“Have fun, everybody,” Trump told them after signing autographs.
I think he told everybody to have a good time when he visited Houston after Hurricane Harvey.
He is such an idiot.
My gut reaction was "he assumes that regardless of what else is going on they'll be on cloud 9 after meeting the great one."
But it's probably that he simply doesn't really know how to relate to people. After all, he's probably the only person elected to office because of an angry, as opposed to personable, persona; at least in the TV era.
1995 Milwaukee 1998 Alpine, Alpine 2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston 2004 Boston, Boston 2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty) 2011 Alpine, Alpine 2013 Wrigley 2014 St. Paul
Train crew had little warning before Ohio wreck, probe finds
By JOHN SEEWER, MICHAEL RUBINKAM and GEOFF MULVIHILL
Yesterday
EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (AP) — The crew operating a freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, didn't get much warning before dozens of cars went off the tracks, and there is no indication that crew members did anything wrong, federal investigators said Thursday as they released a preliminary report into the fiery wreck that prompted a toxic chemical release and an evacuation.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made his first visit to the crash site and took shots at former President Donald Trump, who had visited the day before and criticized the federal response to the train derailment. Their back-and-forth was the latest sign that the East Palestine wreck has become a hot-button political issue, prompting a rebuke from the head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Enough with the politics. I don’t understand why this has gotten so political,” safety board Chair Jennifer Homendy, clearly exasperated, said at a briefing in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “This is a community that is suffering. This is not about politics. This is about addressing their needs, their concerns.”
The NTSB report, which laid out the facts that investigators have gathered to date, said crew members had no indication the train was in trouble until an alarm sounded just before it went off the tracks.
An engineer slowed and stopped the train after getting a “critical audible alarm message" that signaled an overheated axle, according to the report. The three-person crew then saw fire and smoke and alerted dispatch, the report said.
“We have no evidence that the crew did anything wrong,” said Homendy, who announced a rare investigatory field hearing to be conducted in East Palestine this spring as officials seek to get to the bottom of the derailment's cause and build consensus on how to prevent similar wrecks.
Investigators said the temperature of the failed wheel bearing increased by 215 degrees in a span of 30 miles (48 kilometers), but did not reach the temperature threshold that railroad company Norfolk Southern had set for an alarm to go off until just before the wreck.
The train was going about 47 mph (75 kph), under the speed limit of 50 mph (80 kph), according to investigators.
Outside experts who looked at the report said the system appeared to work as designed, from the spacing of the hot bearing detectors along the tracks to the operation of the sensors.
“There’s nothing in the NTSB report that surprises me at all,” said Dave Clarke, the former director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee. “I can’t see anything to really criticize about what happened or how the response was made.”
Christopher Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois, said the spacing of the sensors that recorded the temperatures of the Norfolk Southern train — 10 and 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) apart — is common in the industry.
He said the detectors would not have notified the train crew of elevated bearing temperatures unless they met the threshold for action.
“I don’t see anything wrong here, but we just don’t know,” Barkan said.
Homendy said investigators would look at whether industry safety standards — including high-temperature alarm thresholds and sensor spacing — will need to change to prevent similar derailments.
Norfolk Southern said the NTSB report showed the heat detectors worked as intended and the train crew operated “within the company's rules." Nevertheless, the company said it would “need to learn as much as we can from this event” and “develop practices and invest in technologies that could help prevent an incident like this in the future.”
The freight cars that derailed on the East Palestine outskirts, near the Pennsylvania state line, included 11 carrying hazardous materials. Villagers evacuated as fears grew about a potential explosion of smoldering wreckage.
Officials seeking to avoid an uncontrolled blast intentionally released and burned toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars, sending flames and black smoke into the sky. That left people questioning the potential health effects even as authorities maintained they were doing their best to protect people.
In another sign of the environmental impact, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said Thursday it now estimates spilled contaminants affecting several miles of streams killed nearly 44,000 fish, mostly small ones such as minnows. Its initial estimate was 3,500.
As NTSB released its preliminary findings, Buttigieg — who had been criticized for not coming to East Palestine earlier — went on a tour of the crash site and defended the Biden administration's response to the Feb. 3 derailment, which Trump had portrayed as indifferent and a “betrayal."
Buttigieg told reporters that if the former president — and current Republican presidential candidate — felt strongly about increased rail safety efforts, “one thing he could do is express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre excoriated “political stunts that we’re seeing from the other side” but did not say whether a trip by Democratic President Joe Biden was in the works.
Another Biden administration official, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, has been to East Palestine multiple times, most recently Tuesday as the EPA ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup.
With heavy equipment rumbling behind him, Buttigieg slammed Norfolk Southern and other freight rail companies for fighting regulations he said would “hold them accountable and the other railroad companies accountable for their safety record." He pressed Congress to act.
