Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the train, but you can't "amortize" failure: any failed bearing would lead to a catastrophic error?
To my mind this means that things like ECP (which have been removed) might've fixed the issue, but the fundamental problem is the train length, which has been discussed (in all of its negatives) here, before.
In that sense, the train company is directly at fault: they are engaging in unsafe practices in order to remain profitable, and the practices are fundamentally not safe-able (to make up a word).
The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)
They burned off the vinyl chloride because the combustion products are relatively benign, it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks, vinyl chloride is quite volatile and acute exposure to high concentrations of vinyl chloride vapor is dangerous, and they wanted to get everyone back in their homes (and yes, get the railroad back up and running) as quickly as safely permissible.
> fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again
I was under the impression that there was risk of a Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion which would have been even more catastrophic than the "controlled" release and burn off.
> There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment [...]
I think that's a problem worth discussing as well. Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump, then the rail companies spent billions in stock buybacks and tried to tighten the screws on their labour force even further for cost-cutting reasons.
There are a lot of pathological behaviours that have gone into "thousands of derailments per year" that are worth discussing, and I'd say those are a lot more important than just this one derailment.
We know the bearing was on fire for 20+ miles before it derailed, and it passed through at least one hotbox detector in that condition without being detected. On average, such detectors are placed every 10-20 miles. The one in East Palestine spotted the problem but it was too late to prevent the derailment.
Maybe a start would be to adjust regulation such that detectors need to be placed with higher frequency. ECP is a nice idea, but that's a last ditch effort and not a generalized solution.
Do we know it was without being detected? I got the impression somewhere that it was ignored because they frequently are for a while due to lack of sidings of adequate length to stop in.
The hotbox detector could have seen the bearing overheating and been ignored, or have malfunctioned or just not been sensitive enough to detect the problem when the train passed. It’s old tech that should have caught this in most cases. The even older tech solution would be adding a caboose on trains carrying hazardous materials. Maybe you don’t need a caboose today but someone watching cameras in a cube could do the same thing.
ECP does not seem like a solution, and addressing how hazardous chemicals are moved is something that needs to be done.
They shipped the wheelset to DC for inspection but we haven't seen the report from that inspection yet. They are also going to inspect the actual site, but are waiting until the site is decontaminated.
So we might get a good ruling on the bearing in the coming weeks but based on other reports that I have read (and I quite enjoy the industrial disaster genre of podcast/video) it will probably be a year or two before the full report is complete.
Right. It's all completely harmless and there's no risk to any residents, but the site is also too contaminated for investigators to make even a very brief visit. Makes sense to me.
From what I read the NTSB has not started its investigation because their are waiting for the train cars to finish being cleaned up. After that they will begin and we'll get some preliminary findings and eventually final report
I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?
I think part of the problem is that a really thorough investigation from the NTSB (https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...) will by definition not be quick. We'll definitely get answers, but it will take time. As a result, we have an information gap which is quickly filled with tons of speculation.
I think it's fair to be concerned until we know that the impact was somehow limited. Toxic fumes and spills are incredibly dangerous. Not just deadly in the short term, they can cause severe long-term health problems. It's not like the spillage/smoke just simply disappears, so it's good to be concerned about them until there's proof the impact is minor.
Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?
I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.
But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
It's being pretty actively done by politicians on one side. I've seen lots trying to somehow blame Biden for it for example even though it's completely irrelevant.
This is a similar discrepancy between the technical meaning of language as used in statistics, and the popular usage of language as the layperson understands it when they read it in the news as happens with the term "mass shooting".
When a layperson hears "train derailment" they think of what happened in Ohio. When a layperson hears "mass shooting" they think of what happened at Uvalde.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a train derailment is ANY time a train has a wheel that goes off of the track which is not part of a planned maintenance. These are rarely catastrophic.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a mass shooting is ANY time a shooting has more than 3 victims, regardless of location. 99% of these are gang shootings in the inner city, in the 1.3% of US counties that make up 90% of all violent crimes. Arguably, these are always catastrophic, but the cause/solution/surrounding issues are vastly different than the popular topic.
As usual, technical language used in the media is misconstrued and misunderstood by non-technical reporters and lay audiences.
Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood.
And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "fender bender" derailments in switching yards. US standard is >$12k in damage according to TFA.
A couple months ago I watched an amateur train nerd on youtube cover a derailment that dumped a load of bitumin/tar into a river and destroyed a bridge. This kind of thing happens pretty commonly. No national news covered it, only a couple of local news stations, at least from what I could find on youtube/googling.
