(The following article by John W. Gonzales was posted on the Houston Chronicle website on October 11.)
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — Responding to community outrage over a rash of terrifying train accidents, Union Pacific has agreed to add more than 200 local workers, enhance crew training and take other steps to avert problems.
The changes “will improve safety and security in the San Antonio area,” UP President Jim Young assured local officials last week.
Three people died from a chlorine gas leak, and about 50 were injured in one of three major train accidents in the past five months. Several more were injured in two other crashes, which rattled a downtown neighborhood and a nearby high school and prompted demands for a congressional investigation.
U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, asked the Federal Railroad Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board last week to look into complaints that rail staffing, training and operations were endangering the public.
“We must identify and address any safety shortcomings in our rail systems to protect our citizens,” said Hutchison, who leads the Senate subcommittee on surface transportation.
On Oct. 1, Mayor Ed Garza asked Hutchison, a former NTSB member, to press for a federal probe, citing fears of more accidents in vulnerable, heavily populated areas.
“Unless something is done immediately to remedy the increasing number of rail accidents in San Antonio, more are certain to occur, placing the public’s health and safety at risk,” Garza told Hutchison.
“Already, the train derailments have caused many to question the reliability of the rail-transport system in Bexar County, causing an outcry by the public demanding that local officials do something to resolve this problem,” Garza said.
Before Young detailed UP’s remedies to Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, Garza said, he was disappointed with the railroad’s response to community pleas.
“We believe that if there’s one accident, we can probably live with that. If there’s two, the flag is raised. Three, four, five, like we’ve seen here recently, that’s unacceptable — especially when we’re not getting a response on any kind of plan of action,” Garza said. His tally included several minor mishaps that heightened local concerns.
Garza said other Texas cities face similar perils because of old tracks, urban sprawl and increasing domestic and international rail traffic. He wants the NTSB and FRA to “mandate” improvements, but he acknowledged grass-roots demands to reroute tracks away from neighborhoods are “not feasible” because of the multibillion-dollar projected costs.
Federal agencies already were investigating one of the three major crashes: a June 29 collision in south Bexar County that killed an engineer and two people who lived near the tracks, all felled by chlorine gas from a leaking tank car. The calamity also produced criticism of emergency-response efforts.
Hutchison asked the federal agencies to expand their probe to include the other two major accidents — on May 3 and Sept. 24 — both near the San Antonio River and involving hazardous cargo. At least three bystanders were injured in those incidents, the latter of which was blamed on train-hopping vandals who tampered with brake lines on a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train. The May 3 collision was attributed to human error on the part of train crews.
Hutchison said preventing similar crashes requires a thorough study.
After conferring with UP and BNSF officials, Wolff said, he believes recent accidents resulted in part from retirement-induced staffing reductions, combined with increasing freight traffic.
“They went through an early-out program and lost a lot of their good, experienced people. They didn’t fill those positions fast enough. And at the same time, business began to explode. So that’s put some additional stress on them, and they were caught, I think, unprepared for the amount of traffic,” the county judge said.
Wolff said a long-term fix requires a regional restructuring of rail systems. Plans to move freight traffic eastward out of the Interstate 35 corridor, making room for commuter rail between Austin and San Antonio, would make it more feasible to relocate the freight lines that dissect San Antonio, Wolff said.
“That would probably be 10 years,” Wolff said, “but we’re going to continue to push it because it’s a long-range, important thing for us to do, particularly in view of the fact we’ve got Toyota coming in.” The automaker is building a truck-assembly plant not far from the deadly June collision site.
“Every major city — Houston included — needs to take some of the steps we’re taking already,” Wolff said. “It’s a long, drawn-out affair that requires local, state, federal and private funding to make it happen.”
UP officials said they’re eager to address the issues because they want to ensure employee and public safety and prevent more economically disruptive accidents. Among the steps it promised, or implemented, are new rules to promote crew attentiveness and coordination and increased training, including use of a high-tech simulator.
The Omaha, Neb.-based company hopes to offset retirement losses by adding 154 new trainmen and 35 new engineers in San Antonio this year. Another 55 new engineers will be hired next year, officials said.
“This industry is very, very safety-conscious, and those companies that haven’t embraced that, they’re no longer in business,” UP spokesman Mark Davis said.