How to avoid future East Palestines

The agency investigating last year’s 38-car train derailment and fire near East Palestine, Ohio, has begun teasing out its findings, with the final report coming later in July.

The National Transportation Safety Board found plenty of blame to go around in the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment of a Norfolk Southern freight train. For instance, that famous plume of vinyl chloride that forced the temporary evacuation of about 2,000 nearby residents and triggered warnings of environmental devastation? That didn’t have to happen.

The possibly quite dangerous vinyl chloride in the train’s derailed tank cars “remained in a stabilized environment” and was “unable to undergo polymerization, a potentially dangerous chemical reaction, until those tank cars were deliberately breached with explosives” as part of the on-site responders’ “vent and burn procedure,” the agency’s findings state.

Moreover, “On-scene temperature trends did not indicate that a polymerization reaction was occurring and postaccident examinations confirmed this.”

The NTSB’s findings point one finger at the Ohio firefighters for allowing this and a fatter finger at the railroad company. The local, mostly volunteer firefighters lacked proper training, and the electronic communications were a mess, the agency found.

As for Norfolk Southern, the company is faulted for dribbling out information, giving bad information, and not passing on information that could have kept the derailment from becoming a made-for-TV disaster.

NTSB agency head Jennifer Homendy slammed the railroad in a field presentation in East Palestine on June 25, claiming that Norfolk Southern had tried to undermine her agency during the investigation.

This spooked some investors. The company’s stock fell from $228.16 the day before the presentation to a low of $208.43 the day of.

The Association of American Railroads is taking a cooperative and conciliatory approach toward the agency.

“Railroads implemented substantial, industrywide improvements in response to the NTSB’s initial findings,” said Michael Rush, senior vice president of AAR Safety and Operations, in a statement. “With the final report, railroads will carefully evaluate key learnings and determine next steps to meaningfully advance safety.”

The AAR pledged to work with the agency “to aggressively phase out DOT-111 tank cars,” which are the weaker cars that allowed the initial fires in East Palestine, “from hazmat service,” among other things.

Congressional showdown coming?

Whether the railroads will be so conciliatory to proposed congressional fixes is another matter. Based on the findings and recommendations already spooled out, the final report may give them some fodder to push back.

“The probable cause finding was unsurprising, a failed bearing that overheated,” Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “The NTSB found that more research is needed on the performance of hot bearing wayside detectors and their use in order to determine whether any changes ‘would produce a significant safety improvement.’ This necessitates thorough technical, risk, and cost-benefit analyses before proceeding to a potential regulatory response.”

“In contrast, the stalled Railway Safety Act blindly imposes an arbitrary 15-mile spacing mandate for wayside detectors without requiring any analysis,” Scribner added.

He called on lawmakers to “heed the call of NTSB’s experts that any new regulation be justified by careful analysis of the evidence.”

Other political matters will include whether or not Congress will mandate a minimum crew of two railroad workers per train and how much additional power the body wants to hand to the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, to regulate rail.

Many Republicans argue that the crew was a nonissue in East Palestine and that the crew requirement is simply a handout to railroad unions. Some have signaled distrust of Buttigieg as well.

Those concerns have managed to hang the Railway Safety Act up in the Senate, in which support is short of a filibuster-proof majority. Yet this is an election year when the phrase “do something!” tends to take on new urgency.

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To that end, Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX), who chairs the House Transportation Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials, sent up a trial balloon. Nehls plans to introduce a somewhat union-friendly railroad bill, but not before he reads the final report, he told Politico.

[[The Washington Examiner sent several questions to his office about Nehls’s reaction to the NTSB findings, as well as his legislation, but did not hear back by press time.]