Heather Bable, who lives two blocks from the derailment site, said she’s relieved the government’s top brass is finally showing up.
“We need that attention because we weren’t getting it. They should have been here all along,” said Bable.
After throngs of residents lined the streets in pouring rain to welcome Trump on Wednesday, the reception for Buttigieg was decidedly more muted, with little fanfare around the village of just under 5,000 residents. Trump won nearly 72% of the vote in this heavily Republican region in 2020.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, whose Pennsylvania district borders the derailment site, asked Norfolk Southern to expand the boundaries of the geographic zone in which it is providing financial assistance and testing. He asserted the current zone excludes many affected Pennsylvania residents and businesses, and said the company should commit to cleaning up soil and water up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) beyond it.
“Norfolk Southern is failing to show any commitment to rebuilding lost trust in our community,” Deluzio wrote in a letter to Norfolk Southern's CEO. Providing additional resources “would help your company restore the sense of security that the Norfolk Southern train derailment and its aftermath destroyed.”
___
Rubinkam reported from northeastern Pennsylvania and Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press reporters Julie Carr Smyth and Patrick Orsagos in Columbus, Ohio, and Chris Megerian and Hope Yen in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
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memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Safety agency opens probe of Norfolk Southern rail accidents
By JOSH FUNK and JOHN SEEWER
Yesterday
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal investigators are opening a wide-ranging investigation into one of the nation’s biggest railroads following a fiery derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month and several other accidents involving Norfolk Southern, including the death of a train conductor Tuesday.
The National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday it will begin a broad look at the company's safety culture — the first such investigation within the rail industry since 2014. The board said it has sent investigation teams to look into five significant accidents involving Norfolk Southern since December 2021.
The agency also urged the company to take immediate action to review and assess its safety practices.
The Federal Railroad Administration also announced its own investigation of Norfolk Southern on Tuesday. The administration will issue a public report after conducting a 60-day safety assessment, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In the release, the railroad administration said Norfolk Southern must go beyond the steps it announced Monday and take actions “that match the severity of recent incidents.”
Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw pledged to hold a series of companywide safety meetings Wednesday — one day ahead of when he is scheduled to testify in Congress at a hearing on the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment.
“Moving forward, we are going to rebuild our safety culture from the ground up,” he said in a statement. “We are going to invest more in safety. This is not who we are, it is not acceptable, and it will not continue.”
In response to the Ohio derailment, the railroad on Monday announced plans to improve the use of detectors placed along railroad tracks to spot overheating bearings and other problems.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said the crew operating the train that derailed Feb. 3 outside East Palestine, Ohio, got a warning from such a detector but couldn’t stop the train before more than three dozen cars came off the tracks and caught fire.
Half of the town of about 5,000 people had to evacuate for days when responders intentionally burned toxic chemicals in some of the derailed cars to prevent an uncontrolled explosion, leaving residents with lingering health concerns. Government officials say tests haven’t found dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or water in the area.
Within the industry, Norfolk Southern has had a strong reputation for being a safe railroad over the years, said Christopher Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois.
Federal Railroad Administration statistics show accidents involving Norfolk Southern is down since 2019, but the rate of accidents is up over the past decade. The 119 derailments involving Norfolk Southern last year was the lowest number in the last decade. Industrywide, there were more than 1,000 derailments last year.
But pressure has been mounting on the railroad in the aftermath of the East Palestine disaster.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told the nation’s freight railroads in February to immediately act to improve safety while regulators were focusing on strengthening safety rules. Buttigieg said the department will hold the railroad accountable for any safety violations that contributed to the Feb. 3 crash.
President Joe Biden said on Twitter after the derailment that the past pattern of railroads resisting safety regulations must change and that Congress should support the effort to improve safety.
Even though government data shows that derailments have declined in recent years, there were still 1,049 of them last year.
While most don’t cause any major problems, of the five accidents the National Transportation Safety Board pointed to involving Norfolk Southern since the end of 2021, three resulted in the deaths of three workers.
On Saturday, no one was hurt when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed near Springfield, Ohio.
In the latest incident Tuesday, a train and a dump truck collided at a steel plant in Cleveland, killing the train conductor who was standing on the outside of a car, authorities said. The company said the cause of that accident was not yet known.
Eddie Hall, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union that represents the worker who was killed, said the death is a reminder of the need for safety improvements.
“All railroad accidents are avoidable,” Hall said. “This collision underscores the need for significant improvements in rail safety for both workers and the public.”
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
It's almost like the striking rail workers that were complaining about being underpaid and overworked in unsafe conditions were like the canary in the coal mine here. Too bad we don't listen to labor anymore.
