What Norfolk Southern did isn’t illegal but it wasn’t nice either. They destroyed video evidence relating to the East Palestine, Ohio, disaster, “accidentally on purpose.” The NTSB isn’t happy about it. Footage from the train’s cab “could have provided crucial information about the East Palestine derailment.” It can’t now, because it’s been erased.
Norfolk Southern wiped video
The Norfolk Southern locomotive in question had a camera recording everything the crew said and did, with a capacity for 12 hours of recording time. Some of it survived. The part from “15 minutes before the derailment and 5 minutes after.”
The other 11 hours and 40 minutes leading up to the catastrophe are lost. It got “overwritten after the accident because they put the locomotive immediately back in service.” It’s sneaky but legal, Jennifer L. Homendy, chair of the National Transportation Safety Board explained.
The camera was focused inward on the three-person train crew as they approached the impending disaster but nobody can tell what they were “doing earlier in the trip.”
Norfolk Southern thinks it can wipe away video & make evidence go away – like a Hillary Clinton "Houdini" trick! Well, there's an agency in the government that can actually put together "erased" data. Now NS is guilty of obstruction & evidence tampering.https://t.co/XaCJMZklpj
— CPT35E (@Captain35E) March 25, 2023
Ms. Homendy was providing an update on the NTSB investigation to the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday, March 22. “It’s just as important to see what was going on before that,” Homendy testified. Norfolk Southern’s train “was going in the 35-40 mph range earlier and then between 40-50.”
Other than the speed of the train, the NTSB has no idea “what was occurring around the first and second wayside (defect) detectors.” That’s bad enough but knowing what the crew knew and did before that is “key to investigations.” Norfolk Southern did have detectors.
They’re “placed at intervals several miles apart along the tracks” but not equally. They’re “designed to pick up problems such as the overheated bearing blamed for causing the wreck.” They worked exactly as intended and even though the system failed in some ways, enough data was picked up that humans should have sounded an alert sooner.
No requirement to preserve
The NTSB has already released a preliminary report which did not fault the Norfolk Southern engineer or crew aboard the train but the investigation is ongoing. The missing recording came up briefly Wednesday. Ms Homendy was quizzed by the senate in “a three-and-a-half hour hearing on the February 3 wreck.”
The board will be holding an “investigative field hearing in East Palestine in June.” That one, she notes, “will be wholly fact-finding in nature and open to the public.”
Ahead of their hearing, the NTSB plans to “hold a town hall to receive public comments.” The big question senators had for Ms. Homendy was how the video got erased. On planes the flight data and voice recorders are subject to intense requirements.
Officials from the NTSB provide an update on the catastrophic train disaster in East Palestine, Ohio. "We call occurrences "accidents," although there is no such thing. Every incident under investigation is preventable."
"This was 100% preventable." pic.twitter.com/EmovLpCUG3
— 🔥⭐️Edwin⭐️🔥 (@Edwin07011) February 25, 2023
So are videos from Amtrak passenger trains and commuter lines, she answered. It’s not the same for Norfolk Southern’s freight line. “no requirement exists to preserve recordings on freight trains – even ones that derail and cause untold damage.” Something Congress needs to fix.
That problem, she related, isn’t new. “Lack of video hampered investigators probing Aug. 12, 2019, a collision between two CSX trains in the northwest Ohio community of Carey – one of which started its trip in Columbus.” All the way back in 2010, the NTSB recommended mandatory “crash- and fire-protected” cameras. They repeated “the request numerous times in the 13 years since,” Homendy emphasized.
Don’t blame Norfolk Southern for exploiting a loophole the investigators have been screaming to have closed. The bulk of their investigation is focused on how the data from the “hotbox” detectors was displayed to train operators at HQ and why the warning signs weren’t picked up in time to prevent a major toxic disaster.
