EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Large crowds, changes of format, and public frustration marked Wednesday night’s public meeting over the aftermath of the Feb. 3 derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine.
The town hall meeting at the East Palestine High had been switched beforehand to an informational session featuring a series of tables with officials available to answer questions. That changed again after about 20 minutes as some attendees expressed unhappiness with the format, according to news reports, with East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway holding a Q&A session.
Norfolk Southern announced earlier in the day that it would not attend the meeting [see “Citing ‘physical threat,’ Norfolk Southern withdraws …,” Trains News Wire, Feb. 15, 2023].
“I’m just as frustrated as you are,” Conaway told those in attendance about the railroad’s decision. “I’m trying to get answers. I cannot force them to be here.”
Conaway said he and other officials stood by the decision to perform a controlled release of chemicals from derailed tank cars, the New York Times reports, while those in attendance questioned whether their water was safe to drink, and expressed continuing fears about their safety despite official assurances. “Why are people getting sick if there’s nothing in the air or water?” one woman asked, one of several questions to draw applause from a crowd estimated at 700 or more.
The latest such official statement came Wednesday from Gov. Mike DeWine, who said tests showed no contaminants in the five wells that supply East Palestine’s water, WKYC-TV reports. However, those with private wells should use bottled water until they have their water tested, the Ohio Department of Health advised.
Difficulty in arranging such testing was expressed by some at Wednesday’s meeting, while others asked for more details about the testing process.
In other developments:
— Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, in a Tuesday letter to NS CEO Alan Shaw, said the railroad’s “failure to adhere to well-accepted standards of practice related to incident management, and prioritizing an accelerated an arbitrary timeline to reopen the rail line, injected unnecessary risk and created confusion” in the wake of the derailment. WESA Radio, which published the letter, reported that Shapiro had asked the state’s Public Utility Commision to investigate the NS response to the incident.
Shapiro said state officials had noticed three significant issues with the railroad’s actions: its failure to participate in unified command and planning in response to the incident; it provided “inaccurate information and conflicting modeling” about the controlled release of vinyl chloride from derailed tank cars; and its “unwillingness to explore or articulate alternate courses of action” to that controlled-release plan limited officials’ ability to respond.
— U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan will vist East Palestine today to assess the continuing response to the derailment, and meet with local officials and residents. EPA officials will also demonstrate the equipment they are using to monitor the area’s air quality.
Regan and other officials are scheduled to hold a press conference this afternoon, WKYC-TV reports.
How many ex Conrail or Penn Central managers if any still work for NS in the area. People who are local to the area and may have a better working relationship with local officials.
$25,000 to a town of 5,000 doesn’t go very far in promoting good relations.
Bearings will fail. But as stated earlier the failure rate now with the sealed bearings is very small. However, once again, I state the focus will be on the detectors. That bearing should have been heating up long before it started burning. Detectors have recording devices in them that will be gone over. There’s supposedly security camera videos of the bearing burning. I’ve seen the ring doorbell video from New Waterford with the bearing in flames. So the NTSB no doubt is looking along the route for any possibilities as far as security cameras or ring recording this trains passage. It’s also my understanding that the crew was in the process of slowing the train down to stop it when it derailed.
There is a youtube video by a rail worker at a site 50 miles from there where he had been dispatched for a talking defect detector that generated false reports. He said he walked once side of the train stopped by reported troubles detected when the conductor walked the other side with heat guns checking and found no hot wheels or brakes. While repairing it the detector generated more false reports. He was told dispatch told following trains to ignore reports from that detector and the next nearest one was just beyond where the wreck happened.
THIS! Is the reason for those so called “restrictive job killing” & “burdensome” regulation so criticized by some. Whether it be the RR’s, pipelines, oil/energy, mining, foods, pharma etc, We mean nothing to them!! That’s why they have Legal Depts this just gives them something to do just wear down the litigants until they settle. The only reason this still happens is because there are nowhere near enough Govt inspectors in these areas to enforce the regulations these industries have seen to that with their political bribes politically manipulating these agencies abilities by gutting the very agencies that are suppose to oversee them.
I will be interested to see what safety regulations the FRA will issue in light of the East Palestine derailment. Perhaps they will require railroads to install more closely spaced hotbox/draging equipment detectors, especially in the vicinity of population centers.
They would need also an adequate testing schedule and enough maintainers to ensure the detectors are working.
Anyone who questions the controlled burn strategy should view the NFPA bleve training video, which is available online. A controlled situation seems to me to be far superior to an uncontrolled explosion.
George,
The roller bearings on freight cars are now what we called “NFL” bearings when they came into use probably close to 30 years ago. NFL meant no field lubrication. They have no grease fitting to add grease. They went to this because studies of bearing failures showed that many of them occurred after the car had been recently lubricated. The problem was that people were putting too much grease in them resulting in seal failures. The bearing manufacturers stepped up and designed and the AAR tested bearings that would last the expected life of the wheels.
Do freight car roller bearings still fail? Obviously yes, but not near as many as they used to.
Charles – So is it fair to say that the entire North American freight car fleet, railroad and privately owned, now runs these bearings? Are the older manually lubricated types prohibited in interchange?
If the pressure relief valves on the affected cars had in fact been rendered inoperable after the derailment, as claimed, then the “alternative cause of action” was to await explosions and flying shrapnel. If that had been chosen, NS would be blamed for going that way instead of the controlled release. The fault and blame lies in those hotbox detectors, how far apart they were, how much reaction time the crew had after an alert, and when and where the journal that burned off was cleaned, oiled, tested and stenciled.
One more thought, which may be obsolete. My recollection is that there are two types of roller bearings, one requiring oil lubrication, and one requiring greasing. The grease type has a much longer scheduled interval between servicing times than the oil type.