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Norfolk Southern announced plans on Monday to improve the use of detectors placed along railroad tracks to spot overheating bearings and other problems in response to a fiery derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border a month ago.
The announcement came the same day Pennsylvania’s governor announced that the company had agreed to pay several million dollars to cover the cost of the response and recovery in that state.
The company said it would evaluate the distance between “hot bearing“ detectors — currently 13.9 miles (22 kilometers) on average on its core network — and promised to look at every location where the distance is more than 15 miles (24 kilometers), deploying more detectors if practical.
Norfolk Southern „anticipates adding approximately 200 hot bearing detectors to its network, with the first installed on the western approach to East Palestine,” said the company announcement, which comes amid proposals from President Joe Biden’s administration and Congress aimed at improving safety following last month’s derailment.
The National Transportation Safety Board has said the crew operating the train that derailed Feb. 3 outside East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border 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.
A week ago, a safety advisory from the Federal Railroad Administration urged railroads to reexamine the use of such detectors, making sure that they get inspected often enough by trained employees and that there are safe standards for determining when to stop a train or park a railcar when a warning is triggered.
