Investigators are working to determine a cause, and irresponsible speculation from commentators and politicians should cease.
Evidence so far suggests a freak accident, but investigators are working to determine a cause, and irresponsible speculation from commentators and politicians should cease.
O n February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying a variety of goods derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. Thirty-eight cars came off the tracks, and eleven of them contained hazardous materials. A fire broke out, which created the risk of a chemical explosion. To prevent an explosion, the chemicals were vented and burned. Norfolk Southern crews have performed similar operations safely before, which involve draining the liquid chemicals from the cars into a trench and burning them. The resulting fire created plumes of smoke that filled the sky.
No one was killed or injured by the accident. Residents were ordered evacuated on February 5 by Governor Mike DeWine to allow the controlled burn to take place and were told it was safe to return on February 9. “Since the fire went out on February 8, EPA air monitoring has not detected any levels of health concern in the community that are attributed to the train derailment,” EPA regional administrator Debra Shore said on February 14. “The spill did flow to the Ohio River, but the Ohio River is very large and it’s a water body that’s able to dilute the pollutants pretty quickly,” said Ohio EPA chief Tiffani Kavalec. “We would not envision anything from this point forward impacting any of the future drinking supplies.”
Railroad service was restored on February 7. Norfolk Southern has set up an assistance center at a nearby church. It has distributed over $1 million to over 700 families to help pay for lodging and supplies. It has also donated $220,000 to the East Palestine Fire Department and $25,000 to the Ohio Red Cross, and is working with authorities to conduct environmental monitoring.
East Palestine (pronounced “Pal-a-steen”) is near the border with Pennsylvania, south of Youngstown and about midway between Pittsburgh and Akron. Norfolk Southern’s Fort Wayne Line, which connects Pittsburgh and Chicago, runs through East Palestine. The train that derailed was coming from Illinois and on its way to Conway Yard in Pennsylvania, one of the largest rail yards in the country.
The section of the line through East Palestine has safety devices called “hotbox detectors.” On average, there is one hotbox detector every 25 miles on Class I freight railroads. One cause of derailments is overheating wheels and axles, and they can burn off in as little as one to three minutes.
Hotbox detectors are wayside devices that use infrared sensors to measure the temperature of wheelsets. If the temperature exceeds safety bounds, the hotbox detector sends a signal to the cab of the locomotive. The engineer would then stop the train to inspect the wheelset. “Train accident rates caused by axle and bearing-related factors have dropped 81 percent since 1980 and 59 percent since 1990 due to the use of [hotbox] detectors,” the Federal Railroad Administration said in 2019.
Despite the fact that the Fort Wayne Line had these safety devices, the accident nonetheless occurred, and it was exactly the type of accident that hotbox detectors are supposed to help prevent. We don’t yet know the cause of the accident, and the National Transportation Safety Board is investigating. It is expected to release a preliminary report in about a month. It is examining the wheelset that initiated the derailment and, once they are decontaminated, the tank cars that carried the chemicals. The evidence we have so far indicates that the accident may have occurred because of extremely bad luck.
William Vantuono, editor in chief of trade publication Railway Age, wrote:
Railway Age has learned that the derailment probably occurred due to a combination of factors and unfortunate timing. The train passed a wayside hotbox detector that reported zero defects. Shortly after that, a wheel bearing started to overheat, which in turn caused an axle to severely overheat as the bearing got hotter. This eventually resulted in an axle failure that, unfortunately, occurred within a few moments after the train had passed by a second hotbox detector that flagged the problem, alerting the crew. The engineer immediately applied the brakes, but the axle had already failed, and the train derailed.
If true, that would mean that the engineer did exactly what he was supposed to do in response to that signal. Investigators are examining the hotbox detectors to see whether they were faulty. No system will ever be 100 percent fail-proof, and the evidence we have so far suggests a freak accident.
