Unless Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg were supposed to be recalibrating the hot bearing detectors on Norfolk Southern’s trains, it’s hard to blame them for the disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. The derailment, close to the Pennsylvania border, spilled more than 100,000 gallons of highly flammable vinyl chloride.
And Donald Trump, who showed up in East Palestine on Wednesday ever eager to exploit an incident for his own purposes, also wasn’t to blame for having lifted some rail regulations when he was in the White House, as the Biden administration suggests. The Obama rule mandating advanced brakes and speed restrictions for trains with large volumes of flammable liquids would have made no difference.
Accidents do happen.
In this case, as laid out in the preliminary findings of the National Transportation Safety Board yesterday, as Buttigieg was making his own visit to the area, the sensors installed in the railbed to alert crews of passing trains about overheating bearings did exactly as they were set to do.
An alarm goes off when the temperature of the passing bearing exceeds 170°F above the ambient air. For such a warm but non-critical, situation, crews are to stop and inspect the equipment. A difference of 200°F or more is critical and the hot car must be removed from the train.
On the night of Feb. 3, when it was just 10 degrees out, the bearings on railcar #23 (on the train with 149 cars) was measured at 38° warmer than the air. Then, 10 miles later, #23 was 103° warmer, so no alarm was tripped. But at the next detector, 20 miles up the line, the alarm rang as the bearings on #23 were 253° hotter than the surroundings. The crew braked and stopped the train, as several cars derailed, including five tank cars with vinyl chloride.
While the railroad and the feds should have moved faster on the cleanup and aiding the community, the rail safety fix should be to connect the railbed detectors so they pick up sudden temperature increases in the bearings.
