Major railroads should not be allowed to regulate their own safety standards and practices, according to Pennsylvania Congressman Chris Deluzio. He was speaking at a virtual media briefing from Washington, D.C., held exactly two years after a fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, released millions of pounds of chemicals into the surrounding community’s air and water, and culminated in a toxic fire that lasted days.
In June 2024, The Guardian reported that chemicals released during the train wreck fires were carried across 16 U.S. states, according to research of federal precipitation and pollution data.
At the February 3 briefing, rail safety advocates asserted that federal leaders and railroads have not done enough to prevent a similar disaster from occurring again. That same day, a lawsuit alleging for the first time that people died because of the disastrous train derailment was announced, according to PBS.
Vice President JD Vance on February 3 visited the small community he used to represent as a senator, and toured the cleanup with President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lee Zeldin, along with Ohio Governor, Mike DeWine. Vance said that he believes “we continue to need to do better on rail safety in this country.”
On February 3, 2023, 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern train — 11 of which were hauling hazardous materials — derailed in East Palestine, a village of just under 5,000 people, less than a mile from the Pennsylvania border.
Two years later, rail union leaders and representatives from Congress at the virtual briefing called for sweeping safety reforms that have been slow to arrive since the crash, and criticized U.S. railroads for their alleged role in stalling those changes.
“We know we cannot trust the big railroads to regulate themselves,” Representative Deluzio (D-PA) said. “We have a bipartisan solution on the table, and now is the time for all who are serious about protecting our communities to step up.”
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Deluzio went on to announce the reintroduction of the Railway Safety Act, which was first proposed in Congress the month after the derailment in 2023, and would have expanded the list of hazardous materials railroads are mandated to disclose to state emergency officials, required improved derailment detection technology on trains, and would have laid out enhanced safety procedures for trains carrying dangerous chemicals. As it moved through the Senate and House, the bill faced pressure from the rail industry and a handful of lawmakers, before it died in committee in December of 2023.
Today, a Norfolk Southern train with at least one car carrying hazardous materials moves through the East Palestine derailment site on average
every day, according to an analysis from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism (HCIJ). The HJIC also noted that details on the specific chemicals hauled by railroads through the area are not readily available to elected officials or to the local community, and that the group was only able to gather its own data by having a private company place sensors in the area to track the movement of freight trains.
“Short of sitting by the tracks and scrutinizing hazardous material placards, they have no way of knowing what’s on every railcar passing through,” the HJIC said.
Under rules implemented by the Biden administration in 2024, railroads are required to alert first responders to the presence of hazardous chemicals on board trains, but only in the moments following a derailment. In the case of the East Palestine derailment, nearly an hour passed before fire crews were made aware of the dangerous materials that were being carried by the Norfolk Southern train.
