A top transportation safety official still has some concerns over the new safety measures from the rail company behind the train derailment carrying cancer-causing toxic chemicals in Ohio.
National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy said this week that she is not satisfied with the new guidelines Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw announced last week.
“They are not robust enough. I think we’ll be looking at more recommendations as part of our investigation,” Homendy said during an appearance on ABC News’ “This Week.”
Homendy’s comments come just a few days after Shaw was grilled by a U.S. Senate panel and more than a month after a Norfolk Southern train derailed when a railcar’s wheel bearing overheated, leading to the derailment and a fire. NTSB investigators found in a preliminary probe that hot bearing sensors detected an overheated wheel bearing but the train crew was not alerted early enough and the 150-car train derailed, a report said.
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Worries about the increased temperature in a vinyl chloride tank car and possible explosion led Norfolk Southern to unload the chemicals in a “controlled release.” The move forced thousands of East Palestine residents to evacuate for days, amid concerns about air and water quality.
As a result of the derailment, Norfolk Southern said it will revamp its network that detects overheated wheel bearings, including examining areas where the distance between hot bearing detectors is greater than 15 miles and adding more detectors where needed – two measures that are part of the operator’s new six-point safety plan.
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NTSB investigators found that three of the five vinyl chloride-carrying tank cars had aluminum housings protecting crucial safety equipment called “pressure relief devices” or PRDs, which help vent burning gas and relieve pressure in the tanks – preventing a possible catastrophic explosion.
Investigators were concerned because they discovered that these protective covers “melted or were consumed” when the PRDs beneath them were working to vent the vinyl chloride in the East Palestine derailment, NTSB officials announced earlier this month. The melted aluminum may have dropped into some PRDs, “possibly degrading their performance,” NTSB said.
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Homendy told ABC News that NTSB investigators this week will examine the pressure relief devices and valve assemblies that were recovered from the five vinyl chloride tank cars to identify whether they were compromised by the derailment in East Palestine.
“We’ll see what comes of that testing,” Homendy said. “We may have recommendations towards the end that are much broader.”
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NTSB spokesperson Jennifer Gabris said Monday that she is not sure when investigators will have results from their testing and declined further comment.
Norfolk Southern did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear how many tank cars still in operation are equipped with such protective covers. The industry generally moved over to steel protective covers in the 90s “as a cost-saving measure,” according to Samantha Keitt, a spokesperson with the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA). But there was no formal transition by industry to steel, nor any requirement by federal regulators to adopt the metal , Keitt said.
In other accidents, investigators have found that carbon steel protective housing covers survive fires and prolonged “pool fires,” where fuel is evaporating, likely because it has a higher melting point than aluminum.
According to federal regulations, protective housings must be equipped with “a metal cover.”
PHMSA issued a safety advisory notice earlier this month urging “all hazmat tank car owners and offerors to survey their fleets for any tank cars currently equipped with aluminum protective housing and consider replacing this equipment with carbon steel housings, which we understand to be current industry practice.”
Follow Tami Abdollah on Twitter at @latams or email her at tami(at)usatoday.com.