Facts were slow to leak out, but once reported, they swirled and accumulated around Internet forums and reddit threads like plumes of smoke: “50 train cars derailed,” “hazardous materials,” “vinyl chloride,” “controlled burn.” Commenters on the threads expressed shock to learn of the February 3 Ohio freight train derailment and the resulting ecological catastrophe through “a silly subreddit” and not a major news website.
Amateur photographs of the smoke column rising above the charred derailment site in East Palestine, Ohio spread on social media. Residents within a mile radius of the site were evacuated from their homes. Posts about pets and wild animals becoming sick or dying followed. The freight train company, Norfolk Southern Railway, pledged $25,000 towards the cleanup effort.
Here in the Hudson Valley, the CSX freight track hugs the western bank of the Hudson River as it passes through Newburgh, Kingston and Saugerties on its way to the Port of Albany and beyond. Designated the “River Subdivision,” this portion of the track can see 20 freight trains per day, up to five of them carrying the explosion-prone Bakken crude Oil (HV1 crosslink: https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2014/06/26/oil-trains-raise-safety-environmental-concerns/)
On a good day, getting stuck at one of the many CSX train crossings, as 100-odd train cars dutifully trundle across is the most a Hudson Valley resident can expect to be inconvenienced by the freight operator. On March 7, 2017 however, 14 train cars and three locomotives of a southbound 77-car CSX train derailed in the City of Newburgh. And while “none of the toxic materials the train was transporting were spilled.” the 4600 gallons of spilled diesel fuel took days to clean up. The crash was labeled “close to a miracle” by state police captain Richard Mazzone. Newburgh got lucky.
Type in the search term “CSX derails” into trains.com’s news search (a great website for the train-curious) and returned news articles tell of an average of three derailments per calendar year for the operator. Already on the leaderboard for 2023: 20 CSX cars derailed in January, 50 miles west of Akron, Ohio. Luckily no one was hurt, nor were “incidents involving cargo” reported.
“Lucky” is a frequent adjective in train derailment reporting: no one hurt, toxic cargo not spilled into the soil and water. “May all your train derailments be lucky”, the ancient proverb goes.
Record pandemic profits notwithstanding, over the last six years the freight-train industry as a whole has cut 30 percent of its workforce. Obama-era safety requirements, including brake upgrades for trains carrying hazardous materials, were rolled back by the Trump regime following successful lobbying by the Association of American Railroads (AAR). Both CSX and Norfolk Southern are AAR members. Luck is carrying a heavy load.
Can CSX and its AAR brethren be made to turn this train around? Re-hire the staff? Re-introduce abandoned safety measures? Reduce profits by investing in more secure train cars and track maintenance, perhaps shorter trains? Or will they just set $25k aside for a cloudy day? The latest news on the internet is that Erin Brokovitch has reached out to the Ohians affected. The true fallout of February’s catastrophe will not be known for years.
When the next freight train derails in the Hudson Valley, and a derailment is all but guaranteed by the data, reduced staff numbers and stripped safety measures (HV1 crosslink: https://hudsonvalleyone.com/2014/03/14/the-daily-danger-locals-prep-for-rail-mishaps/), let’s hope we’ll get lucky, as Newburgh did in 2017. If not, an Ohio-sized spill on a track that runs through Kingston, Newburgh and Saugerties would see an entire town’s residents displaced by the one-mile radius evacuation. This evacuation would be just the beginning of a very unlucky streak.
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