In Eastern Ohio Rail Disaster, Echoes of Lac-Mégantic, and Lessons Ignored
by Julian A.S. — Corporate and regulatory shortcomings continue to put North American communities at risk.
by Julian A.S.
Earlier this month, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. As the train was thrown from the tracks, its hazardous cargo burst into flames. A massive inferno raged through the night as the town’s residents evacuated. Several days later, authorities began a ‘controlled’ burn of the remaining chemicals in a bid to prevent a massive explosion. An acrid cloud of black smoke rose and hovered over the town and surrounding area for days. The environmental fallout is ongoing.
Thankfully, and miraculously, no one was killed in the initial derailment and fire. Had the train jumped the tracks just a few hundred meters further west, the inferno would’ve consumed a neighbourhood instead of an industrial site. People surely would’ve died. It’s easy to imagine how this disaster could've been far worse, how dozens of innocent people could have been incinerated in their homes, had the circumstances been just slightly different.
Instead, the costs of this disaster will be measured in years and decades: long-term health effects for locals; dead livestock and wildlife; harm to the natural environment. It might seem like this horrifying and widely-reported incident could prove to be the near-miss, the catalyst necessary to improve the safety of the hazardous freight trains that rumble through North American neighbourhoods.
But this is no wake-up call. It is something far more sinister.
Unfortunately, we actually don’t need to imagine how this disaster might have been worse. We’ve already seen it, and it happened right here in Québec.
Nearly a decade ago, on July 6, 2013, a train carrying crude oil derailed in the town of Lac-Mégantic in the middle of the night. The 73-car Montreal, Maine & Atlantic Railway (MMA) train had been parked and left unattended, as was standard practice for the company. Around 01:00, the train inadvertently began to roll downhill and gain speed, before it eventually reached a sharp curve in the centre of town and derailed at over 100 kilometers per hour. As tank cars jumped the tracks and crumpled on impact, a river of crude oil gushed into the neighbouring streets. It ignited almost immediately. The resulting explosions and fires levelled the downtown, instantly killing 47 people.
The disaster shook the country, and reverberated across North America. How could such a dangerous train have come to hurtle uncontrollably into a population centre? And how many more towns and cities were vulnerable to a similar incident?
As with almost any disaster, there was no single cause or sole point of failure. The subsequent investigation revealed a chain of individual and systemic failings.
Before leaving the train for the night, the engineer—who was working alone—failed to apply an adequate number of hand brakes to hold the train as was required by law. On any other night, this mistake might not have mattered. The locomotive had been left idling, and so the train's air brakes were also activated. Combined, these brakes were sufficient to hold the train. But shortly before midnight, a faulty engine repair made eight months earlier caused a build-up of oil to ignite. The local fire department responded to the parked locomotive, and extinguished the small blaze by activating the emergency fuel shut-off. Under instruction from an MMA employee, the firefighters also flipped the electrical breakers on the locomotive.
Crews were satisfied that the emergency had been handled, and the train was once again left alone. With the locomotive now shut down, the air brakes began to slowly bleed pressure until the supplemental force of the air brakes fell below the point necessary to hold the train. Slowly, it began to roll. Lac-Mégantic sat approximately 10 kilometers downhill.
As much as the events of that night were crucial to the disaster, they were fundamentally enabled by a pathetic corporate safety culture and weak regulatory environment. MMA had certainly been cutting corners, but it was immediately evident that the dangers were systemic and industry-wide. In short, it became clear that both Canadian and American regulators were failing to take action to mitigate the obvious risks posed by such negligent corporate practices. Railroads were operating with too much autonomy, and with too much emphasis on profit over safety.
Lac-Mégantic should have been the wake-up call. It was even explicitly referred to as such at the time. So what happened in East Palestine, Ohio, this month? Why are dangerous freight trains still derailing and exploding in population centres nearly a decade later?
In the immediate aftermath of Lac-Mégantic, it seemed like lawmakers and regulators in both Canada and the United States were serious about taking action to improve safety on North American freight railroads. There was significant public discourse surrounding the regulatory and operational failures that had led to the disaster on both sides of the border, and it looked like meaningful change might be on its way. Lessons had been learned. Mandated automatic braking systems, modern railcars, improved corporate safety culture, and increased government oversight were going to prevent something similar from ever happening again.
The optimism was short-lived.
Just a few years later, the Trump Administration reverted many of the American safety regulations that had been introduced in the immediate aftermath of Lac-Mégantic, leading to cartoonishly-ominous headlines like “Trump Rolls Back Train-Braking Rule Meant to Keep Oil Tankers from Exploding Near Communities”. While maybe not as blatantly cynical as Trump-era backpedaling, Canada’s updated regulations—or lack thereof—were also being challenged around the same time. We shouldn’t feel complacent on this side of the border, even if Lac-Mégantic was felt much more acutely here.
Today, the situation is little better.
There are still over 1000 train derailments every year in the United States. In Canada, the annual average was around 500 between 2010 and 2019. These are not rare occurrences. Of course, the overwhelming majority of these incidents will not become firestorms—literal, media, or otherwise—but we continue to roll the dice an awful lot.
It’s not yet clear what caused the recent derailment in Ohio. A full investigation and report will be required to say definitely what went wrong, but early indications suggest that a malfunctioning railcar was a key factor—what will likely turn out to be the result of cost cutting and lack of maintenance, enabled by an absence of sufficient regulatory oversight.
While the exact circumstances of this disaster—the immediate causes, the chemicals involved—may differ from Lac-Mégantic, the overarching factors are starting to look eerily familiar. Railroad companies are likely cutting corners, and regulations are either too relaxed or too underenforced to prevent tragedy.
In a political environment where our governments are so clearly failing in their duty to protect the general public, and journalists are literally being arrested while trying to report on these disasters, it is clear that we have a serious accountability problem.
Although it could have been much, much worse, this month’s derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, is so sinister because it reveals a simple truth: nothing has meaningfully changed since Lac-Mégantic. The lessons were learned, they’ve just been ignored—and unless something changes, our cities and towns will continue to burn.