Comments
But it's probably that he simply doesn't really know how to relate to people. After all, he's probably the only person elected to office because of an angry, as opposed to personable, persona; at least in the TV era.
1998 Alpine, Alpine
2003 Albany, Boston, Boston, Boston
2004 Boston, Boston
2006 Hartford, St. Paul (Petty), St. Paul (Petty)
2011 Alpine, Alpine
2013 Wrigley
2014 St. Paul
2018 Missoula, Wrigley, Wrigley
2021 Asbury Park
EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (AP) — The crew operating a freight train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, didn't get much warning before dozens of cars went off the tracks, and there is no indication that crew members did anything wrong, federal investigators said Thursday as they released a preliminary report into the fiery wreck that prompted a toxic chemical release and an evacuation.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made his first visit to the crash site and took shots at former President Donald Trump, who had visited the day before and criticized the federal response to the train derailment. Their back-and-forth was the latest sign that the East Palestine wreck has become a hot-button political issue, prompting a rebuke from the head of the National Transportation Safety Board.
“Enough with the politics. I don’t understand why this has gotten so political,” safety board Chair Jennifer Homendy, clearly exasperated, said at a briefing in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. “This is a community that is suffering. This is not about politics. This is about addressing their needs, their concerns.”
The NTSB report, which laid out the facts that investigators have gathered to date, said crew members had no indication the train was in trouble until an alarm sounded just before it went off the tracks.
An engineer slowed and stopped the train after getting a “critical audible alarm message" that signaled an overheated axle, according to the report. The three-person crew then saw fire and smoke and alerted dispatch, the report said.
“We have no evidence that the crew did anything wrong,” said Homendy, who announced a rare investigatory field hearing to be conducted in East Palestine this spring as officials seek to get to the bottom of the derailment's cause and build consensus on how to prevent similar wrecks.
Investigators said the temperature of the failed wheel bearing increased by 215 degrees in a span of 30 miles (48 kilometers), but did not reach the temperature threshold that railroad company Norfolk Southern had set for an alarm to go off until just before the wreck.
The train was going about 47 mph (75 kph), under the speed limit of 50 mph (80 kph), according to investigators.
Outside experts who looked at the report said the system appeared to work as designed, from the spacing of the hot bearing detectors along the tracks to the operation of the sensors.
“There’s nothing in the NTSB report that surprises me at all,” said Dave Clarke, the former director of the Center for Transportation Research at the University of Tennessee. “I can’t see anything to really criticize about what happened or how the response was made.”
Christopher Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois, said the spacing of the sensors that recorded the temperatures of the Norfolk Southern train — 10 and 20 miles (16 to 32 kilometers) apart — is common in the industry.
He said the detectors would not have notified the train crew of elevated bearing temperatures unless they met the threshold for action.
“I don’t see anything wrong here, but we just don’t know,” Barkan said.
Homendy said investigators would look at whether industry safety standards — including high-temperature alarm thresholds and sensor spacing — will need to change to prevent similar derailments.
Norfolk Southern said the NTSB report showed the heat detectors worked as intended and the train crew operated “within the company's rules." Nevertheless, the company said it would “need to learn as much as we can from this event” and “develop practices and invest in technologies that could help prevent an incident like this in the future.”
The freight cars that derailed on the East Palestine outskirts, near the Pennsylvania state line, included 11 carrying hazardous materials. Villagers evacuated as fears grew about a potential explosion of smoldering wreckage.
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Officials seeking to avoid an uncontrolled blast intentionally released and burned toxic vinyl chloride from five rail cars, sending flames and black smoke into the sky. That left people questioning the potential health effects even as authorities maintained they were doing their best to protect people.
In another sign of the environmental impact, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources said Thursday it now estimates spilled contaminants affecting several miles of streams killed nearly 44,000 fish, mostly small ones such as minnows. Its initial estimate was 3,500.
As NTSB released its preliminary findings, Buttigieg — who had been criticized for not coming to East Palestine earlier — went on a tour of the crash site and defended the Biden administration's response to the Feb. 3 derailment, which Trump had portrayed as indifferent and a “betrayal."
Buttigieg told reporters that if the former president — and current Republican presidential candidate — felt strongly about increased rail safety efforts, “one thing he could do is express support for reversing the deregulation that happened on his watch.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre excoriated “political stunts that we’re seeing from the other side” but did not say whether a trip by Democratic President Joe Biden was in the works.
Another Biden administration official, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, has been to East Palestine multiple times, most recently Tuesday as the EPA ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup.
With heavy equipment rumbling behind him, Buttigieg slammed Norfolk Southern and other freight rail companies for fighting regulations he said would “hold them accountable and the other railroad companies accountable for their safety record." He pressed Congress to act.
