Derailment= East Palestine Ohio

The article says there’s a detector just a little further down from where the security camera there was. Did it find that issue? That looks pretty bad…

This map, from the article above, is very helpful in understanding the layout of events.

Lead story on NBC Nightly News this evening.

I'll post a link as soon as NBC makes it available.

addendun: Here's the link

Was discussing this with a number of folks on an email conversation. As mentioned here, looks bad that the detector at Salem which was downline from the security camera did not alarm. Brings up what are calibration standards and frequency of testing for these detectors. That will have to be reviewed.

In addition, the maintenance record of the car will have to be reviewed especially when wheelsets were inspected and bearings changed.

‘32 Nasty:’ Rail Workers Say They Knew the Train That Derailed in East Palestine Was Dangerous

Selected fair use quotes:

Because of staff cuts, workers who used to inspect hundreds of cars a day now have to inspect a thousand or more, according to multiple Norfolk Southern employees Motherboard interviewed in 2021. They said that managers will pressure workers not to report safety defects they discover, because fixing them will hurt PSR metrics such as the amount of time trains spend in the terminal, which, under PSR’s philosophy, is supposed to be as little as possible. But, if they don’t report a defect and something catastrophic happens on the rails, workers feel vulnerable, believing the company will try to pin responsibility on individual workers not following official protocol. As a result, workers feel they operate under two different, often contradictory rulebooks, one official to maintain a pretense of safety and one unofficial intended to keep trains moving. In this sense, one mechanic who worked for Norfolk Southern for 13 years, told Motherboard that workers can “kind of be screwed one way or the other.”

According to the train’s load profile, confirmed by two workers familiar with 32N’s load profile and reported by the cross-union worker solidarity group Railroad Workers United, 40 percent of the train’s weight was in the rear third of the train’s length, and the back half was the heavier half. This is the opposite of long standing railroad best practice, which calls for trains to be frontloaded with the heaviest cars and the lightest at the back. But rearranging train cars takes time and manpower, both of which have been cut under PSR. As Motherboard has previously reported, trains are routinely sent onto the tracks in violation of these century-old best practices in order to save time and labor costs. The longer the train, the tricker it is to control, because cars could be in different situations; for example, the front of the train could be going downhill while the back is going uphill, according to an influential white paper written by Grady Cothen, a former Federal Railroad Administration safety official on the dangers of long trains under PSR.

*sigh*

Well, plenty of intermodal trains running nearby have routinely been seen to be unevenly loaded. Many times, I have seen the first thirty cars be sparcely loaded and remainder of train fully loaded. Of course, how many trucks on the nearby Interstate are improperly handled too. Things in general industry aren't much better, we had a wood dust silo fire over the Christmas shutdown due to many factors from management to work force; that incident brought 10+ fire departments. We were lucky that we were up by Jan.4.

William C. Vantuono, Editor-in-Chief of Railway Age published this fact based, well ritten article/op-ed in Railway Age 2/15/23:
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/clas ... annel=news

Subhead:

Fifty cars of a Norfolk Southern train hauling vinyl chloride and a variety of other freight derailed in East Palestine, Ohio late on Feb. 3, causing a massive fire that forced evacuation of a three-square-mile area. No injuries to crew, residents or first responders were reported. The cause of the accident, which the National Transportation Safety Board was mechanically related, is under investigation. The train was operating from Madison, Ill., to Conway Yard near Pittsburgh, Pa. Service has been fully restored, and NS has established a charitable fund to assist the local community. Meanwhile, misinformation-full media frenzy, driven by uninformed reporting by local and national media and stoked by various groups who appear to be leveraging the derailment and its aftermath to support their own agendas, has been spreading faster than the fire that resulted from it. (See commentary, at the conclusion of this article.)

NPR reporting about a town hall held... and NS skipped out on it. People wanted answers. Other national outlets (including NBC News Today Show) is jiving with said reporting:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/11573965 ... derailment

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Residents of the Ohio village upended by a freight train derailment packed a school gym on Wednesday to seek answers about whether they were safe from toxic chemicals that spilled or were burned off.

Hundreds of worried people gathered to hear state officials tell them — as they did earlier in the day — that testing so far has shown local air is safe to breathe and to promise that safety testing of the air and water would continue.

But residents had many questions over health hazards and they demanded more transparency from the railroad operator, Norfolk Southern, which did not attend the gathering, citing safety concerns for its staff.

