#safety third

[thekanucklehead]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Train managers earn bonuses for greenlighting unsafe cars

Tomorrow (November 16) I'll be in Stratford, Ontario, appearing onstage with Vass Bednar as part of the CBC IDEAS Festival. I'm also doing an afternoon session for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library.

Almost no one knows this, but last June, a 90-car train got away from its crew in Hernando, MS, rolling three miles through two public crossings, a ghost train that included 47 potentially explosive propane cars. The "bomb train" neither crashed nor derailed, which meant that Grenada Railroad/Gulf & Atantic didn't have to report it.

This is just one of many terrifying near-misses that are increasingly common in America's hyper-concentrated, private equity-dominated rail sector, where unsafe practices dominate and whistleblowers face brutal retaliation for coming forward to regulators.

These unsafe practices – and the corporate policies that deliberately gave rise to them – are documented in terrifying, eye-watering detail in a deeply reported Propublica story by Topher Sanders, Jessica Lussenhop,Dan Schwartz, Danelle Morton and Gabriel L Sandoval:

https://www.propublica.org/article/railroad-safety-union-pacific-csx-bnsf-trains-freight

It's a tale of depraved indifference to public safety, backstopped by worker intimidation. The reporting is centered on railyard maintenance inspectors, who are charged with writing up "bad orders" to prevent unsafe railcars from shipping out. As private equity firms consolidated rail into an ever-dwindling number of companies, these workers face supervisors who are increasingly hostile to these bad orders.

It got so alarming that some staffers started carrying hidden digital recorders, so they could capture audio of their bosses illegally ordering them to greenlight railcars that were too unsafe for use. The article features direct – and alarming – quotes, like supervisor Andrew Letcher, boss of the maintenance crews at Union Pacific's Kansas City yard saying, "If I was an inspector on a train I would probably let some of that nitpicky shit go."

Letcher – and fellow managers for other Tier 1 railroads quoted in the piece – aren't innately hostile to public safety. They are quite frank about why they want inspectors to "let that nitpicky shit go." As Letcher explains, "The first thing that I’m getting questioned about right now, every day, is why we’re over 200 bad orders and what we’re doing to get them down."

In other words, corporate rail owners have ordered their supervisors to reduce the amount of maintenance outages on the rail lines, but have not given them additional preventative maintenance budgets or crew. These supervisors warn their employees that high numbers of bad orders could cost them their jobs, even lead to the shutdown of the car shops where inspectors are prone to pulling dangerous cars out of service.

It's a ruthless form of winnowing. Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good" – in an economy where counterfeit money circulates, people preferentially spend their fake money to get it out of their hands, until all the money in circulation is funny money. This is the rail safety equivalent: simply fire everyone who reports unsafe conditions and all your railcars will be deemed safe, with the worst railcars shipped out first. A market for lemons – except these aren't balky used sedans, they're unsafe railcars full of toxic chemicals or explosive propane.

When cataclysmic rail disasters occur – like this year's East Palestine derailment – the rail industry reassures us that this is an isolated incident, pointing to the system's excellent overall safety record. But that record is a mirage, because the near-misses don't have to be reported. Those near-misses are coming more frequently, as the culture of profit over safety incurs a mounting maintenance debt, filling America's rails with potential "bomb cars."

Rail mergers and other forms of deregulated, anything-goes capitalism are justified by conservative economists who insist that "incentives matter," and that the profit motive provides the incentive to improve efficiency, leading to lower costs and better service. But the incentive to externalize risk, kick the can down the road, and capture regulators rarely concerns the "incentives matter" crowd.

Here's an incentive that matters. Rail managers' bonuses – as much as a fifth of their take home pay – are only paid if the trains they oversee run on time. Inspectors have recorded their managers admitting that they have quotas – a maximum number of bad orders their facility may produce, irrespective of how much unsafe rolling stock passes through the facility.

