Live: NTSB hearings into East Palestine train derailment
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is holding investigative hearings Thursday and Friday in East Palestine about the February train derailment that upended life in this rural Ohio town.
You can follow our live coverage of the hearings below.
The hearings, which focus on the hazardous materials release and fires from the derailment, are a step in the federal agency's fact-finding safety investigation.
Only NTSB members, investigative staff and designated parties may ask questions of witnesses.
The public can only observe the hearings, not participate.
The hearings follow a Wednesday evening meeting at East Palestine High School where NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy answered public questions about the investigation.
The NTSB formal hearings on the East Palestine derailment will focus on:
Hazard Communications and Emergency Responder Preparedness for the Initial Emergency Response
Circumstances that Led to the Decision to Vent and Burn Five Vinyl Chloride Tank Cars
Freight Car Bearing Failure Modes and Wayside Detection Systems
Tank Car Derailment Damage, Crashworthiness and Hazardous Materials Package Information
Some of the groups represented at the hearings include: The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen; The Federal Railroad Administration; Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration; Norfolk Southern; Trinity Rail Management Leasing Services; OxyVinyls; the village of East Palestine and others.
6 p.m.
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy concluded the investigative hearing Friday by thanking the community of East Palestine.
She singled out 12-year-old twins in the audience who "stuck it out through the past two days."
"This hearing was for your community," she told them. "You have all been so kind to us. We will consider East Palestine a home to us" and invited the twins to visit the NTSB labs in Washington, D.C.
The last part of the hearing focused on rail car safety and the phase-out of particular rail cars still being used to haul hazardous materials when safer options are available.
A Federal Railroad Administration employee testified companies are slow to replace the cars because they planned to use them for 50 years and want a return on their investment.
That prompted Homendy to ask what a human life is worth.
Federal lawmakers are expected to soon vote on the bipartisan Railway Safety Act of 2023, which was spearheaded by Ohio's U.S. senators, Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance, after the East Palestine derailment.
The legislation, which includes many changes intended to make rail transport safer for workers and the public, initially called for the old hazardous material rail cars to be upgraded by 2025. Language in the proposed law has since changed, pushing back that deadline to the end of 2027.
4 p.m.
The final part of the NTSB investigative hearing focuses on tank car safety.
Media filled most of the folding chairs set up for the NTSB hearings this week in the East Palestine High School gymnasium.
Many people from in and around East Palestine watched from the bleachers.
Robin Seman said she tries to attend every meeting or hearing, often bringing some of the six children she is raising and home-schooling.
She said there are real-life lessons about how government works, or doesn't, along with science in what's happening in East Palestine.
On Thursday, she had a tooth pulled early in the morning, but still made it to the 9 a.m. hearing with cotton stuffed into her cheek. Seman said the NTSB hearings are "helpful, but it's complicated."
The NTSB hearings don't deal with the potential impact the derailment had on water, soil and air. Seman lives on a creek 2.9 miles from the derailment and said when the Environmental Protection Agency and others began testing their water, they were looking for 129 chemicals. Now, she said, they only look for 29 chemicals.
Seman still doesn't understand why.
Norfolk Southern, meanwhile, made local headlines after spending $25 million to renovate a park in town.
Seman said she wishes the company would have spent that money on train safety or placards that wouldn't melt in a fire.
She fears most Americans have already forgotten what happened in East Palestine and how it impacted areas far beyond the town.
"We all need to be paying attention," Seman said. "What happened here could happen anywhere."
2 p.m.
The first half of Friday's NTSB hearing didn't wrap up until 2 p.m. The final part of the investigative hearing will resume at 3 p.m.
NTSB members took a special interest in how railroads are regulated, how thoroughly Norfolk Southern inspects its trains and how Norfolk Southern has cut its staffing in recent years, particularly among those responsible for maintenance and inspections while the number of executives has remained fairly constant.
Vice Chair Bruce Landsberg said the railroad industry is unique in the transportation industry because a trade group — the Association of American Railroads (AAR) — sets its standards.
Landsberg asked Michael Rush, a senior vice president of AAR, if its standards are mandatory for members, including Norfolk Southern and other major U.S. railroads.
Rush said the answer was complicated. Landsberg listened for a while and then cut off Rush and answered his own question: "It's basically recommended and you leave it to the parties to make the decision."