"They just danced around the questions a lot," said Danielle Deal, who lives about three miles from the derailment site. "Norfolk needed to be here."

In my opinion all of this is smelling of lawsuit and maybe a board complaint.

urr304 wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 7:00 am Well, plenty of intermodal trains running nearby have routinely been seen to be unevenly loaded. Many times, I have seen the first thirty cars be sparcely loaded and remainder of train fully loaded. Of course, how many trucks on the nearby Interstate are improperly handled too. Things in general industry aren't much better, we had a wood dust silo fire over the Christmas shutdown due to many factors from management to work force; that incident brought 10+ fire departments. We were lucky that we were up by Jan.4.

Do note that a 20' container has the same gross weight limit as a 53' container and that the tendency is that the more valuable the cargo in the container, the lighter it is (this is generally true of most commerce--heavy bulk cargo is less valuable pound for pound than finished goods), so less valuable cargos tend to be in smaller containers (where the cargo's weight limit means even that container is not completely full). This can easily lead to a well with 2 20' containers weighing more than a well with 2 53' containers.

Regarding the Railway Age story - in some ways, this is the bed that the industry (post-PSR) has made for itself, and now they have to lay down in it.

The 50 cars involved aspect seems kind of high. Typically a wreck like this, given the track speed and route profile, usually you would come away with 30-some cars involved. I hope the NTSB starts looking at the impacts upon hazmat from 150 car train forces, higher train weights, DPU disengagement (if there was a DPU in use here - was there?) and how that possibly contributed to a typical 30 car derailment becoming 50 cars. Was the pile-up aggravated or made worse by the weight of the train behind the point of derailment? How many breached tankers might not have been breached with a lesser amount of train weight running into the pile? Maybe the solution lies in certain types of hazmat being restricted to shorter trains.

Generally speaking, I think NS does a sloppier job at train composition than CSX currently does. Just watching the cameras, one sees empty flats on the rear of CSX trains, while NS intermodal trains often have empty spines on the locomotive drawbar followed by doublestacks on the rear. Did all this 'clean-sheeting' eventually shit the bed?

Per the NTSB 38 cars derailed, 12 damaged due to the subsequent fires.

STrRedWolf wrote:NPR reporting about a town hall held... and NS skipped out on it. People wanted answers. Other national outlets (including NBC News Today Show) is jiving with said reporting:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/16/11573965 ... derailment

EAST PALESTINE, Ohio — Residents of the Ohio village upended by a freight train derailment packed a school gym on Wednesday to seek answers about whether they were safe from toxic chemicals that spilled or were burned off.

Hundreds of worried people gathered to hear state officials tell them — as they did earlier in the day — that testing so far has shown local air is safe to breathe and to promise that safety testing of the air and water would continue.

But residents had many questions over health hazards and they demanded more transparency from the railroad operator, Norfolk Southern, which did not attend the gathering, citing safety concerns for its staff.

"They just danced around the questions a lot," said Danielle Deal, who lives about three miles from the derailment site. "Norfolk needed to be here."

In my opinion all of this is smelling of lawsuit and maybe a board complaint.

NS skipped it because there were threats of violence.

At this point, the local and state environmental agencies are the ones in the hit seat - they said it was safe to return home, not the railroad. They ordered the controlled burn, not the railroad.

Certainly plenty of questions remain on the root cause, but the response has been a goat rodeo. You can't blame that on PSR.

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk

johnpbarlow wrote: ↑Thu Feb 16, 2023 7:16 am
Subhead:

Meanwhile, misinformation-full media frenzy, driven by uninformed reporting by local and national media and stoked by various groups who appear to be leveraging the derailment and its aftermath to support their own agendas, has been spreading faster than the fire that resulted from it.

Boy, this is spot on. Suddenly, but probably not surprisingly, this has become top of the list for political finger pointing, conspiracy theory crazies, and arm chair disaster response chiefs.
The incident was/is terrible. No 'feel good' outcome was coming from this. There's no need to exaggerate or make up garbage, it's plenty bad on it's face.

https://www.thebulwark.com/the-sun-and- ... erailment/

This article in The Bulwark compares the pollution from a train derailment to the pollution from the brand new ethane cracker facility that was built just 20 miles down-river. Both sites give off excess VOC's, but the one that directly employs 600 people gets different treatment in the eyes of the locals.