Inspectors have caught their managers removing repair order tags from cars they've flagged as unsafe. Inspectors will log orders in a database, only to have the record mysteriously deleted, or marked as serviced when no service has occurred. Some inspectors have seen the same cars in their yard with the same problems, and repeatedly flagged them without any maintenance being performed before they're shipped out again.

Former managers from Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern told Propublica that they operated in an environment where safety reports were discouraged, and that workers who filed these reports were viewed as "complainers." Workers furnished Propublica with recordings of rail managers berating them for reporting persistent unsafe conditions the Federal Railroad Administration. Other workers from BNSF said that they believed that their bosses were told when they called the company's "confidential" work-safety tipline, setting them up for retaliation by bosses who'd falsified safety reports.

Whistleblowers who seek justice at OSHA are stymied by long delays, and while switching their cases to court can win them cash settlements, these do not get recorded on the company's safety record, which allows the company to go on claiming to be a paragon of safety and prudence.

The culture of retaliation is pervasive, which explains how the 47-cars worth of propane on the "bomb train" that rolled unattended over three miles of track never made the news. There is a voluntary Close Call Reporting System (operated by NASA!) where rail companies can report these disasters. Not one of America's Class 1 rail companies participate in it.

After the East Palestine disaster, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed the rail companies to join, but a year later, none have. It's part of an overall pattern with Secretary Buttigieg, who has prodigious, far-reaching powers under USC40 Section 41712(a), which allow him to punish companies for "unfair and deceptive" practices or "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Buttigieg can't simply hand down orders under 41712(a) – to wield this power, he must follow administrative procedures, conducting market studies, seeking comment, and proposing a rule. Other members of the Biden administration with similar powers, like FTC chair Lina Khan, arrived in office with a ranked-priority list of bad corporate conduct and immediately set about teeing up rules to give relief to the American public.

By contrast, Buttigieg's agency has done precious little to establish the evidentiary record to punish the worst American companies under its remit. His most-touted achievement was to fine five airlines for saving money by cancelling their flights and stranding their passengers. But of the five airlines affected by Buttigieg's order, four were not US companies. The sole affected US carrier was Spirit airlines, with 2% of the market. The Big Four US airlines – who have a much worse record than the ones that were fined – were not affected at all:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/

Rather than directly regulating the US transportation sector, Buttigieg prefers exacting nonbinding promises from them (like the Tier 1 rail companies' broken promise to sign up to the Close Call Reporting System). Under his leadership, the Federal Railroad Agency has proposed weakening rail safety standards, rescinding an order to improve the braking systems on undermaintained, mile-long trains carrying potentially deadly freight:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp

The US transportation system is accumulating a terrifying safety debt, behind a veil of corporate secrecy. It badly demands direct regulation and close oversight.

If you are interested in rail safety, I strongly recommend this episode of Well There's Your Problem, "a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides" – you will laugh your head off and then never sleep again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BMQTdYXaH8

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/15/safety-third/#all-the-livelong-day

[overheard-at-kickoff]

"We'll bridge that gap when it's burning" - Kid on my robotics team who then proceeds to almost light something on fire

I NEED to know the story behind this

[jadeleechsupportgroup]

I spent so much time on this and I can't stop crying at the arms

[thatstormygeek]

"This addition to the Kansas government bureaucracy would control a “sandbox” of business experimentation that would rely on temporary or permanent suspension of state regulations and laws to speed innovation."

Hang on. That sounds familiar. Could have sworn I heard someone talking about that kind of thing fairly recently.....

oh. right.

This guy.

The founder of the company behind the Titan submersible previously described his industry as "obscenely safe" and complained that passenger-vessel regulations held back innovation. Describing the industry in a 2019 interview, Rush said that there had been no injuries in the field for decades, adding: "It's obscenely safe because they have all these regulations. But it also hasn't innovated or grown — because they have all these regulations."

The Titan imploded less than 6 months ago!

Being from KC, I can't think about this anti-regulation-at-all-cost mentality without my mind going to Caleb Schwab and how his dad couldn't even give full-throated support to regulations that might have saved his son's life.

