Yes, Actually. Train Accidents Really ARE Increasing: Ohio Derailment

The U.S. has been tracking train derailments since 1975, and since then, we’ve averaged about 1704 derailments per year.  Most of these aren’t disasters, just annoyances that spill coal, grain, or gravel; and tie up traffic for a while.

But the Ohio derailment may wind up causing long-term damage on the scale of Chornobyl, and since then, people have been paying more attention to derailments in the news.

2023 Derailments

Let’s take a quick look at what’s happened so far this year:

January 9: In Lake City, South Carolina, a train derailed after striking a car that had been parked on the tracks.  The engineer tried to stop but was unable to.  However, no one was in the car, so no injuries were reported.

January 19:  98 cars derailed near Trinway, Ohio.  Only one car out of the 98 was loaded, and no injuries were reported.  However, no causes have been reported yet.

January 21:  Multiple cars derail near Loris, South Carolina, spilling gravel and closing roads.  No injuries were reported.

February 3:  A wheel bearing overheated, causing cars to derail in East Palestine, Ohio.  Five of those cars were carrying vinyl chloride, and one of those cars began to overheat, leading authorities to fear an explosion.  In response, they lit the spilled chemicals on fire, poisoning the surrounding area.

February 4:  One of the trains on Philadelphia’s Septa system derailed because of a cracked rail; the train was able to safely stop and unload its passengers.  No injuries were reported.

February 13:  21 freight cars derailed near Splendora, Texas, after a truck drove onto the tracks.  Several hundred gallons of diesel fuel were spilled, but no other chemicals being transported leaked.  The truck driver was killed.

February 13: A train derailed near Enoree, South Carolina.  No injuries have been reported, but the investigation is still ongoing.

February 16:  A train derailed near Belle Ville, Michigan.  One car containing liquid chlorine derailed, but the tank stayed intact.  No injuries, or potential causes, have been reported.

February 19:  In Delphos, Ohio, a train derailed, knocking over poles and shutting down several intersections.  No hazardous materials were being transported, and no injuries were reported.

This list is by no means exhaustive; it’s just a sample of what’s happened so far in 2023.

What do we make of these accidents?

Is the number of crashes increasing?  Who’s to blame?  Are the crashes the result of an evil plot, or corporate cost-cutting, or is there some as-of-yet unmentioned factor here?  How concerned should we be regarding future incidents?

Rail executives point to the number of incidents per year holding constant over time, but if you look at how much bigger trains have gotten over the past ten years, the rate of accidents per track mile has increased by about 10%.  So yes, safety incidents are increasing.

The rail company responsible for the accident in Ohio, Norfolk Southern, saw an increase of 82% in safety incidents per track mile since 2013.  They’ve shed about one-third of their workforce in the past ten years, keeping costs down and investors happy.  But the people living in the communities their trains go through?  Not so much.

Personally, I wouldn’t rule out some kind of plot to mess with the American infrastructure, but there’s not much evidence of that yet.  A peculiar but little-mentioned detail did occur in Ohio. A blasting cap was found about 1.4 miles away from the crash.   The landowner, Jerry Corbin, found his yard full of ash along with the blasting cap; the EPA didn’t know what to make of it.  They took samples and haven’t told him anything else.  We don’t have answers there.

But we do have a great deal of evidence that points toward corporate cost-cutting.

Who remembers those rail workers threatening to strike a few months ago, just before the holidays?

Most news coverage about the strike focused on Biden signing a law making it illegal for rail workers to strike.  Media claimed that in exchange for declaring strikes illegal, rail workers were getting a big pay raise.

However, listening to a roundtable interview with rail workers themselves,  the picture gets a little more complicated.  Their complaints had less to do with pay and more to do with working conditions.  They may have gotten a pay raise, but not the sick days they had actually been looking for.

Workers discussed the toxic relationship between labor and management, and the increased suicide rate due to the stressful nature of the job.  They talked about the huge push toward replacing human workers with technology that just isn’t ready yet.  Also mentioned was how trains that used to have five people manning them now have two.  The trains keep getting longer, which means they are physically more difficult to monitor.  70% of the union members are on call 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  They’re demoralized and exhausted.

One of the controversial issues within the rail industry has been the implementation of Precision Scheduled Railroading, which claims to streamline service while also cutting costs    Rail companies have been laying off workers since 2015 , even though the amount of goods transported by rail continued to increase through 2018.

PSR helps rail companies cut overhead costs, but it allows for less time to physically inspect cars.  Rail companies point to advanced monitoring technology within the cars; union members respond that the excessive length of some trains makes it difficult to hear alarms going off, and difficult to communicate with their coworkers.  The best monitoring tech in the world doesn’t mean anything if you physically can’t get to the problem area in time.

And the train that derailed in Ohio was huge.  At 150 cars, it was nearly two miles long.  As pointed out by Senators Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance in their letter to Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, this massive train was manned by only one engineer, one conductor, and one conductor-in-training

I’m amazed that two Republican Senators are complaining about corporate cost-cutting, though questions definitely need to be asked here.  But it’s more evidence that times are changing.

There’s one other factor in some industrial accidents.

And I think there may be another factor at play, another change Americans will have to deal with in the upcoming years.  It caught my eye in the report, not of a train derailment, but of a truck accident in Arizona.

On February 14, a truck carrying nitric acid drifted off I-10 in Arizona.  The vehicle crashed and the driver was found dead in the cab.    No cause of death has been confirmed, though officials said it didn’t look like he had been speeding, and there was no evidence of substance abuse.  This 54-year old truck driver seemingly just died.

Where else have we heard about people dying suddenly?  It seems to happen more frequently than it did five years ago. . .

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