The DOJ is seeking injunctive relief, cost recovery and civil penalties to “ensure it pays the full cost of the environmental cleanup,” according to the lawsuit.
“As a result of this incident, hazardous materials vented into the air and spilled onto the ground. These substances contaminated local waterways and flowed miles downstream,” the prosecutors wrote in the suit.
The derailment, involving a freight train traveling near a small town along the Pennsylvania-Ohio border, sent 38 cars off the track, spilling hazardous chemicals. Some of the tank cars had been compromised and required a controlled release of toxic vinyl chloride, which was burned off and forced the town’s evacuation.
Federal officials have insisted that the area and its water are safe now, but residents continue to complain of foul smells and worry about long-term health concerns, as well as depressed home values.
Earlier this month, Alan Shaw, the railroad’s CEO, appeared before Congress to apologize for the derailment and promise accountability, telling lawmakers that “we won’t be finished until we make it right.”
The company has come under intense scrutiny from the industry and lawmakers, who have pressed for more stringent safety precautions as they suspect an overheating wheel caused the derailment. Norfolk Southern has since announced a handful of new safety measures, as has the industry as a whole.
Lawmakers from both parties, including a heavy contingent from Ohio and Pennsylvania, are pressing forward with legislation intended to shore up rail safety, but so far have yet to gain broad traction.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Norfolk Southern’s accident rate jumped 80.8 percent between 2013 and 2022, to 3.658 accidents per million miles traveled, from 2.023. Norfolk is one of seven “Class 1″ railroads. Overall, the group had 27 percent more accidents, a rate of 3.067 accidents per million miles traveled, up from a rate of 2.415 in 2013.
The increased accident rate comes as the chemical industry predicts a rise in the amount of chemicals that will be shipped by rail, trucks and other forms of transportation.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday the National Transportation Safety Board announced a special investigation into Norfolk Southern’s “safety culture” after the railroad had its third serious accident in just over a month.
Another Norfolk Southern train derailed Saturday in Springfield, Ohio, and a conductor for the railroad was killed Tuesday by a dump truck as a train was moving through a steel mill in Cleveland, the company said.
The conductor, 46-year-old Louis Shuster, was a father and an Army veteran who had worked at the railroad since 2005, according to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen.
“The NTSB is concerned that several organizational factors may be involved in the accidents, including safety culture,” the safety board said in a news release.
The American Association of Railroads argues that the safety data E&E News reviewed includes minor collisions that happen in train yards and that the number of “main line” incidents like the one in East Palestine has been dropping.
“If you were going to look at the main line accidents … 2022 was the lowest year in history overall,” Mike Rush, the trade group’s senior vice president of operations and safety, said in an interview.
Norfolk Southern, whose CEO is due to testify in a Senate hearing Thursday, declined to comment on the federal safety data but said in a prepared statement that the company is committed to safety.
“We diligently monitor our trains and infrastructure to identify potential hazards, and we invest approximately a billion annually into maintaining our infrastructure every year,” the statement said.
About 19 percent of U.S. chemical output travels by rail, according to AAR. The bulk — 57 percent — moves by truck, and the remainder by ships, barges and pipelines.
Trucks by far have the highest incident rate.
Of all transportation incidents involving hazardous materials in 2022, trucks were responsible for nearly 94 percent, according to Bureau of Transportation statistics. Trains were responsible for a little more than 1 percent.
Truck accidents have been rising, along with other road accidents, for a variety of reasons, including speeding and distracted driving, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
“The road safety is nowhere near as good as rail safety,” said Nicholas Little, the director of railway education at Michigan State University. “There’s less chance of a vehicle-to-vehicle accident … and, also, there’s less habitation around the tracks, because it’s not just freeways that the trucks will be going on, they’d be going on local roads, as well.”
But not every chemical is suitable for rail transportation.
How chemicals are transported usually depends on the quantity needed and location of its final destination, Little said. And when rail accidents do happen, the potential for greater environmental damage is larger because trains can carry much bigger quantities of chemicals than trucks, he said.
“Even the biggest highway truck only carries a quarter of the volume that a railcar can carry,” Little said.
The FRA data includes derailments, collisions between trains and other on-rail problems. The numbers cover only the first 11 months of 2022.
