Sorry, Buttigieg. Even WaPo Admits Trump’s Regulation Rollback Didn’t Cause Ohio Train Derailment
More proof Buttigieg has no idea what he’s doing.
BUT TRUMP.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg blamed the toxic Ohio train derailment on rollbacks in regulations during President Donald Trump’s administration.
Man, the left and Democrats *pounced* on that idea!
Except…it’s a lie. Even The Washington Post‘s fact-checker Glenn Kessler admitted the regulations didn’t cause the derailment due to a thing called electronically controlled pneumatic brakes.
Kessler relied on the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) preliminary report.
NTSB Report
The NTSB found that the Norfolk Southern crew received an alarm from the hot-bearing detector to slow down and examine a hot axle. The train engineer tried to slow down and stop the train. However:
After the train stopped, the crew observed fire and smoke and notified the Cleveland East dispatcher of a possible derailment. With dispatcher authorization, the crew applied handbrakes to the two railcars at the head of the train, uncoupled the head-end locomotives, and moved the locomotives about 1 mile from the uncoupled railcars. Responders arrived at the derailment site and began response efforts.
NTSB investigators identified and examined the first railcar to derail, the 23rd railcar in the consist. Surveillance video from a local residence showed what appeared to be a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure moments before the derailment. The wheel bearing and affected wheelset have been collected as evidence and will be examined by the NTSB. The vinyl chloride tank car top fittings, including the relief valves, were also removed and examined by the NTSB on scene. The top fittings will be shipped to Texas for testing under the direction of the NTSB.
Trump Administration
In 2017. the administration repealed a rule requiring “ECP brakes on ‘high hazard’ trains that carry flammable hazardous materials” due to cost concerns.
Biden’s administration, which took control in January 2021, hasn’t reinstated the rule.
Then again, Buttigieg probably doesn’t know his job description or what he’s supposed to do.
Kessler’s Fact Check
Nope:
The train was not equipped with ECP brakes; instead its locomotive used dynamic braking — electric traction motors acting as generators, which slow the train and dissipate mechanical energy as heat. When the crew received the alert about the overheated wheel bearing and engaged the dynamic brake, an automatic emergency brake application kicked in to stop the train, the NTSB said. That’s a full application of a train’s main air brakes that takes place when the train senses that air-brake hoses between rail cars have been disconnected — indicating the train had already derailed.
The Obama administration had a rule requiring a two-person crew with only one person after a crash.
Trump’s administration repealed the rule in 2019. But the Ohio train had a two-person crew, which means the Biden administration cannot use this repeal against Trump.
Trump’s administration also “revised minimum safety requirements for railroad track.” The NTSB found no problems in its investigation.
Trump’s administration “adopted weaker standards for regulating emissions of ethylene oxide,” which is one of the toxic chemicals spilled in the crash. But the rule is all about emissions, “not the synthetic chemical.”
I completely missed this. Someone should alert Buttigieg and those at DOT to stop lying.
This means even if the rule had gone into effect, this train wouldn’t have had ECP brakes.
— Jennifer Homendy (@JenniferHomendy) February 17, 2023
I urge you: let the NTSB lead the #safety analysis. Anything else is harmful — and adding pain to a community that’s been through enough.
— Jennifer Homendy (@JenniferHomendy) February 17, 2023
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Comments
If you know the inside baseball on the rail industry you knew Alfred was full of it. Time to make the Dept or Trans less fruity by stepping down.
Two-person crew rather than two-man, but son in person is masculine. Two-perdaughter crew would be toxic femininity. It is a two-perchild crew. Please be consistent, you gender enders when writing of Mayor Pete the rear ender.
“The Obama administration had a rule requiring a two-person crew with only one person after a crash.”
Can somebody parse this for me? Because I can’t make sense of it.
Thank you, I couldn’t make sense of it either, so I amused myself with a playful comment regarding it in order to draw Henrybowman out questioning its meaning.
Curse you, Chessmaster!
‘Dems pounced’
I guess all news is made up. Some of it is true.
It’s not Buttigieg’s fault either. It’s just bad luck, one that it caught fire, and two that it was in a town. Derailment cleanup crews are hugely professional and quick, they get lots of practice, and it’s just a typical railroad problem that happens a thousand times a year. You can watch them work online in various railroad watcher channels. There’s no John Henry stuff, just fast efficient specialized equipment. New track’s laid in a day and it’s running normally in two.