Landsberg later said he was concerned that railroads were "essentially governed by industry-set standards," which Rush denied was true, insisting the industry was heavily regulated.
NTSB board member Michael Graham, who worked in aviation, pointed out that regulators mandate that every part on a plane — from inspection times to life limits and replacement — be tracked. Graham wanted to know if train wheels face the same sort of scrutiny.
Rush said the wheels are tracked, but Constantine Tarawneh, a University of Texas professor who studies railroads, said the bearings are not. The miles on the bearings are estimated, based on the date the bearings went onto a car and how many miles that car usually travels per month, he said.
Bearings, Tarawneh said, are expected to last 2 million miles, depending on how well reconditioning is done during that time and other factors.
One board member pointed out that the bearing that failed and caused the East Palestine derailment sat stationary twice for more than six months during the past 10 years and asked if that could have impacted its lifespan.
Tarawneh said bearings are designed for perpetual motion. Down time can cause two problems, he said. The grease that smooths the friction separates, he said, making it ineffective or even allowing it to seep out. Also, he said, rain can seep into the bearing.
"Grease's worst enemy is water," he said, because it will degrade the grease.
Chair Jennifer Homendy next zeroed in on train safety.
"What's Precision Scheduled Railroading?" she asked Jared Hopewell, a senior director of Norfolk Southern.
He said his basic understanding is "it means to just take a look at operation and how we move trains more optimally across the system."
Homendy, based on earlier testimony in the investigation, further defined it as railroads keeping their equipment moving, reducing waste and closing yards.
She pulled up a graph she made based on data that Norfolk Southern provided to another agency. It showed that the number of people working for that one railroad declined from around 30,000 in 2012 to about 21,000 in 2023.
During that time, the number of maintenance workers and inspectors fell from about 6,200 to 2,500 , while the number of Norfolk Southern executives fell only slightly, from about 1,900 to 1,700.
Homendy then asked Jason Cox, a representative of the Brotherhood Railway Carmen, what impact those cuts have had on people like him, car men who inspect trains.
He said car men once had three minutes to inspect each car and now are expected to do that in one minute. Additionally, he said railroads are gaming the system, bypassing thorough inspection by car men — which can involve more than 100 points of inspection — for crew inspection, which involve about a dozen points.
He said all inspectors are tired and fatigued and pressured and many trains never get a full inspection and said federal regulation needed to make sure inspections happen to "protect the employees and protect the public.”
When a Norfolk Southern executive said he was unaware of time limits on inspections, Homendy pulled up internal email and Norfolk Southern documents gathering during the NTSB investigation. The documents showed that there was pressure on inspectors to spend one minute or less per car on an inspection.
Earlier in the afternoon , the hearings revealed that 20 out of 77 cars involved in the East Palestine derailment had "defects," which is about 25 percent.
What those defect were was not specified during the hearing, but Cox testified that federal rail investigators found the defects "visually," like car men might have had their been a full inspection of the train.
11:30 a.m.
Constantine Tarawneh, a University of Texas professor who studies railroads, said he doesn't believe more hot box detectors spaced closer together would help prevent train derailments nor would universal standards regulating how railroads react the temperatures measured.
He said it only will add more alerts to a failure before it happens. The alerts would not prevent or delay a bearing failure, like an acoustic vibration detector could because it picks up defects so early.
Hot boxes are "inefficient," he said, comparing them to digging a 10-foot hole with a shovel. Acoustic detectors would be like digging that same hole with a Bobcat, he said.
An NTSB representative told the panel he believed there were only 16 or 17 acoustic detectors now working on U.S. railways.
Another witness said there may be a few more than that, but it's a new technology.
11 a.m.
Professor Constantine Tarawneh of the University of Texas told the NTSB panel that it may be time to change how railroads look for defects in wheel bearings, like the failed bearing that caused the East Palestine derailment.
Norfolk Southern and other railroads now largely depend on so-called "hot box" detectors, which measure the temperatures of rail car bearings as they pass over sensors installed on tracks.
Tarawneh said there are so many variables impacting temperatures that they are not necessarily good indicators of when there is a problem. The speed of the train along with the weight of the load can greatly impact temperatures.
