Opinion

No community in America wants to be the next East Palestine, Ohio. It will be known for generations as the site of the Feb. 3 Norfolk Southern train derailment and the lingering scars of that day. A slew of toxic chemicals burned in a black cloud over the town and ran off into nearby waterways killing thousands of fish and other aquatic life. Families had to evacuate swiftly. Weeks of panic have followed. Government and company officials have struggled to address safety concerns.

The No. 1 priority now is ensuring the well-being of nearby residents. Norfolk Southern chief executive Alan Shaw vows to "do the right things." Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) insists the company will "pay for everything." That has to include immediate clean up and long-term health monitoring. The town of Paulsboro, N.J., should serve as a warning of what could lie ahead. A similar derailment there in 2012 also released vinyl chloride. Some residents did not encounter serious health problems until years later.

Equally urgent is stopping anything like this from happening again. The accident was "100 percent preventable," National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy said. Her agency issued a preliminary report Thursday outlining what is known about what happened: On the 23rd car of the 9,000-foot-long, 149-car train, a bearing connecting a wheel to its axle was worn out and overheated. Norfolk Southern's warning system went off. The crew tried to stop the train, but couldn't in time. In other words, Norfolk Southern's safeguards didn't fail; the problem was, they were inadequate.

In the past decade, America's freight rail companies have become zealots for efficiency. Trains are longer, and they don't stop as often. Unprofitable customers are gone. Scheduling is meticulous. Nearly 60,000 jobs disappeared since 2015. The companies’ stock prices and profitability have surged. Still, derailments are at historic lows. But the East Palestine accident has shown how deficient the industry has been when it comes to investing in upgrades. Many trains still rely on a Civil War-era braking system, and they aren't using the latest detectors that experts say could have caught the deteriorating bearing months before that fateful day.

See how the railroad industry has changed, in 6 charts

Disappointingly — but predictably — the accident has become political fodder, with Democrats blaming former president Donald Trump for loosening safety rules, and Republicans claiming the Biden administration was slow to react. But even amid the finger-pointing, there are some concrete steps that all sides should agree upon and implement quickly. Here are four:

By the time Norfolk Southern's alarm system warned that the 23rd car on the 149-car train had a problem, it was too late for even a state-of-the-art braking system to avert a calamity. This was the equivalent of a car's fuel gauge coming on when it was a block away from running out of gas.

The current system to monitor the health of bearings relies on temperature. Every few miles, a "defect detector" takes the temperature of hundreds of bearings as the train rolls by. The preliminary report spells out the data from this accident: The 23rd car was 38 degrees above ambient temperature initially. Ten miles later, it was 103 degrees above. The next detector — which came 20 miles later — "recorded the suspect bearing's temperature at 253°F above ambient," the NTSB report said. That's when the alarm went off.

The best way to prevent this kind of debacle would be to detect the bearing problems much earlier. One option, rail safety experts say, is to require more detectors so there isn't a 20-mile gap. A better one, several said, is to install devices that monitor the vibration of bearings, not just temperature.

"This bearing likely started to fail as early as September," said Constantine Tarawneh, director of the University Transportation Center for Railway Safety in Texas. "Onboard [vibration] sensors are the answer. They tell you when the bearing starts to fail."

Such monitors can be installed on individual rail cars (the most expensive option) or at various points along the track. They would flag when a bearing is beginning to weaken, giving crews plenty of time to examine and replace faulty parts. Making this upgrade across the rail system should be a top focus of Congress, President Biden and regulators.

What escalated the severity of the East Palestine derailment was the need to release and burn vinyl chloride from five rail cars on Feb. 6 — three days after the derailment. There was fear that those cars might explode as the temperature inside one tank car continued rising.

It's still not clear exactly what went wrong, but the preliminary report indicates National Transportation Safety Board investigators are turning much of their attention to tank car design. In particular, they plan to examine the relief valves and other components on the train cars carrying the vinyl chloride.

"The industry needs to improve the way the tank cars are made," said Magdy Elsibaie, a former director of research at the Federal Railroad Administration. Safety experts say it's likely that NTSB will recommend stronger tank cars with thicker walls, especially on ones that carry dangerous materials. Some steps in that direction were taken a decade ago after headline-grabbing derailments involving gas, including the tragic 2013 derailment in Quebec that led to an explosion that killed 47 people.

One of the biggest criticisms of America's seven major freight rail carriers is their collective resistance to upgrading the brake systems on trains. Widely in use now are antiquated air brakes, which work by sending an air signal throughout the train. It takes time for the signal to reach the caboose, which means that cars in the front brake sooner than those in the back. This is especially true as freight trains have gotten longer.

About three decades ago, a much faster electronic braking system came along, in which all parts of the train get the signal at the same time.

In 2015, in the wake of high-profile gas train derailments and explosions, the Obama administration pushed hard for widespread adoption of these more modern systems, known as electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, or ECP. But the Trump administration repealed the mandate in 2017 after heavy lobbying from the freight industry.

It's costly to retrofit trains. For ECP to have worked, all 149 cars traveling through East Palestine would have had to be using the updated braking system. While those brakes would almost certainly not have prevented the derailment, they might have lessened its severity. The Biden administration should revive the ECP mandate. It would take time to phase in, but an industry that has seen such a surge in profit margins in recent years can afford to make this safety investment.

Ohio's governor has zeroed in on another key point: Though the train had numerous cars carrying substances that were toxic and highly flammable, it did not technically meet the definition of a "high hazard flammable train." Which meant, as Mr. DeWine said, that Norfolk Southern "was not required to notify anyone here in Ohio about what was in the rail cars coming to our state."

It's time to revisit the definition. The reality is most freight trains carry different types of cargo, including hazardous and flammable materials, though they may be in only a few cars on a 150-car train. The federal government requires railroads to carry hazardous materials, in part because freight rail has a much better safety record transporting this cargo than trucks do. But the regulations likely need to be revisited.

Other ideas to improve freight rail safety have come up in the wake of the East Palestine tragedy: Increasing fines for companies that violate safety regulations (the current maximum is $225,455, according to federal rules), shortening the length of trains (150 cars is more than double the average train length from 2008 to 2017) and requiring more crew. All have merit, but experts say they are unlikely to be as impactful as addressing bearing monitors, brakes and car design, along with revising the rules around hazmat trains.

Better technology exists for freight rail. Let's use it.

Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.

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