Heather Bable, who lives two blocks from the derailment site, said she’s relieved the government’s top brass is finally showing up.
“We need that attention because we weren’t getting it. They should have been here all along,” said Bable.
After throngs of residents lined the streets in pouring rain to welcome Trump on Wednesday, the reception for Buttigieg was decidedly more muted, with little fanfare around the village of just under 5,000 residents. Trump won nearly 72% of the vote in this heavily Republican region in 2020.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio, whose Pennsylvania district borders the derailment site, asked Norfolk Southern to expand the boundaries of the geographic zone in which it is providing financial assistance and testing. He asserted the current zone excludes many affected Pennsylvania residents and businesses, and said the company should commit to cleaning up soil and water up to 30 miles (48 kilometers) beyond it.
“Norfolk Southern is failing to show any commitment to rebuilding lost trust in our community,” Deluzio wrote in a letter to Norfolk Southern's CEO. Providing additional resources “would help your company restore the sense of security that the Norfolk Southern train derailment and its aftermath destroyed.”
___
Rubinkam reported from northeastern Pennsylvania and Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Associated Press reporters Julie Carr Smyth and Patrick Orsagos in Columbus, Ohio, and Chris Megerian and Hope Yen in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Federal investigators are opening a wide-ranging investigation into one of the nation’s biggest railroads following a fiery derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border last month and several other accidents involving Norfolk Southern, including the death of a train conductor Tuesday.
The National Transportation Safety Board said on Tuesday it will begin a broad look at the company's safety culture — the first such investigation within the rail industry since 2014. The board said it has sent investigation teams to look into five significant accidents involving Norfolk Southern since December 2021.
The agency also urged the company to take immediate action to review and assess its safety practices.
The Federal Railroad Administration also announced its own investigation of Norfolk Southern on Tuesday. The administration will issue a public report after conducting a 60-day safety assessment, according to a release from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
In the release, the railroad administration said Norfolk Southern must go beyond the steps it announced Monday and take actions “that match the severity of recent incidents.”
Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw pledged to hold a series of companywide safety meetings Wednesday — one day ahead of when he is scheduled to testify in Congress at a hearing on the East Palestine, Ohio, derailment.
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“Moving forward, we are going to rebuild our safety culture from the ground up,” he said in a statement. “We are going to invest more in safety. This is not who we are, it is not acceptable, and it will not continue.”
In response to the Ohio derailment, the railroad on Monday announced plans to improve the use of detectors placed along railroad tracks to spot overheating bearings and other problems.
Investigators with the National Transportation Safety Board said the crew operating the train that derailed Feb. 3 outside East Palestine, Ohio, got a warning from such a detector but couldn’t stop the train before more than three dozen cars came off the tracks and caught fire.
Half of the town of about 5,000 people had to evacuate for days when responders intentionally burned toxic chemicals in some of the derailed cars to prevent an uncontrolled explosion, leaving residents with lingering health concerns. Government officials say tests haven’t found dangerous levels of chemicals in the air or water in the area.
Within the industry, Norfolk Southern has had a strong reputation for being a safe railroad over the years, said Christopher Barkan, director of the Rail Transportation and Engineering Center at the University of Illinois.
Federal Railroad Administration statistics show accidents involving Norfolk Southern is down since 2019, but the rate of accidents is up over the past decade. The 119 derailments involving Norfolk Southern last year was the lowest number in the last decade. Industrywide, there were more than 1,000 derailments last year.
But pressure has been mounting on the railroad in the aftermath of the East Palestine disaster.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told the nation’s freight railroads in February to immediately act to improve safety while regulators were focusing on strengthening safety rules. Buttigieg said the department will hold the railroad accountable for any safety violations that contributed to the Feb. 3 crash.
President Joe Biden said on Twitter after the derailment that the past pattern of railroads resisting safety regulations must change and that Congress should support the effort to improve safety.
Even though government data shows that derailments have declined in recent years, there were still 1,049 of them last year.
While most don’t cause any major problems, of the five accidents the National Transportation Safety Board pointed to involving Norfolk Southern since the end of 2021, three resulted in the deaths of three workers.
On Saturday, no one was hurt when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed near Springfield, Ohio.
In the latest incident Tuesday, a train and a dump truck collided at a steel plant in Cleveland, killing the train conductor who was standing on the outside of a car, authorities said. The company said the cause of that accident was not yet known.
Eddie Hall, president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen union that represents the worker who was killed, said the death is a reminder of the need for safety improvements.
“All railroad accidents are avoidable,” Hall said. “This collision underscores the need for significant improvements in rail safety for both workers and the public.”
___
Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
There are no kings inside the gates of eden