And new bearings often run so hot for the first 25,000 miles that they would set off false alarms at many sensors, he said.
A more reliable option, he said, are acoustic vibration detectors, which can reveal defects in bearings at the earliest stages.
Tarawneh said the acoustic information is so reliable that railroads could schedule maintenance around it, and would know if they had 50,000 or 25,000 miles to react.
9:30 a.m.
Jason Cox, of the Brotherhood Railway Carmen, testified that the train car that caused the East Palestine derailment was never inspected along its route from the Illinois-Missouri state line until it derailed just before it reached Pennsylvania.
Historically, this car would have been inspected by trained car men who check 90 to 105 points on each side of a freight car. Among other things, they use palm-sized gauges to check for potential defects in freight train wheels, Cox said.
Increasingly, railroads have shifted to crew inspections, which were supposed to be "stop gap" inspections until in-depth inspections by car men. This car received neither, Cox said.
Inspections, others testified, don't always reveal wheel bearing problems.
This morning's hearing focuses on wheel bearings and automated track defect detectors.
9 a.m. Friday
Testimony is scheduled to begin again Friday at 9:30 a.m., but here are some other things that emerged during Thursday's hearing:
∙ The railroads have a phone app that first responders, firefighters and police can use to see what a train is carrying. But not all of those groups know the app exists, including East Palestine firefighters at the time of the derailment. To use the app, members of those groups must first register and be verified by an employer. The app is not available to the public because of national security concerns. East Palestine Fire Chief Keith Drabick, who was hired from outside the department in October 2022, said during the hearing he now has the app on his phone.
∙ When asked what Drabick learned from the derailment, he told NTSB officials that the most important thing was: "You can never have enough training, you can never have enough manpower." Most firefighters in the U.S. are volunteers who work other full-time time jobs, Drabick said. His entire department is volunteer, he said, and he applauds that but it makes training and staffing difficult.
∙ Ohio recently reduced how much training volunteer firefighters are required to take. It was 54 hours, now it's 36. The reduction was a compromise after some lawmakers wanted to entirely eliminate mandatory training for volunteer firefighters, a state public official said during Thursday's hearing. Drabick said there should be more stringent requirements for volunteers, along with government funding to pay for it.
∙ The placards, or tiny signs, that rail cars carry to identify the hazardous chemical in them melted in the East Palestine derailment. That complicated identifying what was in the cars. Federal regulations mandate the placards be made of something that can withstand the elements for 30 days, testimony during the hearing revealed. But there is no federal requirement that the placards be fireproof or fire resistant.
5 p.m. Thursday
NTSB spent much of Thursday afternoon trying to understand why Norfolk Southern and its contractors told East Palestine Fire Chief Keith Drabick that the area was in grave danger of a chemical explosion if they didn't quickly move ahead with a vent and burn of vinyl chloride from a derailed train.
The hearing exposed differing opinions about the danger the tanks posed.
Norfolk Southern and its experts feared rising temperatures might cause a chemical reaction that could cause the vinyl chloride tanks to to explode.
A derailed tank car carrying vinyl chloride that most worried emergency responders was cooling slightly before it was vented and burned in East Palestine, according to records released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
But representatives of the manufacturer of the vinyl chloride, OxyVinyls, told investigators that the gas did not pose an explosion risk, particularly when the exterior tank wall temperatures were measured around 135 degrees.
Norfolk Southern and its subcontractors countered that a chemical reaction was only one of their worries. They said they also feared the fire had damaged O-rings and other parts of the cars containing hazardous, flammable gas.
Drabick told the committee he was unaware there was any disagreement over the danger of an explosion.
On Thursday, he told the NTSB panel the companies gave him 13 minutes to decide whether to to approve a vent and burn, warning him there could be deadly consequences if they did not proceed.
When NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy asked Drabick if it would have helped if he knew that others doubted a dangerous chemical reaction was happening inside the derailed cars, he said: "I believe any information you have is power."
But, he cautioned, he's not sure whether it would have changed his decision to approve a vent and burn.
11:30 a.m. Thursday
Twelve hours after the NTSB’s community meeting, Lisa Mahoney was back for the NTSB investigative hearings.
“I feel it’s my job as part of the community,” said Mahoney, who also penned a letter to NTSB Chair Homendy to let her know what questions she still had about the derailment.