It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
"Wheel off track" is a derailment. Doesn't have to mean a huge wreck and pile-up. Can happen at low speeds. The vast majority aren't that big a deal.
(my dad ended his career in middle-management with a railroad—not Norfolk, but for all I know Norfolk owns the one he worked for now, there was a lot of consolidation—and for a few years he had to travel to derailments in his region, when they happened, and derailments happened somewhat often)
Goddamn I love government websites. A simple form, with clear and common styling, with no place I have to put my email, with no popup about joining a damn mailing list, with no ads, and when I click the submit button, the response is instant and a clear table that doesn't do anything stupid with javascript.
Every time the government spends my tax dollars developing a web page with a form that generates reports, an angel gets it's wings.
How much less than 1000 (my German is pretty rusty)? e.g. 900 vs 1100 is not really statistically different, and doesn't suggest a systemic problem. Especially given the heavy focus on shipping for the US rail network versus passengers in the EU. Tracks in the US that are used for passengers are maintained better than shipping-only tracks, for sure.
How does this compare to Europe, or the rest of the world? I can spot numbers like 'every other day' in Europe, but getting comparables is proving difficult. Given the different nature of the tracks, usage, and geography, it may be difficult to draw a meaningful comparison anyway.
I do see that the rates are broadly similar between Canada and the US, which is not a surprise but does suggest a correlation.
Most derailments are completely uneventful. The train just barely goes off the tracks and slows to a stop, remaining completely upright. I've heard from people that they were on a passenger train that derailed and didn't even know it until the conductor told them.
Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents?
News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go.
Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
I have read that the governor of the state isn't requesting much in the way of federal assistance, and hasn't yet declared a state of emergency, which may or may not be a prerequisite for such federal action.
That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the assistance they need.
"Hasn't yet"? You do realize that things have completely dispersed at this point and the very transient burn was weeks ago right? The event is long over.
What types of assistance would require action at a federal scale? it seems like a pretty manageable problem at the state level.
It seems like there is a huge outcry that "something must be done" without really examining what that something would be or reviewing what is already being done.
Do people have shelter or need it ?
Do people have access to medical care or need more?
That's FEMA's role, but otherwise that's a damn good question. Yes the company that caused the mess should rightly be on the hook for cleaning it up, but there's still a need for federal disaster assistance.
> Before the bankruptcy filing, J&J faced costs from $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements, including one in which 22 women were awarded a judgment of more than $2 billion, according to bankruptcy court records.
Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant.
The thing that protects them is limited liability, as it does many corporations. They can only lose everything the company has, and not more. If you, random HNer, have some holdings of this railroad in your stock portfolio, they cannot come after you for millions. Thus stock ownership is safe for non-billionaires.
Bankruptcy, rather — the serious kind — erases all ownership, sells the company off to new owners, and pays outstanding debts with the proceeds, in order of priority. This tends to result in more paid debts than an uncontrolled shutdown; fewer people want to buy a stopped business and it can’t make much money.
The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
They could always just not do it. The release says that if this happens, the gov will do it instead and "compel" NS to pay them triple the cost, but I don't really see that happening, given that they just "compelled" the rail workers union to not strike against them.
I'm hopeful that they will just clean it up, but this is a massive corporation owned by hedge funds we're talking about. The rules don't apply to them.
Bankruptcy protects the corporate entity, but not shareholder equity.
That is, shareholders can lose all equity claims. But that doesn’t mean destroying the business. It can be sold off to new shareholders and then sale proceeds used to make creditors whole.
This is a completely broken system though. These cleanup fees should be paid for during the waste generation. Just being allowed to pollute everything and then paying out the owners and declaring bankruptcy leaving it to the tax system to clean up is nonsensical.
Readit News
To my mind this means that things like ECP (which have been removed) might've fixed the issue, but the fundamental problem is the train length, which has been discussed (in all of its negatives) here, before.
In that sense, the train company is directly at fault: they are engaging in unsafe practices in order to remain profitable, and the practices are fundamentally not safe-able (to make up a word).
The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)
My understanding is that contemporaneous weather radar[0] put the plume southeast at the time of the burn.
[0] https://www.wdtn.com/news/ohio/east-palestine-train-derailme...
I was under the impression that there was risk of a Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion which would have been even more catastrophic than the "controlled" release and burn off.
