Are trains carrying hazardous material any safer a year after East Palestine derailment?

In the year since a Norfolk Southern derailment forced the evacuation of nearly half of East Palestine, lawmakers have failed to act and it's unclear whether a patchwork of safety changes by individual railroads will prevent another train carrying hazardous chemicals from coming off the rails.

The shortcomings continue to leave the communities that trains pass through vulnerable to dangerous derailments, experts told The Dispatch. In Ohio — a state that led the nation with 59 derailments in 2023 — that could mean the difference between security and catastrophe, said Chris Hand, head of research for the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen union.

"I do feel like it can happen again," Hand said. "My fear is it's going to be much worse."

While Norfolk Southern has made some significant changes since 38 railcars went off the tracks and caught fire in East Palestine, upending residents' lives, Hand said other railroads haven't followed suit. And despite Ohio's unwelcome lead in derailments, federal lawmakers from the state still haven't moved a bill proposing significant changes over the finish line in Congress.

Read More: Has a train spilled chemicals in your neighborhood? We made a tool you can use to find out

The Railway Safety Act, introduced last march by Ohio's two U.S. Senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican J.D. Vance, made it out of committee but has yet to come up for a vote before the full chamber. The measure would require two-person railroad crews, impose tighter rules for trains carrying hazardous materials and increase penalties on companies with safety violations.

Brown blamed industry lobbyists for blocking the legislation, while Vance’s office did not respond to multiple interview requests by The Dispatch.

“Trains are a little bit safer because they know we’re watching them,” Brown said. “They know we’re working to get this bill passed. They know they need to look better in the public eye than they are."

However, Brown also said railroads "aren’t doing fundamental changes to the railroad to make them safer.”

At the state level, even Gov. Mike DeWine has admitted his hands are tied as federal regulators have taken away "the ability of the state to really do much in the area of safety on the railroads."

Ohio officials added a requirement of a two-person-minimum crew on trains to last year’s transportation budget, along with a provision requiring railroads to install more wayside detectors, which can immediately alert train crews of problems. But the American Association of Railroads (AAR) sued Ohio over the rules, contending that only the federal government has the authority to regulate railroads because it involves interstate commerce.

When something like the East Palestine derailment happens, there's usually a "very finite window to hammer out definitive change," said John Easterly, state legislative board chairman of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. Whether too much time has passed since the East Palestine crash for any legislation to be revived and passed remains to be seen, he said.

“They’ve got 175 years of momentum behind them," Easterly said of railroads and their lobbyists. "They have for generations now been able to more or less do what they want due to their lobbying efforts federally and at the state level. They’re very well-connected and spend a lot of money to make sure they operate in the way they want to operate."

More: East Palestine families say their homes make them sick. They may not have anywhere to go

'They had no choice'

While gaps in safety measures persist, Hand said Norfolk Southern, which generated more than $12.2 billion in operating revenues in 2023, has made decent strides since its freight train came off the tracks in East Palestine a year ago.

But, Hand said, Norfolk Southern didn't really have much of an option but to act.

"Look, let's be honest. Their back was up against the wall," he said of Norfolk Southern. "They had no choice. It was the only way to stop getting beat up."

Almost 12 miles outside of East Palestine, in a village called Leetonia, Norfolk Southern erected what it calls a digital train inspection portal in October. A first of a kind, the railroad decided to open the portal in northeast Ohio instead of Georgia because of the derailment.

Trains go through the large metal enclosure, where cameras inside 360-degree imaging of the locomotive and its rail cars, said John Fleps, vice president of safety at Norfolk Southern. Those images are run through an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm designed to catch problems.

Already, the portal has caught a number of issues that Fleps said are hard to spot with the naked eye during stationary inspections, such as a cracked component or wheel.

"What's most important about what we're finding is it's tiny stuff," Fleps said. "It's little things that if left unattended, can grow over time and into bigger problems."

Norfolk Southern on Monday also announced it would join a pilot program of an anonymous tip line for near-miss incidents on railroads.

The company will be the first of the nation's largest freight railroads to join the federal Confidential Close Call Reporting System (C3RS), which is run by NASA and modeled after a similar program used by airlines. However, it will only be active in three cities at the onset: Atlanta, Elkhart, Indiana, and Roanoke Virginia, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

“We are committed to setting the gold standard for rail safety, and we are proud to be the first Class I railroad to deliver on our promise to codevelop and launch a C3RS program," Alan Shaw, Norfolk Southern president and CEO said in a prepared statement. (A Class 1 railroad is defined as any carrier earning annual revenue greater than $250 million.)

Would more heat sensors have prevented East Palestine derailment?

On top of the portal and close-call pilot program, Norfolk Southern is also deploying something it hopes will get to the heart of what caused the derailment in the first place.