Looking strictly at on-rail accidents, three of the freight railroads — Norfolk Southern, CSX Corp. and Union Pacific Corp. — had higher rates over the last 10 years.
Norfolk Southern had one of the lowest accident rates in 2013 and now has the second highest behind Union Pacific, which averaged 4.359 collisions per million miles last year.
The accident rate didn’t appear correlated to the amount of freight on Norfolk Southern’s system. The company’s revenue ton mileage, a metric based on the revenue from one ton of freight shipped over one mile, rose from 2013 to 2018, before falling during the pandemic and bouncing back in the last two years, according to securities filings. Overall, the company had about an 8 percent drop in revenue ton miles over the last decade.
The accident rates at Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern are far lower than they were in the 1970s and ‘80s. But they also show a stark contrast to the other four Class 1 railroads — BNSF, Canadian National, Kansas City Southern and Canadian Pacific — where accident rates fell between 5 percent and 65 percent over the last decade.
Political oversight
To date, the bulk of the congressional investigations and other political fallout have focused on the Transportation Department and Environmental Protection Agency, not on the rise in accident rates across the industry.
Politicians from both parties have called for stricter safety standards, although it’s unclear if the proposals would have prevented the Ohio wreck.
The 149-car train derailed shortly before 9 p.m. on Feb. 3 just outside East Palestine, a town of about 4,700 that sits near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. An automated system detected an overheated wheel bearing on one of the cars, which triggered an alarm.
The crew was trying to stop the train when a section of it derailed. Thirty-eight cars left the tracks and several of them caught fire.
Some of the cars contained hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride and other chemicals. Vinyl chloride, which is used to make common types of plastic, is a carcinogen that creates poisonous gases when it burns, and it also poses an explosion risk.
Three days after the train derailed, local and state officials decided to release the vinyl chloride into a trench and conduct a controlled burn, rather than risk a larger explosion. No one was killed or seriously injured, but the fire sent up a plume of black smoke that left residents complaining about lung irritation and foul odors.
EPA has tested air quality in more than 500 homes, while state officials test the local water system; they have found no hazardous chemical levels. Independent tests by Texas A&M University found high levels of chemicals in the air, which could lead to health problems if the levels persist.
Norfolk Southern announced a series of safety improvements Monday, including assessing how frequently its hot bearing detectors are spaced and testing a new type of hot bearing detector and a new type of acoustic sensor. The company is also developing new technology to search for track defects and is working with the rest of the rail industry on setting standards for when hot bearing detectors should trigger an alarm.
Norfolk Southern and the other six major railroads announced last week that they’re joining a program that allows employees to confidentially report close calls among trains without fear of retaliation.
Safety advocates have used the wreck to call for tighter regulations on rails, calls that have been echoed by several officeholders and by Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Since the accident, DOT has announced “targeted track inspections” for routes known to carry hazardous materials and issued a safety advisory for certain aluminum tank car covers, a part that is now known to have melted during the Ohio crash.
Republicans on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee have announced hearings into Buttigieg’s handling of the wreck, including when he knew about the derailment. Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia asked Buttigieg for information about the adoption of a more modern braking system, known as electronically controlled pneumatic brakes.
The system allows engineers to activate the brakes simultaneously on every car in a train, which could help trains stop more quickly and smoothly. The conventional air brakes on most trains use an air hose that connects the locomotive to the freight cars, so it transmits the braking signal more slowly than an electronic signal.
Republican Sens. J.D. Vance of Ohio and Marco Rubio of Florida sent a letter to Buttigieg asking about both the length of the train and the number of crew members on board. Last week, the two senators were part of a bipartisan group that introduced a railroad safety bill.
Long trains, short crews
The Federal Railroad Administration defines a train with 150 or more cars as “very long” — one more than the train that derailed in East Palestine.
A 2019 report by the Government Accountability Office said the number of long trains on the rails was increasing and said crew training “is particularly important for their safe operation.”
The FRA is currently writing rules that would require two-person crews on more freight trains. The industry has resisted the idea, saying that personnel decisions should be made by the companies and arguing that automation can safely reduce the number of crew members.
Automated trains have been operated safely in other countries, including in Australia, where they’re used to transport long trains of iron ore, said Allan Zarembski, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware who specializes in railroads.