Commenting on the response to the accident, Vantuono wrote, “Misinformation, driven by uninformed reporting by local and national media and stoked by various groups who appear to be leveraging the derailment and its aftermath to support their own agendas, has been spreading faster than the fire that resulted from it.”
That includes Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who speculated that the official response to the incident was motivated by the fact that residents of East Palestine are white and mostly voted for Donald Trump in 2020. It also includes comedian Jon Stewart, who said it “looks like Chernobyl.”
The problem with those accounts is that a similar incident happened in Paulsboro, N.J., in 2012. A train derailed while crossing a bridge over Mantua Creek (a tributary to the Delaware River), and over 20,000 gallons of vinyl chloride spilled into the water. The volume of chemicals was less than in East Palestine, but it’s the same substance and a similar risk of environmental damage.
Authorities responded in much the same way, with local, state, and federal officials involved, establishing an evacuation zone and ordering schools closed. Unlike East Palestine, Paulsboro was a Democratic stronghold, having voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a margin of 79 percent to 20 percent in 2012. Officials had removed all traces of vinyl chloride from the derailed cars just over one week after the accident, and the chemical had stopped being detected in the air a few days before that. Paulsboro’s population today is about the same as it was in 2012.
Politicians have also chimed in. Senators J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) and Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) wrote a letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg demanding answers on the derailment. Representative Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) tweeted that the derailment was “the result of years of deregulation and anti-labor practices.”
Vance and Rubio’s letter notes the length of the train, 150 cars, and says that the train had three crew members onboard. “It is not unreasonable to ask whether a crew of two rail workers, plus one trainee, is able to effectively monitor 150 cars,” they write. But having three crew members onboard means the train had one more crew member than normal.
Two-man crews are the industry standard (and technological advances have made the second crewman less important than in the past). All three crewmen on this train would have been sitting in the cab of the locomotive, looking at the same instruments and gauges; it’s not as though they are monitoring individual cars throughout the train. Countless trains 150 cars or longer are safely operated by two-man crews every single day across the country.
The four questions Vance and Rubio pose to Buttigieg all refer to precision-scheduled railroading (PSR), which is an industry practice that railroads have adopted in recent years to improve productivity and reduce costs. Unions have opposed PSR because it reduces the number of employees necessary to operate a railroad. They have also tried to make PSR into a safety concern, which is the line of questioning that Vance and Rubio have taken as well, seeking to find whether the blame for the East Palestine wreck rests on PSR.
PSR was first implemented by Canadian National in 1998, and by 2019, six of the seven Class I railroads reported using it (BNSF is the exception). While accidents have been rare over that whole period, freight trains are safer today than they were 20 years ago. That’s partly due to the adoption of safety technology such as positive train control, which, after gradual adoption, has been in operation on every major freight line in the U.S. since 2020.
The Government Accountability Office has already studied PSR and found in a report released in December that the evidence of PSR’s effect on safety is inconclusive. “FRA officials stated that while data do not currently show a decrease in safety due to PSR-associated operational changes, these changes may increase risk, and FRA is engaged in several efforts to monitor and address these potential risks,” the report says.
Khanna’s concerns, as Reason Foundation transportation scholar Marc Scribner pointed out, are misplaced. Freight rail underwent economic deregulation, not safety deregulation. Those tasks are carried out by entirely separate government agencies (economic regulation is by the Surface Transportation Board, and safety regulation is by the FRA). Economic deregulation played a role in improving safety, by making freight railroads more financially viable so they could invest in infrastructure improvements. Since 1980, when the Staggers Act deregulated freight rail, train accident rates have declined by 76 percent, and employee injury rates have declined by 85 percent.
Freight trains in the U.S. today are extremely safe, despite the accident in East Palestine. Fortunately, no one was killed or injured in the accident, despite the horrible images and massive fire that resulted from the controlled burn. For the sake of everyone involved, commentators and politicians should let investigators do their work and avoid irresponsible speculation on the cause of the accident or the motives of the local, state, and federal officials who responded to it.