An overheated wheel bearing is thought to have played a role in the derailment, according to a preliminary report by the National Transportation Safety Board. The NTSB, which is expected to conclude its investigation in late spring or early summer, declined to make someone available for an interview.

Miles before the derailment, devices commonly referred to as hot box detectors noted that a bearing's temperature was rising. The detectors are important, experts said, because once a railcar's bearing begins to overheat, it can burn off in as little as three minutes.

In the 10 miles between the first sensor and the second one outside East Palestine, a bearing on rail car 23 increased by roughly 65 degrees — from 38 degrees to 103 degrees. While that rise may be concerning to the average person, it is below the threshold at which its recommended trains be stopped and inspected.

The train traveled 20 more miles before it passed a third detector. By that time, the bearing had already reached a critical temperature of 253 degrees above the ambient temperature and shortly thereafter began to derail.

Read More: 'East Palestine is not the only one': Trains have spilled chemicals in cities across Ohio

"Had there been a detector earlier, that derailment may not have occurred," NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said just 20 days after the accident.

The spacing of hot box detectors and its role in the derailment has been up for debate in the months following the derailment.

A 2017 study from the American Association of Railroads (AAR), a lobbying group for the major railroad companies, showed that the optimal spacing between the sensors was 15 miles. But as recently as May 2019, the association also suggested it was OK for the detectors to be separated by as much as 40 miles.

On average, there is a detector every 25 miles along the tracks of Class I freight railroads, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. AAR has set a goal of Class I railroads adding enough detectors so that they appear on average every 15 miles along tracks.

With the sensors under scrutiny, Norfolk Southern announced in March 2023 that it would add 259 more of them along its main line tracks. As of January, Fleps said more than 100 had been installed and the railroad would add the remaining detectors by the end of 2024.

While there could still be long stretches of track without the detectors, the newly added devices mean that on average there will be one every 11 miles on key routes that carry hazardous material, Fleps said.

"In light of what happened in East Palestine, we're not going to say things are good enough," Fleps said. "We're committed to getting better. We're committed to making it right and enhancing the detector network to continue to drive (derailments) as close to zero as we possibly can."

Do changes make a dent in the problem?

Currently, there are no laws that even require hot box detectors to be used by railroads. And while Norfolk Southern has deployed more of the sensors, Hand said not all railroads have done the same.

The Railway Safety Act proposed by Brown and Vance would require the detectors to be placed every 10 miles on rails that hazardous material travels over. But the railroad association has pushed back on that part of the bill, saying that it locks in current technology and leaves little room for advancements, according to a statement provided by spokeswoman Jessica Kahanek.

"Regulations would really help in this space, but I don't know how we're gonna get there," Hand said.

The railroads association has, however, recommended additional temperature trend analysis to catch overheating bearings earlier and lowered its bearing temperature threshold for when it states a train should be stopped and inspected. As of July, that number is now 170 degrees above the average temperature of an environment instead of 200 degrees, according to the AAR.

Without fewer miles between heat sensors on the tracks, the 170-degree threshold still may not have been enough to stop the East Palestine train any sooner.

An alternative to the detectors could be to stop solely relying on them altogether, said Constantine Tarawneh, director of the Transportation Center for Railway Safety at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV).

Hot box detectors have been around for decades, said Tarawneh, which makes them somewhat outdated. If railroads are waiting for increasing temperatures to sound the alarm, then they're likely already too late to stop a derailment, he said.

To make sure there's no delay, Tarawneh said he and others at the center developed and tested an on-board system that can detect bearings that are overheating.

Tarawneh described the system as being like an indicator light in a car that comes on when someone is in need of an oil change or if tire pressure is low. If like cars had to be like trains and drive by a sensor to check their oil level or tire pressure, he said drivers would likely face a lot more problems on the road.

But Tarawneh admitted that having multiple sensors on a single train is far more costly than having one every several miles on the tracks and railroads realize that. Those higher costs resulted in little interest in the on-board system at first.

Following the East Palestine derailment though, Tarawneh said more railroads have said they'd like to pilot the system. The increased interest may have something to do with the $1.1 billion —including $836 million in environmental-related expenses and $381 million in community assistance and legal fees— that Norfolk Southern said it's spent on the East Palestine derailment in the last year.

"It's an investment," Tarawneh said. "But the point is: do we want to revolutionize safety? Or do we want to keep playing Russian roulette?"

Max Filby is a reporter for The Dispatch.

Haley BeMiller is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves The Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.

mfilby@dispatch.com

@MaxFilby

hbemiller@dispatch.com

@haleybemiller

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: After East Palestine derailment, are Ohio railroads any safer?