Ohio senator blasts Trump’s rail safety cuts after derailment
WASHINGTON, D.C.— Federal law should require railroads to tell states when hazardous chemicals of the sort that escaped into the environment after this month’s East Palestine, Ohio, derailment are passing through, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown said Wednesday.
Brown also blamed the administration of former President Donald Trump for weakening safety standards set by his predecessor, Barack Obama, that might have prevented the accident.
“The Trump administration was mostly all about weakening rules and regulations on behalf of their corporate sponsors and we think that’s what happened here,” the Ohio Democrat told reporters. “Obama had strengthened them. Trump had weakened them.”
The Norfolk Southern train derailed Feb. 3, spilling toxic chemicals such as vinyl chloride, Butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and ethylene glycol monobutyl either. Federal and state officials, fearing the vinyl chloride tanks would explode, set them afire, creating a massive plume of thick black smoke. Other chemicals seeped into local streams, killing fish and traveling down into the Ohio River.
Ohio Gov. Mike Dewine said Tuesday that under federal law the railroad operator wasn’t required to alert state officials about what the cars were carrying and called on Congress to make changes. Brown said he agreed with the Republican governor’s call for changes to federal law.
“The most important thing now is to make sure that Norfolk Southern lives up to everything it said it would,” Brown continued. “That means cleaning the soil and the water in the air. It means fixing the damage that’s done to these homes. It means paying people who had to flee.”
Brown said he’s discussed what the government needs to do to ensure such accidents don’t happen again with Dewine and the National Transportation Safety Board, as well as local mayors and fire officials. He said
he would visit the site in the next few days to learn more.
“I’ve been told that some of the rail safety issues, some of the inspections, have not taken place the way they did seven or eight or 10 years ago, and it’s up to it’s up to (President Joe) Biden to fix those, it’s up to the National Transportation Safety Board to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said Brown, who also questioned whether Norfolk Southern invested enough in safety as it laid off employees and bought back stock.
While newly-elected U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, R-ohio, has criticized U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for focusing “more on whether we have too many white men in construction jobs” than he is on ensuring the nation’s transportation infrastructure is viable, Brown said Buttigieg has been “trying to fix some of the things that the Trump administration did to weaken rail safety.”
“I don’t know if they’ve been fast enough, aggressive enough,” said Brown. “Biden comes into office and he needs to look at a whole panoply of of consumer protections, environmental protections, worker protections, safety protections that the country had a general, mostly, consensus on, and Trump had come in at the behest of his big contributors and his allies and weakened environmental laws and weakened worker safety laws and weakened worker protections generally and weakened consumer protections. This whole incident says, to me, how vigilant we need to be with presidents when they can come into power and just pass a bunch of rules and nobody’s paying attention.”
Justin Mikulka, a research fellow at the New Consensus think tank who authored a book called “Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk, “said the Trumpera Department of Transportation announced in 2017 that it would repeal a critical safety regulation that would have required trains that carry oil to have modern electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes by 2021.
Mikulka has also criticized Trump’s DOT for withdrawing another Obama-era rail safety recommendation that would have required two-person crews on freight trains. He said supporters of that rule argued that two-person crews were safer because the job of operating a train was too demanding for one person, new technologies have made the job more complex, and fatigue becomes a more serious issue with only one crew member.
“ECP brakes could have possibly prevented the (Ohio) derailment but also would have reduced the forces and tank car damage in the derailment if it still occurred,” Mikulka said in an email. “An additional factor is that there is no regulation on train length, and longer trains are more likely to derail. The 2013 Lac-megantic oil train disaster that killed 47 people was called a corporate crime scene. The Ohio disaster is another corporate crime scene where profits were prioritized over public safety.”
Vance on Wednesday joined U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, in a letter asking Buttigieg how the U.S.
Department of Transportation oversees the nation’s freight train system “and more generally, how it balances building a safe, resilient rail industry across our country in relation to building a hyper-efficient one with minimal direct human input.” The pair questioned whether a crew of two rail workers plus one trainee can effectively monitor 150 rail cars.
“Current and former rail workers, industry observers and reform advocates have pointed to precision-scheduled railroading (PSR), by which rail companies such as Norfolk Southern increase efficiency and drive down costs by moving more freight with fewer workers, as a potential contributor to the accident,” their letter said.” We have voiced concerns with PSR, as well as with this administration’s prioritizing of efficiency over resilience in its national infrastructure and transportation systems.”
Vance sent a separate letter on Wednesday asking Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw to expand the company’s existing financial reimbursement area to include all residents of East Palestine, not merely those within the 1-mile area of the evacuation perimeter.
Vance joined with Brown and both of Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators on a letter to EPA Administrator Michael Regan expressing their concerns about the release of hazardous materials after the derailment. It urges EPA to hold Norfolk Southern accountable and ensure the proper resources are reaching East Palestine.
The same group sent a letter to National
Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer L. Homendy to raise concerns about the weakness of current requirements regarding “high-hazard flammable trains,” axle and railcar inspections, electronic controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, and railroad practices regarding maintenance and staffing.
“Are U.S. railroads and shippers investing sufficiently in maintaining the railcars and tracks used by trains that transport hazardous materials?” the letter asked. “It has been reported that the seven Class I railroads in the U.S. spent more than $114 billion on stock buybacks and cash distributions and paid more than $77 billion in dividends between 2010 and 2021, amounts that significantly exceed the $138 billion spent on their infrastructure during that period.”
A statement from U.S. Rep. Bill Johnson, a Marietta Republican whose congressional district includes East Palestine, said he’s currently focused on making sure the residents of East Palestine are safe, secure, get the help they need, and have their questions answered.
“The ongoing cleanup efforts must be completed, and the ongoing air and water testing must continue,” said Johnson. “Right now, we need to let the investigators with the NTSB do their job and determine the cause of this crash. Once their investigation is complete, Congress and the administration must take a close look at the findings to determine what policies to modify and/or implement to better prevent anything like this from happening again.”