Stephanie Elverd | Mar 31, 2023
EAST PALESTINE – When the 38 cars of the Norfolk Southern train derailed –including 11 hauling hazardous material –the residents of East Palestine and people far beyond Columbiana County waited for an explanation. In the weeks that followed, it was learned that an overheated wheel bearing was the likely culprit.
That was the simple answer to a complicated chain of events and left yet more questions to be answered. The most pressing being what could have prevented the disaster. It’s a question that Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw has asked himself repeatedly since.
“I’ve had personal conversations with each of the rail CEOs. I’ve asked my team what we could have done differently?” Shaw said during a media roundtable held at East Palestine’s Centenary United Methodist Church on March 17. “I’ve asked myself what could we have done differently? As you can imagine, I’ve been asking myself that every day since Feb. 3.”
While the disaster cannot be undone, improvements can be made. One such change has already been implemented as the railroad has installed more hot-box detectors to its tracks. The addition of more hot-box detectors by Norfolk Southern was a direct result of the East Palestine derailment.
“The hot box detectors that measure the wheel bearings were working as designed,” Shaw said. “Our hotbox detectors were already spaced at the shortest intervals on average in the rail industry and we are going to add 200 more. And the first one we added was right outside of East Palestine.”
Wayside hot-box detectors are placed on rail tracks every 20 miles, give or take. The detectors record the temperatures of railroad bearings as trains pass by using infrared sensors. If an overheated bearing, one that reads a certain degree over ambient temperature, an alarm is triggered and the crew is notified of a potential failure. The crew then stops and inspects the train.
But the safety system didn’t prevent the train from derailing in East Palestine. By the time, the crew was alerted the wheel bearing was more than 250 degrees above the ambient temperature. According to the NTSB’s preliminary report, the train passed through three hot-box detectors stationed outside of East Palestine. The first detector registered a temperature of 38 degrees above the ambient temperature. Eleven miles later, the second detector indicated that the bearing had overheated to 103 degrees above the ambient temperature. Nineteen more miles down the track, the bearing had rocketed to 253 degrees above ambient temperature. It was only after the third reading that the alarm sounded and the crew notified. The train was stopped but the damage had been done despite Shaw’s assertion that the detectors did what they were supposed to do and spaced closer than industry standards.
That led Norfolk Southern to consider more additions to safety operations and practices. The additions include a more-advanced inspection technology and lowering the temperatures that trigger overheat warnings.
“We’re going to move a machine-visioning inspection portal that we developed in concert with Georgia Tech, that can catch stuff that the human eye would never catch on a train moving by on track speed and we are going to put that up outside of East Palestine,” Shaw said. “Our thresholds for hot-box detectors are already the lowest in the industry and we’ve partnered with the industry to lower them.”
Despite what Shaw called Norfolk Southern’s “investment to safety,” he was criticized during the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation hearing held on March 22 when he supported parts but not all of two new bills aimed to improve railroad safety. Shaw would not endorse provisions that would mandate a two-person crew on all railroad locomotives, stating “we’re not aware of any data that links crew size with safety.”
The train that derailed on Feb. 3 was operating with a three-person crew which was unaware that one of the cars was on fire as far back as Salem. Surveillance cameras caught sparks and flames visible underneath a car 20 miles away from where it eventually derailed along East Taggart Street in East Palestine. Neither Shaw nor the NTSB found the crew at fault. According to Shaw, advancing technology is the only way to detect such things in the future.
“I am not sure how a crew member could have seen that on a train, so what we have to do and what we will do is continue to invest in technology,” he said. “And I am going to continue to invest in safety. I am going to continue to make Norfolk Southern a safer railroad. We are a safe railroad and we will get better.”