While other lawmakers spoke, Schwab paced the aisle next to his seat, and his hand shook as he sat back down. When it was his turn, he said he didn't come to the Legislature to grow government or increase regulations but that "you can get to a point where there's just not enough." "For those who have consternation with the expansion of government, sometimes you just need some," Schwab said. He said he wouldn't hold it against any colleague who votes against the bill because of concerns about added regulation.

I've heard it said that safety regulations are written in blood. But a person has to actually care about those who shed that blood for that statement to have any impact. Therein lies the rub.

We make a lot of ridiculous laws for bad reasons here in the US. And I am 100% down for getting a lot of them off the books. I just don't think we need to be clearing the field for ag and tech companies to do whatever they like while simultaneously adding barriers between people and their healthcare, or making it more difficult for folks to exercise their rights as human beings and citizens of the fucking planet.

[4eva-a-fangrl]

love his smile :)

[burninglights]

For the love of god don't die in my labs, there's a lot of paperwork if you do. is one hell of a sentence. It made me laugh quite a bit. I'm not that familiar with University and professional labs, is it a common occurrence that machines say they're done while they are not really?

heyo, anon!

So my uni lab was a high-volume lab, meaning we were running undergrad, postgrad and doctoral thesis projects simultaneously. Between glassware, autoclaving our powdered agar suspensions with deionised distilled water to make sterile agar suspensions and media and the lab techs sterilising equipment for first year labs and demos, our autoclaves were going near constantly.

What happens with the autoclaves is that they beep once to tell you that the cycle is finished, and again to tell you that the autoclave has depressurised and is safe to open.

Because we weren’t just running the autoclave and we’re doing other tasks concurrently, it wasn’t all that hard to forget which beep you were on, and if it was the first beep, you ran the risk of opening a pressurised autoclave and getting a face full of ~90c steam at about 6atmos, which would, at best, their degree burn you to hell and back.

(The autoclave has lights on the top indicating which part of the cycle it’s on, but you can’t control for user error, and 40 harried undergrads who haven’t been in a lab for two years on account of The Rona doing their thesis project are like. the poster demographic for user error.)

To forestall us from reducing our faces and/or extremities to a homogenate with the texture of chunky marinara, our prof made us confirm with the lab techs — absolute rockstars who had been working alongside the university professors researching COVID and keeping the research teams on other projects afloat throughout the acute phase of the pandemic — who have had years of experience using autoclaves under time pressure and at speed, that we were on the ‘safe to open’ part of the cycle before opening the autoclave with every use.

Probably just so he didn’t get pulled away from his agar plates for a major incident review, but it’s the thought that counts! 😂

[prawnparachute]

If Picnic Dad doesn't become a regular Safety Third guest then I will... pay attention with even greater irregularity than before? Or possibly [insert better vague meaningless threat].

[codyshellhole]

Oh to be Mia in the new safety third video 🥰

[cant-think-of-a-good-one]

"...I love the idea of bees just being where they're not supposed to..."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tell me something I don't know

[time-out-with-timothy]

Losing Life In the Name of Safety

The NFL Returns The NFL returned to our lives this weekend, and millions of us were glued to our couches watching. We have a love hate relationship with the sport nowadays. It excites us watching our favorite teams and players doing the insanely crazy athlete feats they perform with such apparent ease. The big runs. Threading the needle with a pin point pass. Elevating for a tremendous catch.…

[frootybop]

William Osman Is Going Bald

To the tune of What's This (Nightmare Before Christmas)

What's this? What's this?

It's William Osman's hair!

What's this?

It's floating through the air! (ew)

What's this?

Right before his eyes, he must be balding

It's getting everywhere

What's this?

/J+L+GG+Imsorry

[yangjeongin]

HYUNIN | SKZ TALKER EP. 61

[4eva-a-fangrl]

[gallifreyanhotfive]

Can someone please introduce the UNIT staff to appropriate laboratory PPE - I'm dying over here

You guys work with dangerous chemicals in there, some of which are extraterrestrial in origin! UNIT is not immune to these chemicals' toxicity!