It was the workers’ nightmare come true.
The Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3 sent a toxic barrage of hazardous chemicals into the air, soil, and water and caused untold damage to waterways, wildlife, air quality, and people’s health. It was a grim confirmation of what rail workers have been saying would happen for years. And it could have been worse.
No one was killed or badly injured in the derailment itself, and most of the 149-car train’s cargo was nontoxic. Fears of a massive explosion, which led to the evacuation of nearby residents, did not happen. But it’s hard to say there’s a silver lining to a disaster that prompted a “controlled burn” of toxic chemicals producing a cloud visible from passing airplanes, says Ross Grooters, a longtime railroad worker and co-chair of Railroad Workers United, a caucus of rail workers that spans multiple unions. Still, they add, after an attempt by rail workers to strike over working conditions—including ongoing safety concerns—was squelched by members of Congress and President Joe Biden late last year, at least there is renewed attention on the rails.
But if the politicians and the rail companies had listened to the workers, this accident, and others, might have been prevented. In the weeks following the disaster, three more Norfolk Southern trains derailed—in Ohio, Michigan, and Alabama—the latter occurring just before the company’s CEO, Alan Shaw, appeared before Congress to answer questions about the Ohio disaster.
I first spoke to Grooters in late January for a story about the rail workers’ fight for paid sick leave. At the time, they described a constant pressure to do more with less, exemplified by a system known as precision scheduled railroading, or PSR.
“The ‘precision’ part of ‘precision scheduled railroading’ is how precisely can we cut the operation to the bone and still have it walk around as a full skeleton,” Grooters told me. “They’ve cut so deep that it just doesn’t function and they don’t have people to fill the jobs.”
There had been cutbacks to track and equipment maintenance, and more equipment fatigue and derailments. “It just feels really unsafe when you’re in the workplace. It’s like we’re rolling the dice with all these things.”
In 2020, for example, The Washington Post reported that more than 20,000 rail workers had lost their jobs in the previous year, of which more than 3,500 had been at Norfolk Southern. Simultaneously, train lengths were increasing, adding more cars to the workload of the same tiny train crew. A rail engineer told the Post at the time, “They found they can hook two trains together and cut a crew.”
Rail workers were stressed, but railroad stock prices jumped. The following year, two rail workers’ unions filed suit, alleging that Norfolk Southern had sliced rail crews so deeply because of PSR that engineers were having to do the work of conductors and brakemen. “[Norfolk Southern] cannot lawfully lay off roughly 4,000 conductors and brakemen, and then give their work to another craft,” the two union presidents said in a statement at the time.
The workers’ lives are often, to use a metaphor from a different deadly industry, the canary in the coal mine. Because the real public relations nightmare for the company is not when workers get hurt or killed, but when a train derails in a populated area and produces a mushroom cloud that can be seen from a plane.
When we spoke again after the derailment, Grooters noted that there isn’t a single cause of major rail accidents, but rather “a series of failures.” Cutbacks mean fewer layers of protection, and “precision scheduling” pressures workers to get the train running no matter what. “They don’t care about our lives. And when I say our lives, it’s the workers,” Grooters added, “but it’s also every community that these trains travel through.”
East Palestine’s 5,000 residents are now feeling the results of those cutbacks. NPR reported that people living near the accident site have suffered headaches, nausea, and rashes, and that many residents were forced to temporarily evacuate as the train wreckage burned for days. The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, warned of a possible “catastrophic tanker failure which could cause an explosion with the potential of deadly shrapnel traveling up to a mile.”
This was purportedly the reason for the burnoff of vinyl chloride, which caused the massive cloud and required evacuation of a one-by-two-mile area around East Palestine, on both sides of the Pennsylvania state line, because the burn itself created other toxic chemicals. (As a fact sheet from the Ohio Department of Health noted, “You can die from breathing extremely high levels of vinyl chloride,” and it is known to cause cancer.) While DeWine said the decision was made for safety reasons, critics—including the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro—suggest that it might have been done to get the tracks cleared and trains running faster.
Notably, local news reported that Norfolk Southern had given the maximum possible donation—$10,000—to fund the Ohio governor’s inauguration party, just a month before the derailment.
Residents have spoken out in anger and frustration and understandable fear, and state officials said the company must pay for the cleanup. Norfolk Southern’s response was to pull out of a meeting with residents, issuing a statement that it feared a “growing physical threat to employees and members of the community.”
The greatest physical threat in the area remains the chemicals, not the angry residents. Video shared on social media showed locked water fountains at the local high school, where the town hall meeting was held, a reminder that it was residents, not Norfolk Southern executives, who were at risk.
