Safety first
Biden should use East Palestine visit to push bipartisan railroad safety reform
Tomorrow, a year after promising to visit East Palestine, President Joe Biden will tour the stricken Ohio town. It is a hopeful sign that its people are not being forgotten — but in the year since the devastating train derailment and controlled explosion of toxic chemicals, something that would help all Americans has been forgotten: groundbreaking, bipartisan freight train safety legislation.
Last year’s derailment was an economic and environmental catastrophe for East Palestine and its surrounding countryside, including Darlington in Pennsylvania — and one whose full consequences continue to unfold. Yet as bad as it was, it could have been much worse.
The train was headed toward Beaver County’s massive Conway Yard on a line that only 20 miles later passes through Pittsburgh’s North Side, Downtown, the Strip District and then through several neighborhoods and the eastern suburbs. There’s no reason other than luck — good for Pittsburgh, bad for East Palestine — the train’s axle didn’t malfunction in or near the Golden Triangle, with exponentially more dire consequences.
The city has thus far been lucky: The worst cargo that hit the streets after the 2018 derailment near Station Square was mouthwash. But every freight train that passes through Allegheny Commons or under the South Side Works is a potential disaster.
After East Palestine, rail company Norfolk Southern, and the entire fright rail industry, came under heavy scrutiny for its business and safety practices. That scrutiny culminated in the bipartisan Railway Safety Act, a landmark piece of legislation co-sponsored by Pennsylvania senators John Fetterman and Bob Casey, alongside Ohio’s Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance. The bill sailed through the Senate Commerce Committee last May,.
But it hasn’t seen the light of day since.
It’s time to pass this essential legislation. Mr. Biden should use his visit to East Palestine not just to comfort its residents and to burnish his political credibility, but to press Congress to bring the Railway Safety Act to his desk.
“Self-policing” is inadequate
This bill is necessary for the simple reason that companies will not adequately police themselves. The public can’t rely on their voluntary safety measures.
Videos capturing a fiery axle miles west of East Palestine have made it clear that a malfunctioning truck — the name for the housing for train cars’ wheels — contributed to the derailment. One of the Railway Safety Act’s provisions would address just this, mandating defect (or “hotbox”) detectors every 15 miles.
Major rail companies have voluntarily installed them only every 25 miles. An earlier detection might have allowed the engineer to bring the train safely to a stop.
Norfolk Southern was the first of the country’s six major rail lines to follow through on a post-East Palestine promise to participate in a federal program that allows engineers and conductors to make anonymous reports about safety lapses. That was good.
At the same time, however, the
company ramped up its lobbying and political spending after the Ohio disaster, as reported by the Post-Gazette’s Jonathan D. Salant. Observers credit this industry-wide effort with slowing the Railway Safety Act, with companies arguing they can police themselves.
East Palestine should have pierced that fantasy. If it didn’t, consider this: Despite enhanced scrutiny from regulatory agencies and the media, rail accidents ticked up more than 10% in the last year. Corporate “self-policing” isn’t working. It never does.
Change the calculus
Here is another example. Incredibly, even for trains whose length is measured in miles (the derailed train was 1.75 miles long), the industry has moved to assigning a single engineer to the entire apparatus. In this system, a roving support staffer drives along nearby roads, available to leap into action in case of trouble.
This is part of the new Precision Scheduled Railroading regime, which has also led to trains up to three miles long. The system sacrifices safety to save on labor costs, and needs to be reined in. The Railway Safety Act would mandate a return to two-person crews on long trains.
The act would also catch up with reality in its new maximum penalties for unsafe practices. Right now, the Federal Railroad Administration can only levy fines of $100,000, even for catastrophes like East Palestine.
Railroads, like other companies, simply bake the fines into their cost projections, then proceed to do business knowing their trains will have a certain number of accidents. The new maximum penalty of $5 million, which could be layered to create even more expensive fines, would make spending more to avoid accidents cost effective. Disasters like the one in East Palestine cannot be seen as mere business expenses.
Safety first
Trains are the most efficient, and the safest, way to transport hazardous materials. But the sheer volume of toxic chemicals that can fit in tanker cars — 30,000 gallons per car, attached to dozens of others of the same size — makes accidents extremely dangerous. With around 110,000 carloads of chemicals and petroleum products originating in Pennsylvania alone every year, even a 99.99% safety record means hundreds of thousands of gallons of spilled hazmat goods.
Safety standards must be written and enforced with the worst case scenario in mind, so that scenario never comes to pass. The railway industry will not do this on its own. The Railway Safety Act also includes provisions specific to hazardous materials, including accelerating the retirement of older, less secure tanker cars and adding to the list of dangerous cargo that triggers enhanced safety rules.
Meanwhile, the rail industry is one of the most profitable in the country: Norfolk Southern reported it absorbed total costs of over $1 billion from the East Palestine disaster — but still made nearly $3 billion in profits last year on its railway operations alone.
Enhancing railroad safety is good politics and good policy. And there’s no better backdrop for Mr. Biden to apply pressure to Congress than East Palestine, Ohio.