All the proposed solutions come with benefits and drawbacks, Zarembski said. Using electronically controlled brakes would improve a train’s stopping power, but it costs more than conventional air brakes. And the system would have to be widely adopted because railroads often haul carloads of hazardous materials mixed with other freights cars.
Electronically controlled braking systems “are at the top of the list” for suggested safety improvements on freight trains, said Little, of Michigan State University. “But when you’re dealing with over 1.6 million rail cars that are in operation, it’s a very, very big task.”
Michael Gorman, a rail consultant and faculty at University of Dayton’s school of business administration, echoed industry concerns, warning of “unintended consequences of poorly thought-out legislation.”
Expensive rail safety improvements would create a higher cost of shipping and could turn businesses away from trains and toward the more accident-prone trucks, Gorman said.
“Right now, we’re in reaction mode, and overreaction is likely to be the results,” Gorman said.
In a 2015 report on rail safety that was written to help the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection cope with an influx of trains carrying crude oil, Zarembski made a series of recommendations.
Some of the steps are mundane, including slower speeds through populated area, while others are high-tech, such as more frequent use of automated track inspections. None of them were new ideas at the time, Zarembski said.
“I haven’t seen anything revolutionary coming down the pike … that’s being ignored by the railroad industry that’s an obvious no-brainer,” he said.
“I think the process is going to continue to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The top Democrat and Republican on the committee — Chair Tom Carper (D-Del.) and ranking member Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) — said Wednesday that they want to hear more about what’s being done to help East Palestine. Carper said that he expects “straight answers” and “accountability.” And Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he expects Shaw to “own up to his company’s spotty safety culture, particularly the increasingly apparent pattern of negligence”
Shaw also plans to urge an “industry-wide comprehensive approach, including railcar owners, car manufacturers, leasing companies, equipment makers, and the railroad companies” — suggesting regulators should cast a net much wider than his own company, or even his own industry. He’ll specifically call for changes to certain types of railcars, which the railroads do not directly own.
Shaw will also highlight Norfolk’s new focus on moving away from “efficiency” and profits, and toward something he will call “a more balanced approach to service, productivity, and growth”— which he called a “significant departure from the railroad industry’s recent past.” (These moves were first announced on a December earnings call, where he also assured investors that “other important financial measures, such as earnings per share, Return on Invested Capital, and revenue” would still be paramount.)
Capito made it clear that she’ll also focus on the adequacy of the Environmental Protection Agency’s response to the environmental disaster that the derailment caused. “Personally, I think the EPA failed on risk communication,” she said Wednesday. “There was confusion, there was delayed data and a sense that nobody really cared.”
The committee will also take testimony from Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown (D) and J.D. Vance (R) as well as Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey, who are part of the group of lawmakers pressing forward with a bipartisan rail safety bill.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
NTSB urged the company to “take immediate action today to review and assess its safety practices, with the input of employees and others, and implement necessary changes to improve safety”
Norfolk Southern announced several safety measures on Monday, but most were focused on addressing one of the specific problems thought to have caused the Feb. 3 derailment, primarily involving an overheating wheel and the adequacy of detection technology.
Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw said in a statement that he went to Cleveland as soon as he heard the news about the death of the conductor. He said he offered his condolences to the family as well as the promise of “support for anything they need.”
He also said he called together every member of the management team Tuesday afternoon “to emphasize the urgency of finding new solutions” and that on Wednesday, the company will take time out of the workday to discuss safety with “every employee across our network.”
“Moving forward, we are going to rebuild our safety culture from the ground up,” he said. “We are going to invest more in safety. This is not who we are, it is not acceptable, and it will not continue.”
Shaw is scheduled to testify Thursday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee — his first time facing lawmakers following the East Palestine derailment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The plan gives Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw something to present to senators when he appears before the Senate EPW Committee Thursday — but it’s not likely to satisfy Democrats on the panel.
Most of the six-point plan to be announced Monday involves improving the equipment Norfolk Southern uses along tracks to help sense when a train’s wheels are overheating, including boosting the number of detectors and reviewing how far apart they’re spaced. The railroad also says it wants to seek industry consensus on standards for this equipment, which now are determined by individual companies. And it says it wants to accelerate research on a new automated inspection technology.
