, and for the views of their relatives. This is Soviet-style totalitarian repression, enforced with routine police brutality and unofficial coercion — anonymous threats, assaults, vandalism and summary dismissal from work.
Under these conditions, it is hard to know how much to believe opinion polls showing 80% approval for Putin’s leadership. There is little doubt that he has a solid base of devotees, and that state propaganda channels sustain a personality cult. Too many Russians prefer a diet of hate-filled lies, when the alternative is bitter truth about what is being done in their name. But polling is unreliable when voicing dissent is a criminal act. Independent analysts say there is an important swing constituency — people whose patriotic instinct is to see Russia prevail, but who wish the war had never started and doubt the president’s judgment.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands have fled abroad. A first wave, driven by horror at the invasion, was followed by a larger group dodging conscription. That depletes the numbers available for internal protest. But dissenters in exile also present an opportunity for Ukraine’s allies.
Western support for Kyiv has been focused on military hardware and financial aid. Pressure on the Kremlin is exerted via sanctions of limited efficacy. Little thought is given to what better government in Moscow is possible. Many fear that the answer is none — that the options are chaos or someone worse than Putin. That is a counsel of despair and a self-fulfilling prophecy. To give up hope of democracy ever returning is to condemn an already beleaguered civil society to death by slow suffocation. Human rights activists inside the country and in exile are doing heroic work nurturing the idea that Russia could be better than the place it has become under Putin.
Ukraine will never know lasting security until the truth of Putin’s murderous criminality is widely understood inside Russia itself. Supporting the minority of Russians who dare to speak that truth aloud to their countrymen is both a moral and a strategic imperative for the West.