GOP crackpots jump the track in Ohio
At least four or five times a week, freight trains rumble past my house. The tracks are no more than 75 feet from where I park my car.
Most of the early morning trains consist in part of tanker cars carrying who knows what chemicals. More than once I’ve wondered what would happen if just one of these tankers derailed and tumbled into the creek bed running alongside both the tracks and my house.
Poof, there goes the neighborhood.
As near as I can tell, the trains are Norfolk Southern. And it seems to me, after squinting online at Norfolk Southern route maps, that the tracks parallel to my house are a spur of the tracks that run through East Palestine, Ohio, north of here near the border with Beaver County.
On Feb. 3 and 4, East Palestine almost went up in a fire ball, the result of a Norfolk Southern multiple car derailment. As it was, the town of 5,000 was engulfed in a plume of thick, black smoke.
Following the derailment that breached 11 of the train’s hazardous chemical tankers, the town might have been saved from being blown sky high by a controlled burn of vinyl chloride. That was the good news, along with the fact that there were no fatalities. The bad news is that evacuated residents were left gasping for breath. They’ve since complained of sudden, unexplained rashes and a suspect supply of drinking water.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, and U.S. Environmental Protection administrator Michael Regan, an emissary of the Biden White House, have been doing their best to calm the fears of agitated, frightened residents.
To little avail, it seems. Into this toxic brew have stepped the munchkins of political mischief and mayhem — House Republicans Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and such fellow conspirators as the always snarky Tucker Carlson of Fox News.
The big sidewinder himself, Donald Trump, flew in to be at East Palestine on Thursday. “This is America here,” he told residents. “We’re standing in America.”
Smart fella. He could have said as much while shopping at a jewelry store on Rodeo Drive.
Thanks for nothing, Mr. Trump. Thanks for nothing, Reps. Gaetz, Greene, and Scott Perry.
East Palestine might not face the mess it does if you hadn’t been such railroad industry toadies.
According to Greg Hynes of the railway labor union SMART Transportation, the Trump administration’s railway safety record was “horrible.” The same could be said of a good chunk of Capitol Hill Republicans, as outlined in multiple sources, including the specialty publication Freight Waves.
Let’s get specific:
For years, the feds required railroad freight carriers to conduct brake tests on cars that had been out of service for four or more hours. The Trump administration issued regs in 2020 relieving the railroads of this obligation; instead, a 24-hour test requirement was put in place.
In addition, the Trump administration sidelined an Obama-era order that would have accelerated the outfitting of freight trains with an up-to-date electronic braking system.
ECP, electronically controlled pneumatic brakes, uses modern technology to instantaneously apply air-powered brakes across the length of a train. According to The Intercept’s Lee Fang, “studies show the brakes can shorten stopping distance by up to 60%.”
Likewise, the Trump Department of Transportation killed an Obama DOT rule that projected the widespread use of near rupture-proof tanker cars, instead of the relatively fragile cars that cracked up in East Palestine.
The fact is, according to railway union officials and others, Republicans in the era of Trump were eager to enhance railroad industry profitability, even at the expense of safety.
And now, Trump and company have the gall to boast that they are standing up for the aggrieved citizens of East Palestine, Ohio, against the supposed indifference of the Biden administration, which, in reality, has been on the ground since the get-go.
Trump and his cohort of crackpots are so full of hot air they might as well be Chinese “weather” balloons.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.