The tests that DeWine used to declare the water safe were, as it turned out, funded by the railroad, carried out by a contractor, and appeared not to be up to federal Environmental Protection Agency standards. Thousands of fish died in the days following the derailment, and thousands of cubic yards of contaminated soil and gallons of poisoned water are being removed from the site.
Evacuation orders were lifted after February 8, but local resident Dianna Elzer told NPR that she didn’t feel reassured by officials who said it was safe to return. “We aren’t going to know the true ramifications of what the impact on the environment is for a while,” she said.
The rail workers, however, were already feeling the effects. A letter sent to the Biden Administration by the chair of one of the rail unions, who also is a Norfolk Southern employee, said that workers doing cleanup after the derailment were not provided with personal protective equipment, and several of them experienced nausea and migraines for days.
We’ve mostly heard the term “bargaining for the common good” in reference to teachers and other public-sector workers, but the East Palestine derailment is a good reminder that the rail workers’ fight for safety is also a form of bargaining for the common good—and the Biden Administration, in preventing their strike, gave tacit approval for the rail companies to keep cutting corners.
This issue has been on Grooters’s mind since the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster in Quebec, when forty-seven people were killed by a runaway train carrying millions of liters of crude oil that derailed and exploded into flames, leveling thirty buildings in the center of town. They note that in rail accidents, “it’s typically the workers that these companies try to throw under the train and make them take the blame. But it is completely systemic. It all starts at the top.”
Even if workers are making mistakes, the conditions under which they are forced to work make such mistakes much more likely. Workers across much of the rail system, Grooters explains, are on call 24/7. Downsizing the workforce in recent years has meant that the workers who stay are working longer hours, with less time for rest, and, for many, no sick leave.
While sick time became a major focus of the rail workers’ fight, safety concerns were also a huge part of the pushback on the PSR system, which has been a general speed-up of work across the industry. Rail workers, Grooters says, hadn’t previously “seen anything like this level of lack of care, of putting profits ahead of people’s well-being. Ten or fifteen years ago it would’ve been ‘Safety first. Take your time, do the job right, follow the rules, make sure you’re doing it safely.’ That would’ve always been the primary message we heard when we came in. And then PSR hit about five years ago and all that got thrown out the window.”
“The ‘precision’ part of ‘precision scheduled railroading’ is how precisely can we cut the operation to the bone and still have it walk around as a full skeleton.”
For their efforts, rail carriers, including Norfolk Southern, have made record-breaking profits. East Palestine residents have filed suit against the rail operator, and Congress is considering a bill to change hazardous cargo notification requirements—the train operator in this instance was not required to notify the state that dangerous materials were on board because most of the cars were carrying nonhazardous materials—as well as institute a requirement that trains have at least two-person crews and increase fines for wrongdoing by train operators. But it is the workers who are the first and last line of defense, and their demands would make freight trains safer for all.
“The first response is going to be the train crew to any derailment or accident,” Grooters says. The train operators are supposed to be given an accurate manifest of the materials they are carrying, but with PSR, they have too little time to read and understand it.
“Pre-PSR, we used to come in, sit down, do a job briefing. Part of that would be going over the manifest, talking about ‘Here’s our conditions that we’re going to work under today,’ and making sure we had an understanding of the job to be performed,” they add.
Those briefings might have taken up to an hour, but now that workers fear being disciplined for taking too long, that time has eroded, and workers feel pushed out the door. That can lead to people simply taking their paperwork and going to work. “The message from management all the way from the top was, ‘These things don’t matter anymore. You need to move this as quickly as possible,’ ” Grooters says.
With a fraction of the workers on the rails and less time, workers have fewer opportunities to get down on the ground and inspect passing trains, and there are simply more opportunities for catastrophe. It may have been just one overheated bearing that caused the derailment, after all.
We do not know, as the residents of East Palestine have noted, what the final toll of this derailment, or of other recent ones, will be. But we do know that we were warned, repeatedly, that cutbacks would lead to more danger, and that danger will be unequally distributed. We know that rail workers raised these issues because their own health and safety are linked to those of the communities the freight trains travel through—communities in which they also often live. And we know that as in so many other essential parts of society, from teachers to nurses, slashing staffing while demanding more work is a recipe for disaster. Like these other workers, rail workers’ demands are for the common good.
Regulation is necessary, as is demanding that Norfolk Southern pay for the damages its train has caused. But Grooters warns, “As long as the railroad companies are hyper-focused on financializing, extracting wealth from the railroads . . . [and] on that profit component, the likelihood that things like East Palestine are going to happen increases. It’s not a matter of if those things are going to happen; it’s when and where.”