Train that derailed Feb. 3, creating a dangerous disaster, wasn't labeled hazardous; critics see lax federal monitoring

Photo Gene J. Puskar,  The Associated Press

The official website for East Palestine, Ohio, calls itself "The place you want to be." But at 9 p.m. on Feb. 3, a Norfolk Southern train chugged through, and no one in the town of 5,000 knew the cars were carrying hazardous chemicals. The train derailed, followed by an explosion, a dangerous fire and a controlled burn that released more toxins.

"Among the chemicals the freight was carrying, five cars contained vinyl chloride, a colorless gas that is linked to various cancers and is used in a variety of plastic products and manufacturing," reports John McCracken for Grist. "In the initial days after the derailment, temperatures rose in the cars holding the vinyl chloride and officials at both the railroad company and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered that residents evacuate East Palestine" while they conducted a controlled burn of some cars. Gov. Mike De Wine "two bad options," McCracken reports. "Do nothing and risk that a train car full of vinyl chloride would explode, which would have been 'catastrophic,' resulting in shrapnel flying out in a one-mile radius. The second option won."

East Palestine in Columbiana County, Ohio (Wikipedia)

DeWine "said he learned that the train cars were marked as non-hazardous, and thus officials weren’t notified that the train would be crossing through the state," McCracken writes. "He called on Congress to look into the regulations that would allow a train carrying multiple cars with hazardous substances to be labeled non-hazardous." He said, “We should know when we have trains carrying hazardous materials that are going through the state of Ohio." 

"About 4.5 million tons of toxic chemicals are shipped by rail each year and an average of 12,000 rail cars carrying hazardous materials pass through cities and towns each day, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, reports Tom Perkins of The Guardian. "Ineffective oversight and a largely self-monitoring industry that has cut the nation’s rail workforce to the bone in recent years as it puts record profits over safety is responsible for the wreck, said Ron Kaminkow, an Amtrak locomotive engineer and former Norfolk Southern freight engineer" and secretary of Railroad Workers United, "a non-profit labor group that coordinates with the nation’s rail unions."

“The Palestine wreck is the tip of the iceberg and a red flag,” Kaminkow told Perkins. “If something is not done, then it’s going to get worse, and the next derailment could be cataclysmic.” Perkins notes that the Transportation Department "in 2020 approved a rule to allow liquified natural gas, or LNG, to be shipped via rail with no additional safety regulations. Trains can now run 100 or more tank cars filled with 30,000 gallons of the substance, largely from shale fields to saltwater ports. The decision was opposed by local leaders, unions, fire departments and the National Transportation Safety Board."