Rail Safety Bill, Inspired By Fiery Ohio Derailment, Clears First Major Hurdle

A Senate committee on Wednesday superior laws aimed toward stopping disasters like February’s fiery train derailment and chemical spill in East Palestine, Ohio.

The Railway Safety Act of 2023, championed by Ohio Sens. J.D. Vance (R) and Sherrod Brown (D), has attracted uncommon bipartisan assist in a fiercely divided Congress. Both President Joe Biden (D) and former President Donald Trump (R) have endorsed the measure.

The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation voted 16-11 in favor of the measure, advancing it to the complete Senate for consideration.

In its present type, the invoice would set up new security necessities for freight trains hauling hazardous supplies, restrict the general dimension of trains, require not less than two-person crews, and drastically enhance penalties for rail security violations. It would additionally funnel extra funds to legislation enforcement and first responders for hazardous materials training.

“We have allowed the rail industry to socialize the risk of their business while privatizing the rewards,” Vance mentioned throughout Wednesday’s listening to. “The people of East Palestine are going to deal with the costs of what Norfolk Southern did for the next generation — the mental health costs, the physical health costs, the economic damage, the loss of home and property values.”

“The least that we can do is make it less likely that the next East Palestine happens in our communities,” he mentioned.

On Feb. 3, an almost 2-mile-long Norfolk Southern train carrying poisonous and flammable supplies, together with lots of of hundreds of kilos of vinyl chloride, a typical chemical used within the manufacturing of plastics, careened off the tracks in East Palestine, a city of roughly 5,000 individuals on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. Fearing a catastrophic explosion, authorities carried out what they described as a “controlled burn” of the vinyl chloride three days after the crash, releasing black clouds of poisonous smoke into the air.

The incident sparked worry in East Palestine and surrounding communities, finally made worse by a response effort marked by shoddy water sampling and quite a few conflicts of curiosity.

The invoice, which has expanded since first being launched in March, picked up a number of new supporters forward of Wednesday’s committee vote, together with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), chair of the Commerce Committee, and three extra Republicans: Sens. Mike Braun (R-Ind.), Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) and Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

“No community should have to go through the trauma, evacuation and environmental damage that East Palestine had to go through, especially when you can prevent these [incidents] from happening,” Cantwell mentioned Wednesday.

Several Republicans on the committee voiced concern that the invoice will enhance prices for each trade and American customers. Announcing his opposition to the invoice, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the committee’s rating Republican, argued it might give the Biden administration a “free hand to aggressively restrict the movement of coal, oil, natural gas, ethanol and other essential commodities that the radical green movement hates.”

Vance swung again at Cruz’s feedback, noting that a variety of trade teams have come out in assist of the invoice.

“They would not be supporting it if they thought it would make it impossible to transport their product by rail,” Vance mentioned. “Yes, it may make rail transportation a little bit more expensive. But it’s going to make rail transportation a little bit more expensive in the service of safety.”

The bipartisan effort to spice up rail security within the wake of the Ohio catastrophe hasn’t been with out its partisan assaults.

Republicans have largely condemned the Biden administration’s federal response in Ohio whereas applauding Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and state companies regardless of their quite a few missteps on the state degree. In a press release saying assist for the invoice, Trump slammed Biden for not visiting East Palestine within the wake of the catastrophe and heaped reward on Vance.

“JD Vance has been working hard in the Senate to make sure nothing like this EVER happens again, and that’s why it’s so important for Congress to pass his Railway Safety Act,” Trump’s assertion mentioned.

The railroad trade has a lengthy historical past of preventing stricter security rules whereas gutting employees. And it discovered an ally within the Trump administration, which in 2018 repealed an Obama administration-era rule requiring electronically managed pneumatic brakes — a contemporary know-how that Norfolk Southern as soon as embraced — on trains hauling a specific amount of crude oil and different so-called “high-hazard flammable” supplies. The Association of American Railroads, an trade lobbying group of which Norfolk Southern is a member, fiercely opposed the regulation.

“Do Republicans stand for corporate America or our own people?” Vance wrote in a Twitter submit forward of Wednesday’s vote. “It’s time for choosing.”