Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) recently offered a sober assessment of the conditions of railway safety in the United States.
“I know that some of you probably watched these events unfold on television and thought, ‘We’re just like East Palestine. This could happen to us,’” Cantwell, chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, said at a May 17 Capitol Hill press conference.
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She was flanked by representatives of cities that have rail freight currently flowing through them to promote the passage of the Railway Safety Act of 2023.
Jeff Silvestrini, mayor of Millcreek, Utah, argued that “folks who live on the other side of the tracks,” those people whose homes are located close to rail lines, are the “least advantaged and the most threatened” by rail delays and derailments.
Deanna Dawson, Association of Washington Cities CEO and a former member of the Edmonds City Council, about 15 miles north of Seattle, said, “The safety of our community is really dependent on this type of legislation.”
Without legislative action, Cantwell warned, things could get worse.
“The accident rate across America’s rail network has increased 14% in just five years,” she said. “In my own state of Washington, Class 1 derailments have nearly doubled in a decade.”
The railroads object to Cantwell’s alarm.
“Some stakeholders cite data, such as 1,000 derailments per year, because it sounds alarming and can help advance broad policy changes,” Ted Greener, spokesman for the Association of American Railroads, told the Washington Examiner. “Yet 76% of derailments in 2022 were in rail yards, the equivalent of parking lot fender benders. Railroads absolutely have meaningful work to do to drive all incidents lower, yet rail is still an unbelievably safe mode of transportation.”
Cantwell’s bill to address the problem of railroad safety made it out of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, which she chairs, in early May. In the full Senate, it still has to clear the filibuster hurdle. The bill can probably count on unanimous Democratic support, but it currently doesn’t have quite enough Republicans on board to get to 60 and end debate.
Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is one of the bill’s sponsors. He has been arguing with Republican colleagues in public and private that they need to come on board and worked to secure former President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the bill. That has gotten it much closer to passage.
The House of Representatives could be a different story, and not simply because it has a narrow Republican majority. Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) is the congressman for East Palestine, home of the Feb. 3 derailment, evacuation, and costly cleanup. He is championing competing legislation.
Broadly speaking, the differences between Vance’s and Johnson’s legislation might be boiled down to an “act first” versus a “facts first” approach.
The RAIL Act would direct “the Federal Rail Administrator, in conjunction with the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) investigation of the East Palestine train derailment, to recommend new safety requirements and procedures for all trains carrying hazardous materials,” Johnson wrote.
Johnson argued that such an approach is desirable because “it’s critically important that we get all the facts and information from the investigation. The recommendations from the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and NTSB will look at everything from train length and weight to route analysis, speed restrictions, and track maintenance.”
Johnson’s bill would “also push more funds to first responders, paid for entirely by the railroads,” he boasted.
Johnson hasn’t rejected the Railway Safety Act outright. The legislation “highlights and keeps the discussion going on the importance of rail safety,” he told Politico Pro in an interview. Yet he questions some of its provisions.
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“I don’t want to give the transportation secretary essentially — if I’ve got the wording of that bill right — whatever the transportation secretary deems necessary. That’s too ambiguous to me,” he said.
The representative of East Palestine urged the full House to pass his bill so that “we can marry the two” bills — and presumably dump some unwanted baggage in the process.
