(The following article by Mike Bucsko and Anya Sostek was posted on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website on October 24.)
PITTSBURGH — While last weekend’s train derailment rocked New Brighton and Beaver Falls, forced more than 150 residents to flee and sparked fires and fears about safety, the simple truth is this: Such rail accidents aren’t all that uncommon in Pennsylvania.
Though rail accidents nationwide are down about 16 percent the first six months of the year, Pennsylvania’s accident rate remained stagnant, with 54 accidents in each of the first six months of 2005 and 2006, said Steven Kulm, spokesman for the Federal Railroad Administration, the government’s railroad regulatory agency.
“We’re moving more freight than ever before, we have record capacity. You would think that you would see more accidents, but no,” said Kelly Donley, assistant vice president of communications for the Association of American Railroads.
Norfolk Southern Corp., the operator of the train involved in Friday’s derailment, has had more derailments in Pennsylvania the past three years than in the other 20 states in which it operates, according to the Washington, D.C.-based agency. Most of the Norfolk, Va.-based railroad’s lines are located east of the Mississippi River.
Such accidents in some ways are considered a normal cost of doing business for an industry that moved a record 1.9 billion tons of freight last year.
And while Friday’s accident produced a spectacular fireball that lighted up the night sky, it could have been much worse.
“We were very lucky,” New Brighton Fire Chief Jeff Bolland said of Friday night’s derailment that sent 23 cars of a Norfolk Southern train hauling 100,000 gallons of ethanol from Chicago to New Jersey off their tracks, plunging some into Beaver River. “Nobody got hurt.”
The crash came as a worldwide economic expansion, strong consumer spending and high fuel prices have the rail industry operating at its healthiest levels since World War II.
Traffic is at record levels on intermodal transport — loads that travel on trucks or ships in addition to trains — with the last three weeks of September the highest-ever in terms of volume, according to the railroad association.
The boom has pushed Norfolk Southern’s stock price up 49 percent the past two years, and profits over that period have risen an even higher 139 percent, to $1.28 billion in 2005, on a 39 percent increase in sales to $8.53 billion.
Despite the record traffic, Ms. Donley of the railroad association noted that employee casualties the first six months of this year were down 9.9 percent from the same period in 2005. And the casualty rate for all of last year was a record low for a full year, she said.
“One hundred years ago, working for the railroad was a fairly dangerous undertaking,” she said. “Now, rail safety records have improved so much, it’s safer to be a rail employee than to work in the fast food industry.”
Still, human factors are the chief cause of railroad accidents, including the Norfolk Southern derailment in Graniteville, S.C., in January 2005 that caused nine deaths. In that case, a misaligned switch caused a tanker with chlorine to collide with a parked locomotive.
One of the chief contributing factors to human error is fatigue, a situation caused by the work schedules of railroad workers, said Frank Wilner, a spokesman for the United Transportation Union in Cleveland, which represents 70,000 railroad brakemen and conductors.
Under federal guidelines, railroad workers must have a minimum of eight hours off for a regular shift and 10 hours off if they work a 12-hour shift. With time spent in transit between home or hotel and work, the reality is most railroad workers usually only get four to six hours of sleep before they are called out again, which means they can work two 12-hour shifts on little sleep in 24 hours, Mr. Wilner said.
“Many of the accidents that the [government] investigates are shown to be caused by what’s called human error and we believe there is a correlation between human error and fatigue,” Mr. Wilner said. “No one would want to fly in an airplane where the pilots are not given a day off and are exhausted.”
The nation’s railroads spend $10 billion to $12 billion annually on repairs and maintenance of their infrastructure — the equivalent of approximately 31 percent of their total operating revenue, said Ms. Donley, of the railroad association.
They also attempt to prevent derailments through technology. Wayside detectors, for example, use thermal imaging and other high-tech techniques to detect cracks and equipment failures before they can be seen by the human eye, she said.
Ms. Donley said railroad companies also have stepped up training and safety instruction.
The Federal Railroad Administration, which is responsible for safety on railroad lines, has a regular inspection schedule for different classes of railroads. The tracks of the largest carriers, in the Class 1, 2 and 3 categories, are inspected weekly. If the tracks carry passenger trains or more than 10 million gross tons of traffic, they are inspected twice weekly.
Included in the attention to safety is a focus on the transportation of hazardous material.
Railroads carry 1.7 million shipment of hazardous material each year under guidelines of another federal agency, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, part of the federal Department of Transportation with the Federal Railroad Administration.
The FRA, in a report in June, recommended the government increase its communication with local emergency responders and provide more detailed information on shipments of hazardous material in their communities so the local units can prepare for accidents.
Generally, the FRA investigates railroad accidents, but takes a back seat when the National Transportation Safety Board gets involved. That’s the case in the New Brighton derailment.
Though the NTSB is the lead investigative agency — it still is trying to determine the cause of Friday night’s derailment — the FRA said it also will conduct its own investigation and issue a separate report.
Accidents as large as the one in Graniteville have the potential to affect a railroad’s bottom line. Norfolk Southern, for example, took a $30 million to $40 million pretax charge last year to cover costs related to that collision, but its profits were still up on the year.
The pretax charge does not include settlements of class action lawsuits related to the Graniteville crash, including a settlement announced yesterday for which terms were not disclosed.
Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband said that it is too early to give a cost estimate for the New Brighton derailment.