There’s a way of getting political power that sociologist Joseph Gusfield studied (“Contested Meanings” is the book), namely discover a new “public problem” and take ownership of it. Mothers against Drunk Driving would be an example, taking what had been a personal moral failing in the 50s and making it a “public problem.” (F.T.Grampp, a personal friend, remarked that if it weren’t for the drunks, most of them wouldn’t be mothers. Truth to power.)
The news media work the same route: the way to eyeballs and ratings is to discover a new “public problem,” here what was formerly a railroad problem. The results will not be good.
In 2017, the administration repealed a rule requiring “ECP brakes on ‘high hazard’ trains that carry flammable hazardous materials” due to cost concerns.
One of the main reasons was !science!: “An October 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NAS) report found that the DOT’s approach to mandating ECP brakes over other technologies was “incomplete and unconvincing.””
According to PolitiFact (of all places!), “Even if this safety rule had still been in effect, it would not have applied to the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, because it was not categorized as a high-hazard cargo train.”
Apparently, all this !science! is above Buttgieg’s pay grade. But at least he can ‘nurse’ adopted babies. Because sCiEnCe.
https://www.aar.org/article/ecp-brakes/
The speed of sound is one problem – it takes the pressure wave a while to reach all the brakes, which ECP is supposed to solve by using the speed of light instead. There’s a larger problem, that the brakes on freight cars are set up not to lock up the wheels on an empty car. On a loaded car, they’re pretty ineffective, therefore. So if stopping fast is a problem, there’s a long way to go.
One fix is that the engineer can dump the air at the end of the train by radio, but that wouldn’t help if the air gets dumped by a hose break as this one was since the engineer didn’t do it.
It seems to me that heat sensors on the wheel bearings might be a better investment.
Not really. One has to first look at the probability of something happening, the cost of that event, and then the cost of preventing that event. Defect detectors can sense the bearing heat. Rather than continuously monitoring every bearing on the train with individual monitors ($$$$$$$$$$), a more reasonable solution might be to up the number of defect detectors on the lines to ensure a more timely reporting of data and as a redundancy feature in case one goes out ($$$).
When they came out, anti-lock brakes seemed like a great idea. Except that those who had them tended to drive faster in more iffy conditions such that the number of wrecks didn’t decrease as expected, and the damage may have been worse due to higher speeds. I know that I have come close to hitting other cars when pulling into parking spots with leaf debris by the curb, since my ABS kicks in when the front passenger wheel locks on the leaves, requiring me to then stop using the hand brake, which I am now prepared to do. One always has to determine when the cure is worse than the disease. One area that is being looked at is how new safety features may actually assist car-jackers by immobilizing a vehicle under certain conditions. Electronic transmissions in some brands will keep a vehicle in park if the door is opened, so if a carjacker gets your door open, you be screwed.
This seems to be a maintenance issue for the Rail Road. Pete looks stupid trying to lay this off on the prior admin who have been out of power for two years. If Pete believes those regs were vital where was the push from him and Biden to make the change? It amazes me how often people shirk responsibility.
‘Lil Pete don’t care. Another underqualified virtue signaling token, clearly in over his head trying to uphold Leftist narrative. That’s all that counts. Stupid and gay doesn’t go far enough.
Why, you have to steal luggage just to make ends meet.
But they got the lies out first…
A malignant, tiny little boy in adult’s clothing.
Communist or immune to facts and data, call it terminal stupidity.
More like terminal narcissism.
Buh…buh…but it has to be Trump’s fault! Somehow! Wait, I know! The NTSB is part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy! The Russians got to them! Yeah, that’s the ticket!
I was an automation control engineer for a prominent named company. My function was to design controls systems and as a group, we used what’s called counter-EMF to dynamically brake motors not needed a controlled stop or expensive motor controllers.
According to this essay, this was the method used to stop those cars. Very effective.
This is Biden’s modus operandi-blame the Republicans and Trump for anything that is going wrong
in situations like this its pretty easy to tell who is a dumba**.
dynamic braking, if (which is most now) equipped with extended range dynamic braking, can bring a consist to a 2mph crawl VERY fast and NOT at the same time create more heat in the failing bearing.
whatever,
since hour one Miss Info has been bandied about like a loose prom queen.
No, he know’s exactly what he’s doing, which is smearing the political opposition. Oh, you thought his job was transportation?