Derailment in Westford Ma 2-20-14

I got a kick out of it, after missing the pun. I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed

FRA will fine Pan Am after investigation of this derailment.Also the town of Greenland, NH is raising concerns about Pan Am's proposal to increase propane shipments as a result of this incident. From the Lowell Sun-



Officials: Pan Am to be fined

By Samantha Allen , [email protected]
Updated: 04/02/2014 09:43:13 AM EDT0 Comments


WESTFORD -- Federal Railroad Administration officials have determined the train derailment in February was caused by a track issue and Pan Am Railways will be fined.

According to Rep. Niki Tsongas' office, FRA inspectors went to the train derailment on Bridge Street in the Graniteville neighborhood following an incident Feb. 19, where five cars slipped off the track. After walking the site, the administration determined there was a "wide gage" track condition. Pan Am, based in Billerica, will be charged with a violation for that issue which generally carries a $5,000 fine, according to Tsongas' Regional Director Jane Adams. Town Manager Jodi Ross said she was made aware of the development last Wednesday.

Read more: http://www.lowellsun.com/news/ci_254746 ... z2xmGjxQh3" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

First, a $5000 fine isn't even a slap on the wrist. I do hope thats a typo, as much as I'm pro rail, the penalty for screwing up should be big enough to actually make a difference. Although I'm not really sure why they get fined for wide guage?

Lowell Sun wrote:"Was this something that happened as a result of weather, or was it a failure on the part of one or more employees of Pan Am to follow their own rules?" Banks posed.

According to the Journal of Wheel/Rail Interaction from 2004, the wide-gage code is cited nearly 30 percent of the time in all track-related derailments.

For someone who is a "rail expert" to accuse employees without knowing the specifics is crude. Especially with that line followed by the state that 30% of derailments are wide guage related...Its obviously something that happens a lot more than because a couple of delinquent employees didn't do their jobs... For a rail expert he did nothing to help the industry out there, what a joke.

Finally, I think most of these people would wet themselves if they realized how often derailments occur. Its a weekly, dare I say daily, occurance on the branches here in Maine. Most derailments don't happen at 40mph on the main. Most don't stack 50 or 60 cars up. 5 cars upright isn't a terribly big deal, no leaks, etc... I really don't see the problem other than the town manager and other officials don't understand what was going on.

It's funny that they called the police, but that was the one really dumb move PR wise. not reporting I understand in this case, but calling the cops on the town manager really adds nothing of value.

First I've heard of a fine being levied over a track defect.

well- didn't pas kick the hornets nest. will the loon who asked the police to arrest the town manager remain employed? unintended consequences. ken patrick

KEN PATRICK wrote:well- didn't pas kick the hornets nest. will the loon who asked the police to arrest the town manager remain employed? unintended consequences. ken patrick

Westford is Pan Am Railways, not Pan Am Southern.

Since this fiasco ended I have gotten something clarified. No one from the RR asked that the TM be arrested, they asked the police to remove her from the property. I would have done the same thing had it come to it, but I would have communicated better about the situation to begin with. It's easy to see how one was exaggerated into the other though, some municipal figures feel as though they need to justify their authority in situations where they have none.

KEN PATRICK wrote:well- didn't pas kick the hornets nest. will the loon who asked the police to arrest the town manager remain employed? unintended consequences. ken patrick

would you trust your employer to continue employing you for trying to remove someone trespassing on your property? Ken, this is an EXTREMELY rhetorical question

wow. don't we have some true railroad apologists posting here. can't any of you agree that the town manager had every right to go look at another par incident? the row passes thru her town. it is not immune from local oversight. now she has involved fra . i suspect the far will find something. after all, our govenment folk need to have stuff to justify their existence. so foolish. i believe the railroad needs to instruct all employees to accept that town officials can be on site. not that any high speed train movements exist to pose a danger. after all isn't par content with 10mph? ken patrick

As I wrote on the previous page of this thread, PAR could have avoided all of this by simply giving the fire chief or the town manager a quick phone call. Absent that little nugget of public relations goodwill, the next best thing would've been for the PAR employee to say to the town manager, "We've got a lot of heavy equipment here, and you don't have the proper safety gear, so let's walk back to the crossing [or wherever it was that she entered the right-of-way] and I'll call my supervisor and have him brief you and the chief."

Instead, she was apparently met with "get out of here or you'll be arrested."

MEC407 wrote:Rightly or wrongly, everyone is on a hair trigger after Lac-Mégantic. Pan Am could have (and should have) avoided all this drama by simply contacting the town manager and/or the fire chief to give them a quick heads-up about what was going on, and then they wouldn't have had to go walking down the tracks trying to find a PAR manager to tell them what the hell was going on.

