Another train derails in Ohio, Americans in more credit card debt than ever: 5 Things podcast

On today's episode of the 5 Things podcast: Another train derails in Ohio

Another train derailed in Ohio Saturday. Plus, President Joe Biden visits Selma, USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Gina Barton looks at what determines how hard police look for missing children, USA TODAY Personal Finance & Markets Reporter Elisabeth Buchwald explains why Americans are in more credit card debt than ever, and 13 people are dead after severe weather.

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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

Taylor Wilson:

Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Monday, the 6th of March 2023. Today, another train derails in Ohio. Plus, how police decide how they search for missing children, and Americans go into record credit card debt.

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A second train derailed in Ohio over the weekend. Saturday's derailment involved around 20 cars of a cargo train owned by Norfolk Southern, the same company that had another one of its trains derail in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3rd. The February derailment led to toxic chemicals spewing into the town, though there's no evidence this weekend's derailment leaked any hazardous materials. Still, it's renewed a push from lawmakers calling for additional freight safety rules, and it appears there's some bipartisan support. Last week, Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, and a Republican senator, J.D. Vance, from the same state, teamed up with other senators to introduce a bill aimed at establishing additional safety rules. It would raise fines for safety violations, increase safety inspections, and require companies to tell states when trains with hazardous materials pass through their borders.

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President Joe Biden visited Selma, Alabama yesterday, marking the 58th anniversary of the civil rights march there.

President Joe Biden:

Selma is a reckoning. The right to vote, to have your vote counted, is the threshold of democracy and liberty.

Taylor Wilson:

Bloody Sunday began as a march for voting rights for Black Americans who faced barriers to the right to vote across much of the segregated South. Civil rights leaders planned to take their cause directly to Alabama Governor George Wallace by marching 54 miles from Selma to the State Capitol of Montgomery. Some 600 marchers set out on March 7th, 1965, but when they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, they found a line of state troops waiting for them. When the peaceful protestors refused law enforcement's orders to disperse, the officers attacked. Attendance at the bridge crossing anniversary has become a tradition for presidents and other politicians. Biden's visit yesterday marks the third time he's participated in the commemoration.

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When children go missing, how hard do police search for them? As USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Gina Barton told me, it depends how old they are. Gina, thanks for coming on the show.

Gina Barton:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So, you found in your reporting that a child's age can play a big role in how hard police look for them. Tell me more about what you found here, Gina.

Gina Barton:

So, my colleague, Tami Abdollah, and I, looked at more than 50 rule books for different police departments around the country, and we found that some of these agencies set a maximum age at which the police will really do an all out search for a child. The surprising thing to me was that in some jurisdictions that age is as young as 10. So, if your 10-year-old disappears in some parts of this country, the police really don't put a lot of extra effort into looking for them.

Taylor Wilson:

So, what exactly does happen when a child is older than one of these police age limits?

Gina Barton:

Police are always supposed to take a report about the missing child and then send that information on to the FBI. Sometimes they are supposed to send it in to the state also, depending on what state they're in. They're supposed to question the people who report the child missing and try to get information about where that child was last seen.

Now, different jurisdictions have different things that they should do above and beyond, but that cutoff marks the age at which the kid gets the kind of attention that you see on TV, right? The dogs come out and search and you have 20 or 30 officers blanketing the neighborhood, looking for the child, that kind of thing.

Taylor Wilson:

Gina, what role does race play in how missing children cases are handled?

Gina Barton:

Race is something that we are still trying to nail down. So far, a lot of the people that we've been talking to and a lot of the things that we've been hearing anecdotally is that Black children are more likely to be labeled as runaways than white children.

And why this is important is because there are exceptions to that age rule. And so, if you have evidence a child has been abducted or if running away would be out of their character, then they could still maybe get that full scale search. But if you're labeled as a runaway, you're not necessarily going to get that. And so, in a future story, we are analyzing data right now to see if it's actually true that Black children are labeled as runaways more often than white children.

Taylor Wilson:

So, this is maybe asking the obvious, but how important is law enforcement's speed when it comes to a missing child's outcome?

