Rail 'safety' planning: common good, common sense in short supply

Train derailment sends crude oil cars into Kanawha River; explosions erupt, Feb 2015.

Mock derailment tests emergency response

LaCrosseTribune.com   By Chris Hubbuch   June 10, 2015

[Scenario:] .... a freight train hauling 2.7 million gallons of crude oil derails as it crosses Pammel Creek on the South Side of La Crosse, spilling about 100,000 gallons of the volatile cargo.

Traffic comes to a halt as motorists stop to gawk at the overturned tankers beneath the overpass. Firefighters struggle to get through the bottleneck.

Within minutes, the pool of oil ignites, searing the skin of everyone within 50 yards and sending a plume of toxic smoke into the air. Shortly after firefighters arrive, a tank car explodes in a fireball that can be seen for miles, killing a dozen people — including five firefighters — and injuring another 60.

That was the fictitious scenario posed to dozens of emergency responders Wednesday at an Onalaska conference center....

....The scenario outlined damages far beyond the loss of life:

• 86 nearby homes are damaged; 22 are uninhabitable, displacing 39 residents.
• The Mormon Coulee overpass is destroyed, hindering access for first responders and snarling traffic for months.
• Some 75,000 gallons of oil spills into the Mississippi River, spreading over 64 miles to Guttenberg, Iowa.

And the economic effects are lasting, with homes near the blast zone losing value a year after the derailment and businesses losing sales. As a result, the nearby Walmart hires about 100 fewer workers during the holiday season, according to the scenario.

Participants on Wednesday discussed emergency response; today they will meet to look at recovery.

“That’s where the long tail is,” Satula said. “Recovery takes a long time.”.....  “no kind of training is really going to prepare a fire department … for the kind of catastrophic event we’re going through today.”.........more here

[Ed note: no one discussed liability. ]  

House Republicans' Safety Plan for Amtrak: Videotape the Next Derailment Rather Than Prevent It

By Tim Starks      The New Republic    

.....Tuesday, the GOP-controlled House passed a transportation spending bill that provides $9 million for inward-facing cameras in all cabs to record engineers on the job. The funding was added without objection from anyone in either party.

The cameras might have bipartisan support, but what they won’t do is prevent the next train accident. They are only useful when a crash has already happened. “Inward-facing cameras are very important for determining the reason for a crash afterwards,” Tho “Bella” Dinh-Zarr, the vice chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, told a Senate committee Wednesday. And in the meantime, for all the Republican protests that money for rail safety wasn’t an issue in the May derailment, the House’s spending bill denies funding that very well could avert the next disaster.....    more here