Mahoney doesn’t post on Facebook, or tweet or blog.
“But if I hear someone say something that’s not right, I can say that’s not true,” Mahoney said, explaining why she goes to all the meetings involving the derailment.
She and others say the derailment has divided East Palestine and its surrounding communities. There are conspiracy theorists. There are people being swayed by Norfolk Southern and the money the company is spending. And there are others who have become ill and others angry that people connect their sickness to the derailments.
“High emotions run with this,” Mahoney said.
Mahoney, a school teacher, lives half a mile from the derailment and can see the train tracks from her deck.
Trains pass through East Palestine about every seven minutes.
It’s not clear how many of those carry hazardous materials like vinyl chloride.
But she's worried about the safety of all trains.
Norfolk Southern President and CEO Alan Shaw, for example, has said he has scientific evidence that one-man train crews would be safe, Mahoney said.
“If you’re running a train by yourself and you have a heart attack, what happens? You have a runaway train,” she said. “I don’t need scientific evidence. Two people on a crew to me is common sense.”
10:30 a.m. Thursday
It took Scott Deutsch, Norfolk Southern's regional manager for hazardous materials, about 90 minutes to drive to East Palestine after the train derailment, he told the NTSB hearing.
When he arrived, it was 7 degrees and firefighters were spraying water on a "large pool fire" and another fire that erupted in a ditch along a track.
"I wanted everyone out of there," Deutsch said. He was particularly worried that the pressure valves would open on some of the cars carrying hazardous chemicals, he said.
If that happened, "you could not get away."
Much of the morning hearing was devoted to what happened in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, a scene one NTSB chairman said reminded him of the "fog of war. ... things happening rapidly ... and even the best laid plans" go awry.
East Palestine Fire Chief Keith Drabick described how his all-volunteer department was overwhelmed. They didn't have the manpower to cope with a hazardous incident of this magnitude. And when firefighters rushed in to help from surrounding areas, they couldn't communicate because they worked on different radios and frequencies.
Moreover, few of the volunteer firefighters had hazardous materials training and none of them had access to a phone application that would have shown what hazardous chemicals the train was carrying.
Further complicating things, Drabick, the only full-time firefighter in town, wasn't in East Palestine. When the derailment happened, a volunteer deputy chief initially took command, communicating by phone with Drabick, who was en route.
It would take him several hours to arrive and take over as incident commander.
Two days later, Drabick, in consultation with the unified command of the incident, gave the order to vent and burn the vinyl chloride, Drabick said Thursday afternoon.
A Norfolk Southern representative told the panel that vent and burn is the last option in cases with liquid flammable gas.
The first option, he said, is moving the train car. That was impossible in this case. So then the question is how do you remove the chemical for the car, he said.
They considered something called a "hot tap," but it involved welding and it would have taken too long because the situation was growing more dangerous, he said.
"When you get to that point, there are no other options available," the Norfolk Southern representative said.
Norfolk Southern and its contractors told Drabick, Gov. Mike DeWine and others that one of the cars carrying vinyl chloride had malfunctioned and that burn and release was the only option.
Though it was ultimately Drabick's decision to move forward, he said, no one else objected.
9:00 a.m. Monday
The NTSB released what it refers to as the "docket" into its investigation of the East Palestine train derailment.
It includes hundreds of pages of documents, videos and interviews with first responders, company officials and others.
Two of the videos are linked below:
Jennifer Homendy, chair of the NTSB, opened the hearing by recognizing the derailment's ongoing impact on East Palestine, Darlington, and surrounding areas.
"Since the derailment, the nation has heard about the health effects you’ve suffered … the pets who've died … the damage sustained to your schools, businesses, places of worship … your homes," she said. "On behalf of the NTSB, we are so sorry for what you’ve endured. Our hearts are with you.
The NTSB will use information gathered during the two hearings — happening inside the East Palestine High School gym — to help determine what went wrong Feb. 3, Homendy said.
"We will then make safety recommendations to prevent similar derailments from ever happening again," she said.
The morning panel, which began around 10 a.m., focused on first responders to the scene, including firefighters, police officers and an official from Norfolk Southern.
This article originally appeared on Akron Beacon Journal: Officials testify about causes of East Palestine train derailment