It's human nature that if people don't know what's going on and are left to their imagination, they'll fear the worst. That's Public Relations 101. PAR brought this situation on themselves. It's classic "Guilford 1.0" behavior and an example of how some things have not changed.

KEN-
Perhaps one thing you and I can agree on is that I do not qualify as a railroad apologist, true or otherwise. If you should have doubts, you should have no trouble is assuring yourself of my non-apologist status after a review -- quick or slow -- of my posts.
Was the Westford Town Manager on railroad property without railroad permission? If she was and, further, if she was asked by a railroad authority to leave, she then would have firmly established her trespasser status. Was the Westford Town Manager trained and/or competent at wreck/hazmat mitigation? If not, her continued presence on the property would not contribute -- even in a minor way -- to the successful recovery of a status quo ante, a cogent argument even being feasible that her continued presence would constitute a distraction that would undercut her presumed goal of achieving that recovery.
The Town Manager could have been on scene all she wanted, but when she literally crossed the line onto railroad property and was reluctant to leave that property, she then figuratively crossed the line and fostered a conflict that was unproductive to and distracted from the priority of re-establshing equilibrium. The Westford Police who assisted her off the property seemed to have a better grasp on both the law and the priority than did the Town Manager.
The three necessities of a fire are fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. The atmosphere may have supplied the oxygen, the Town Manager's choice of on-scene and on-property actions and the reactions of the PAR staff may well have been incendiary, but fortunately, the only fire was figurative.
Perhaps someone with more experience in fuel-soaked phrasing could have helped the Town Manager.

You're barking up the wrong tree.

She has a right to look, from public property.

FRA involvement is irregardless of municipal employee temper tantrums.

KEN PATRICK wrote:wow. don't we have some true railroad apologists posting here. can't any of you agree that the town manager had every right to go look at another par incident? the row passes thru her town. it is not immune from local oversight. now she has involved fra . i suspect the far will find something. after all, our govenment folk need to have stuff to justify their existence. so foolish. i believe the railroad needs to instruct all employees to accept that town officials can be on site. not that any high speed train movements exist to pose a danger. after all isn't par content with 10mph? ken patrick

There's an article in today's NY Times that starts with this bit of comedy:

Jodi Ross, town manager in Westford, Mass., did not expect she would be threatened with arrest after she and her fire chief went onto the railroad tracks to find out why a train carrying liquid petroleum gas derailed on a bridge in February.

But as they reached the accident site northwest of Boston, a manager for Pan Am Railways called the police, claiming she was trespassing on rail property.

'So this genius walks into an accident site presumably where heavy machinery is being used and is surprised she's told to leave?

The full article doesn't talk about PAR much. It's about railroads being 'secretive' about transporting hazmat materials like crude oil - ignoring the terrorism possibilities inherit in telling the public about such matters. I just found the quote above to be pretty comical. Since when is PAR a major hauler oil trains anyway?

Full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/busin ... ml?hp&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

DogBert wrote:There's an article in today's NY Times that starts with this bit of comedy:

Jodi Ross, town manager in Westford, Mass., did not expect she would be threatened with arrest after she and her fire chief went onto the railroad tracks to find out why a train carrying liquid petroleum gas derailed on a bridge in February.

But as they reached the accident site northwest of Boston, a manager for Pan Am Railways called the police, claiming she was trespassing on rail property.

'So this genius walks into an accident site presumably where heavy machinery is being used and is surprised she's told to leave?

The full article doesn't talk about PAR much. It's about railroads being 'secretive' about transporting hazmat materials like crude oil - ignoring the terrorism possibilities inherit in telling the public about such matters. I just found the quote above to be pretty comical. Since when is PAR a major hauler oil trains anyway?

Full article
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/busin ... ml?hp&_r=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Once again, the news media reports only 1 side of the story, and puts blame on the railroads..

J

Any clown can match the UN placard # to a material in a hazmat book. The last thing the RR's are trying to do is be secretive. Protect and keep nitwits out of their business? That's more the case.

If these municipalities really have their panties in a bunch so much they need to lobby their legislators to change the laws. Otherwise play by the rules like everyone else.

It is the municipalities who will be responding to any incidents. At the same time they cannot enforce any regulation or sanction because it happens at a federal level. This town manager may not have followed railroad protocol but that situation might have been avoided if there had been prompt information flow to the town/fire service.

newpylong wrote:If these municipalities really have their panties in a bunch so much they need to lobby their legislators to change the laws.

Good luck against the K Street lobbyists.