I think that's a problem worth discussing as well. Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump, then the rail companies spent billions in stock buybacks and tried to tighten the screws on their labour force even further for cost-cutting reasons.
There are a lot of pathological behaviours that have gone into "thousands of derailments per year" that are worth discussing, and I'd say those are a lot more important than just this one derailment.
Maybe a start would be to adjust regulation such that detectors need to be placed with higher frequency. ECP is a nice idea, but that's a last ditch effort and not a generalized solution.
ECP does not seem like a solution, and addressing how hazardous chemicals are moved is something that needs to be done.
So we might get a good ruling on the bearing in the coming weeks but based on other reports that I have read (and I quite enjoy the industrial disaster genre of podcast/video) it will probably be a year or two before the full report is complete.
Right. It's all completely harmless and there's no risk to any residents, but the site is also too contaminated for investigators to make even a very brief visit. Makes sense to me.
I got to that page by reading this page: https://e40.github.io/2023-02-18-train-safety.html
I think it's fair to be concerned until we know that the impact was somehow limited. Toxic fumes and spills are incredibly dangerous. Not just deadly in the short term, they can cause severe long-term health problems. It's not like the spillage/smoke just simply disappears, so it's good to be concerned about them until there's proof the impact is minor.
But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...
This is a similar discrepancy between the technical meaning of language as used in statistics, and the popular usage of language as the layperson understands it when they read it in the news as happens with the term "mass shooting".
When a layperson hears "train derailment" they think of what happened in Ohio. When a layperson hears "mass shooting" they think of what happened at Uvalde.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a train derailment is ANY time a train has a wheel that goes off of the track which is not part of a planned maintenance. These are rarely catastrophic.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a mass shooting is ANY time a shooting has more than 3 victims, regardless of location. 99% of these are gang shootings in the inner city, in the 1.3% of US counties that make up 90% of all violent crimes. Arguably, these are always catastrophic, but the cause/solution/surrounding issues are vastly different than the popular topic.
As usual, technical language used in the media is misconstrued and misunderstood by non-technical reporters and lay audiences.
Deleted Comment
Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood.
And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "fender bender" derailments in switching yards. US standard is >$12k in damage according to TFA.
It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
(my dad ended his career in middle-management with a railroad—not Norfolk, but for all I know Norfolk owns the one he worked for now, there was a lot of consolidation—and for a few years he had to travel to derailments in his region, when they happened, and derailments happened somewhat often)
Here is a poorly made website which can generate reports on this:
https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/que...
Every time the government spends my tax dollars developing a web page with a form that generates reports, an angel gets it's wings.
Edit: less than 100 (Entgleisungen).
I do see that the rates are broadly similar between Canada and the US, which is not a surprise but does suggest a correlation.
Plus we have gauges issues that the US don't, so this much disparity is concerning.
News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go.
Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
I think FEMA should be in the role of protecting the individuals, evacuating people and providing food, water, heating and shelter.
EPA should have more focus on directing the cleanup of the area, and making the area safe for residents to return to.
And the railroad should be billed every penny of the costs of both.
Given that FEMA is perhaps best known for poisoning people with toxic chemicals, who would really be the audience for this?
https://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-...
That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the assistance they need.
It seems like there is a huge outcry that "something must be done" without really examining what that something would be or reviewing what is already being done.
Do people have shelter or need it ?
Do people have access to medical care or need more?
Are safety tests being conducted or not?
Are cleanup plans progressing or being neglected?
This seems to be the role of a disaster management organization
What's more important? Stopping people being harmed or getting agencies functions right?
There seems to be a lot of confusion about who asked for what.
Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant.
[0] https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.....
Bankruptcy, rather — the serious kind — erases all ownership, sells the company off to new owners, and pays outstanding debts with the proceeds, in order of priority. This tends to result in more paid debts than an uncontrolled shutdown; fewer people want to buy a stopped business and it can’t make much money.
I'm hopeful that they will just clean it up, but this is a massive corporation owned by hedge funds we're talking about. The rules don't apply to them.
That is, shareholders can lose all equity claims. But that doesn’t mean destroying the business. It can be sold off to new shareholders and then sale proceeds used to make creditors whole.
- we’ve cleaned up 25% of sites in a system that only started in the 80s
- the infrastructure bill in 2021 bringing back the superfund cleanup tax on chemical companies that expired in 1995 — at double the rate
- and Congress also authorizing an extra $3.5 billion 2 years ago just for cleanups
I think it’s too early to be so cynical
Dead Comment