WASHINGTON, D.C. — The federal agency that oversees the nation’s railroads fined CSX Transportation $20,000 after an Amtrak passenger train derailed 11 years ago in South Carolina, killing eight and injuring 90, Gannett News Service reports.
The railroad’s big-dollar punishment came in 1997, when a Florida jury ordered it to pay the family of one victim, Miami Police Sgt. Paul Palank, $50 million in punitive damages. Amtrak paid compensatory damages to families of some of the other victims.
Authorities determined the crash was caused by broken switching equipment as well as maintenance and safety cutbacks by CSX, and the jury agreed. CSX appealed the verdict all the way to the Supreme Court but lost.
Palank’s widow, Angel, hoped that the large punitive judgment would force CSX to focus on safety. She said she was devastated in April after hearing about the Amtrak derailment in Crescent City, Fla., that killed four people — on the same CSX train line her husband was traveling.
A preliminary investigation points to track failure.
“I was back in a depression and in some ways almost worse because I felt so angry and helpless … to know that four more people died who didn’t have to die,” Angel Palank said.
CSX would not comment on the Crescent City crash because it is under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board, said company spokesman Adam Hollingsworth.
But CSX added 125 track inspectors over the past two years and spent more than $1 billion on track and signals last year, he said. CSX’s derailments dropped 28 percent last year after climbing in the previous five years, he said.
“Any accident is one accident too many,” Hollingsworth said. “We take very seriously our obligation to the public to run a safe rail operation and we’re doing that.”
The $20,000 government fine against CSX is the maximum allowed. Last year, the Federal Railroad Administration fined the railroads a total of $5.8 million for violating safety regulations, an average of $1,614 per violation. Some of those violations contributed to accidents; most did not.
Lawyers representing railroad workers and victims of railroad accidents say the FRA’s oversight and system of negotiated fines doesn’t deter railroads from cutting corners on maintenance and safety, and the penalties are merely a cost of doing business. Between 1997 and 2001, train derailments nationwide increased 26 percent while freight hauled by railroads during that period increased 10 percent.
Railroads would likely be entrusted with transporting most of the 77,000 tons of radioactive waste from the nation’s commercial nuclear power plants to a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., under an Energy Department plan that still must be approved by the Senate and Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Critics say the FRA already is overwhelmed and doesn’t employ enough inspectors.
That’s not true, said Tom White, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads. The companies do have an economic incentive to fix defects before they result in accidents, he said.
“They pay the cost of any accidents that occur,” White said.
There may be instances when FRA inspectors do not fine railroads for minor violations but there are plenty of times they do, said Dan Smith, the agency’s assistant chief counsel for safety. And if railroads ignore major violations for days on end, the total fines can climb into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said. The agency was never set up to inspect every railcar or mile of track, Smith said.
“The idea, instead, is to try to do enough quality control and monitoring to stay on top of the situation,” he said. “We use the enforcement tools before the accident rather than post accident.”
The FRA has 422 field inspectors nationwide who are divided into five areas: tracks, signals, locomotives and cars, hazardous materials, and operating practices. In addition, 30 states have a total of 159 inspectors who help the FRA.
The country’s railroad system consists of some 600 railroads with more than 250,000 employees, 200,000 miles of track, 1.2 million freight cars and 20,000 locomotives.
“When you split 400 people up by 50 states and five disciplines you realize it becomes a shell game,” said Rick Inclima, director of education and safety for the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, whose members build, maintain and inspect tracks and bridges.
“The railroad knows they have an inspector tied up for three weeks, and they don’t have to worry about him nosing around (somewhere else) this week.”
A quickie inspection may have led to the derailment of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight train in Scottsbluff, Neb., in November 2000, said Bob Chaloupka, a lawyer who is suing the railroad on behalf of two clients. The lawsuits allege railroad inspectors failed to notice that a pin in a car coupling had become dislodged. The derailment caused six tank cars to rupture and spill about 80,000 gallons of benzene.
Four hundred homes were evacuated for several days.
“The train was inspected the day before in Montana on its way down here,” Chaloupka said. “At the time, there were 84 cars in the train, and it looks like they inspected the entire train in less than two minutes, which leads to the conclusion they didn’t do a very good job.”
Burlington Northern Santa Fe spokesman Steve Forsberg said he was unaware of the lawsuit. But in general, the railroad inspects its equipment frequently and has detection systems along the tracks that look for failing roller bearings and dragging equipment, he said.
“Our equipment is required to undergo inspection with a much higher degree of frequency than say vehicles moving over the highway,” Forsberg said. “Consequently, railroads have a significantly lower accident rate than traffic moving over freeways.”
Charles Romstad — whose mother died last year in an Amtrak derailment in Nodaway, Iowa — is starting a group to advocate for increased railroad safety. Romstad, who is suing Amtrak and Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway over the accident, said he is frustrated that derailments are on the rise but government officials don’t seem to be acting.
The National Transportation Safety Board concluded the Nodaway accident was caused by a defective piece of steel that was installed to replace a broken part of the track. FRA statistics show the number of train derailments caused by track fissuring has tripled over the past five years to 78.
“It is likely that there are miles and miles of defective track out there and the next disaster is around the corner,” Romstad said. “I want answers and the public needs to know.”