In a statement accompanying the plan, Shaw said the preliminary findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency probing the disaster, made it clear that “a comprehensive industry effort” was needed to improve safety and that Norfolk Southern is “not waiting to take action.”
But that list of actions falls far short of the changes the Biden administration is seeking — such as upgrading to a faster braking system, providing more notification to communities about hazardous materials traveling through their areas and paying workers sick leave.
The Department of Transportation has said it also doesn’t just want railroads to upgrade their automated track inspection equipment. It also wants them to stop seeking to cut back on human inspections.
The Biden administration has asked Congress to make a series of additional changes as well, including increasing the current $225,000 cap on fines for safety violations.
Raising the cap is one of the provisions included in a bill introduced last week by a bipartisan group of senators, including the delegations from Ohio and Pennsylvania where the impacts of the derailment were felt. That bill would also subject more trains that carry hazardous materials to safety regulations designed to protect communities, and would require at least two crew members on board each train — changes the railroads have fought hard to prevent.
The bill also would mandate that railroads have detectors for overheating wheels every 10 miles of track — not every 15, as included in Norfolk Southern’s action plan.
Norfolk Southern hasn’t specifically discussed the bill or DOT’s requests beyond saying that the “rail industry needs to learn as much as we can from East Palestine,” as the company said in a statement to POLITICO.
“Norfolk Southern has committed to working with industry to develop practices and technologies that could help prevent an incident like this in the future,” the statement read. “This incident requires a broad industry response, and we will also work with the owners of the rail cars on the integrity and safety of the equipment we use.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Brown said he had spoken with state and local officials, including Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, who were all “pretty satisfied” with Norfolk Southern’s response to the Saturday crash. But Brown still wants more information about the latest crash, as well as the fiery derailment last month that caused residents of East Palestine to have to evacuate. Residents of that community have continued to express fears about threats to their health.
“People are still concerned. My couple trips in the last two weeks I’ve made to East Palestine, and the railroad’s still not answering all the questions,” Brown said Sunday.
Last week, Brown sponsored bipartisan legislation with newly elected Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to tighten safety requirements on trains and increase fines on railroad companies. Brown said the chances that legislation will pass the Senate “are good,” but he’s unsure how the House will vote.
“I make no predictions in the House,” Brown said, adding later: “But you’d think a disaster that happened in East Palestine would have gotten their attention.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
A seal pup has been rescued after it was spotted wandering past an arcade and kebab shop in Norfolk.
Marine and Wildlife Rescue was called to the scene at 11pm on Friday after the organisation was sent pictures of the grey seal pup outside Istanbul Delight kebab shop in Hemsby, hundreds of metres inland.
“We spoke to a couple of people that were milling around there and thought it was a wind-up, they were like: ‘No, you won’t find a seal around here mate,,” Dan Goldsmith, chair of the Great Yarmouth-based rescue centre, said.
“After searching the area for some time, we eventually found the seal shuffling along on a path outside an amusement arcade called the Mirage.
“The pup must have just been looking for some shelter, but got disoriented and kept heading inland.”
Goldsmith, 38, said the juvenile marine mammal was in good health and he and a colleague loaded it on to a stretcher to carry it back to the beach.
The seal pup loaded on to a stretcher by the rescue team, ready to be returned to the beach. Photograph: Dan Goldsmith/Marine and Wildlife Rescue
He added that such sightings of seals inland are becoming more common as a result of surging populations in the UK in recent years.
“This was more the unusual end of what we do, but this is becoming more of a common occurrence … we responded to one the day before funnily enough, it was out on a road quite a few miles inland,” Goldsmith said.
“I remember 20 years ago we didn’t get hardly any calls about seals, maybe two a week … I get probably at peak times 15-20 calls for different seals a day at the minute.”
Grey seal numbers in the UK dropped as low as 500 in the early 20th century, but there are now estimated to be 120,000 – and it is this population boom, coupled with the recent pupping season, that Goldsmith said is behind the rise in sightings.
Goldsmith, from Gorleston-on-Sea, warned those spotting seal pups inland not to approach them and to call for expert help.
“We do get people that mean really well, that want to help and they’ve done things in the past but have been injured,” he said.
“Call a rescue organisation like us to assess because we’re used to working with them.
“They’re very quick and responsive … and they can look very docile and friendly, but they’re not, they are really quite hostile things.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