Gina Barton:

Speed is so important. We looked at some studies that talked about how quickly children who are later found murdered were actually killed, and the majority of them it was in 48 hours. So, there are two things at play here. One is, the police actually looking for that child very quickly can make a lot of difference. And then the second thing that can make a lot of difference is media attention, not only from traditional media like USA TODAY, but also social media and AMBER Alerts, those notices that go up on billboards and sometimes come to phones. And again, if a child is called a runaway, they don't get an AMBER Alert.

Taylor Wilson:

Gina, so is there any legislative push to try and at least make police action for missing children more consistent? Or, what's the solution here?

Gina Barton:

There's an advocacy organization called the Black and Missing Foundation. People might have seen, there was a HBO documentary about them. And one of their main goals is to get these rules standardized so that police in different jurisdictions put the same effort into finding missing kids. Because I mean, when you think about it, it really does depend on where you live. If you have an 11-year-old, they might get a lot of attention in New Hampshire, but not a lot of attention in Louisville, even if they're the same child who disappeared under the same circumstances. And to a lot of activists and people who work in this space, that just isn't logical at all.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Gina Barton is an investigative reporter for USA TODAY. Thanks for your great insight here, Gina. I really appreciate it.

Gina Barton:

Thanks for having me.

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Taylor Wilson:

Americans are relying on credit cards more than ever, but they're also going into record debt. USA TODAY Personal Finance and Markets Reporter Elisabeth Buchwald has more. Elisabeth, always happy to have you back on the pod.

Elisabeth Buchwald:

Always happy to be here.

Taylor Wilson:

So, credit card debt has hit a record high. How big of a deal is this, Elisabeth, and how did we get here?

Elisabeth Buchwald:

It's a big deal. We're at nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt, and it's an interesting path on how we got here. It wasn't always this bad, actually, we started around that level before the pandemic, but credit card debt started going down a lot as stimulus payments went out and enhanced unemployment benefits, and then also the fact that people just weren't leaving home and spending money on vacations and amusement parks and all of that. So, they weren't taking on more debt and at the same time, they were paying off debt. But now it's coming back up because people are struggling with inflation.

Taylor Wilson:

And which age groups in particular find themselves in a lot of credit card debt?

Elisabeth Buchwald:

People under 40 are finding themselves in the most credit card debt and are mainly paying their bills later as opposed to the other groups that are somewhat better at paying on time.

Taylor Wilson:

So, what can folks do to avoid serious credit card debt?

Elisabeth Buchwald:

It's not easy, but I think a lot of people out there get into credit card debt because you get in your head that just because you have a line of credit available, what that means is when you have a credit card, sometimes they'll say, "You could have $10,000 available to you that you could spend in stores." But you might not have that money in the bank, yet, it's available. But people confuse that with what is available in their bank account.

So, staying within those limits and the general personal finance health, don't make impulse purchases, make payments on time, that'll help a lot. And really staying on top of budgeting.

Taylor Wilson:

So, what does all this credit card debt tell us about the economy in the US as a whole right now?

Elisabeth Buchwald:

It really paints an ugly picture, and I bring that up because a lot of things look really good right now. The unemployment rate is low, inflation showed signs of improving. But the fact that credit card debt is really this high and the amount of people paying late is growing, is concerning. And New York Fed officials acknowledge that as well. It shows that people are financially stressed and are having to turn to other means because they don't have the money available in their pockets.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Elisabeth Buchwald, fantastic insight as always. Thanks so much.

Elisabeth Buchwald:

Yeah. Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

Almost half a million Americans were in the dark yesterday from Kentucky to Michigan after a heavy front dumped snow in the Midwest and Mid-South. Parts of the South also got slammed with thunderstorms and tornadoes, and at least 13 people are dead from the severe weather.

California's mountains will get more snow today as the state continues to try and recover from drought. The average water equivalent in the snow pack in California's mountains range from 40 to 46 inches, almost double the average for early March according to weatherbug.com. For the first time in years, less than half the state's land area is in moderate drought or worse.

Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us every day of the week right here, wherever you're listening right now. I'm back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Another train derailed in Ohio, Biden visits Selma: 5 Things podcast