JD Vance visits East Palestine again, promises to bring MAGA common sense to clean-up Biden’s failures
Vice President JD Vance just made his fifth trip to East Palestine, Ohio on the second anniversary of the derailment disaster involving a hazardous freight train run by Norfolk Southern. There has been extensive site remediation, a settlement of two lawsuits, and the final report by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Unfortunately, the residents of East Palestine are unsatisfied with the federal government’s response, but Vance has promised to apply some MAGA common sense to the issue.
To present an alternate perspective on the accident, I offer this summary.
The NTSB agrees that the proximate cause of the accident was the failure of an overheated wheel bearing on a hopper car filled with plastic pellets. That is the first “slice of cheese” in the cheese model so favored by the NTSB. If the sequence of events does not get through that hole in the safety net, the accident does not happen. To prevent similar accidents in the future, the goal should be to “keep the train on the tracks”, as the NTSB’s own investigator told the Board during its meeting to approve its final report.
A person who lives near a Class I freight railroad, such as Norfolk Southern, is likely to be intensely interested in preventing future derailments (I live within 1.5 miles of three Class I freight railroads). The first place to look would be the maintenance records and ownership of the specific hopper car involved. Here is what the NTSB shows on its website verbatim:
As a result of this investigation, the NTSB issued new safety recommendations to the Secretary of Transportation, FRA, PHMSA, the state of Ohio, the Association of American Railroads, Columbiana County Emergency Management Agency, the American Chlorine Institute, Norfolk Southern Railway, the International Association of Fire Chiefs, the International Association of Fire Fighters, the American Chemistry Council, Oxy Vinyls, LP and the National Volunteer Fire Council. The recommendations address safety issues including:
- Failure of wayside monitoring systems to diagnose a hot wheel bearing in time for mitigation to prevent a derailment.
- Inadequate emergency response training for volunteer first responders.
- Hazardous materials placards that burned away, preventing emergency responders from immediately identifying hazards.
- A lack of accurate, timely and comprehensive information passed to local incident commanders and state officials.
- The continued use of DOT-111 tank cars in hazmat service.
Note that only one of their “recommendations” addresses prevention directly. And there is no recommendation to the hopper car’s owner.
A person with common sense might think, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” But none of the recommendations were sent to the party responsible for the maintenance of the hopper car! It was not Norfolk Southern.
I would recommend that both VP Vance and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin begin by reading NS’s submission to the NTSB. On pages 95–97 are the details about NS’s inspection of the hopper car at Madison, Illinois, in compliance with 49 CFR § 215 by a qualified union inspector (a conductor) in their employ. This inspection took place with the transfer of custody of the hopper car from the Terminal Railroad Association of St. Louis (“TRRA”) to NS. Note that the NTSB report starts in Madison, Illinois and ignores the prior movements from the shipping point near Houston, Texas. Evidently, the shipper was the manufacturer of the plastic pellets, and they needed to get their product to a customer in Pennsylvania, or beyond—as we know, the car only made it to the state line.
The NTSB puts a lot of focus on the wayside detectors without noting that these four different railroads all were required by federal regulations to inspect the cars as they took custody, and by the American Association of Railroads (AAR) requirements to have wayside detectors at a maximum spacing of forty miles all the way from Houston to East Palestine. Given that as the crow flies the distance from Houston to the derailment is about 1,200 miles, that means it passed over 30 wayside detectors owned and operated by four separate common carrier railroads under federal regulation.
The obvious conclusion is that the owners and lessees of freight cars must do better in maintaining their rolling stock. The first thing VP Vance ought to do is figure out who owned the hopper car. (Hint: ask GATX.)
A quick perusal of the court documents reveals that “Car 23 was a hopper car owned by General American and/or GATX, which was carrying polyethylene (plastic) pellets” (page 2 of 55). A person with common sense would know that steel hopper cars don’t burn, but polyethylene pellets do, despite not being “Hazardous Materials”. They are “combustible” if not flammable. The practical reality is that if one had removed all the tank cars containing flammable liquids and gases the night of Feb. 3, 2023, there still would have been a fire emitting noxious gases following the derailment. The vinyl chloride issue arose days later with a flood of NTSB and federal regulator personnel present to advise the incident commanders, the East Palestine volunteer fire department’s captain and, until his arrival, his deputy.
They are certain to know that plastics in the home are a common cause of smoke inhalation injury to those on scene. The residents of East Palestine were exposed to smoke from the burning polyethylene pellets and other leaked chemicals on Feb. 3, not vinyl chloride smoke—that hazard came days later.
There is a suggestion that the hopper car was exposed to a flood caused by a hurricane that hit Houston and the floodwaters washed out much of the lubricating oil in the roller bearing. A simple Notice to Rail Shippers that they ought to refurbish any wheel bearings that have been submerged in floodwaters could have surprising results! The shipper would get paid for its product after safely arriving at their customer’s facility.
Image: Free image, Pixabay license.