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NS Crew Fired After Graniteville Crash
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Brad: <br /> <br />1. No one is excusing anything. We're not, the railroad isn't, the union isn't. We all want to go home in one piece tonight. <br />2. You don't understand that opening and closing that switch isn't the only life-safety item that crew touched that day. It is one of at least ONE THOUSAND such items they did that day, and 1,000 the day before, and 1,000 or more every day they were called to work since the day they hired out. Any single one of them done wrong, or forgotten, can kill someone! So if this crew has had a perfect record for 10 years, and worked five days a week, in that 10 years they have each made 2,500,000 life-safety decisions. Do you reasonably expect any human to make 2.5 million correct decisions in a row? How many life-safety decisions do you make every day at work? <br />3. If you want to have a device that can help make that switch, and everyone just like it in the U.S. a fail-safe switch, you'd be talking over 50,000 switches. Cost, $100,000 each, minimum, on a fully allocated basis including future maintenance, inspection, verification, etc. Where do you suppose the railroads are going to come up with $5 billion to do that? That's almost as much money as they spend every year on new rail, ties, ballast, locomotives, cars, and computers. The shippers can't and won't pay it. Then all the freight those lines will haul will go to highway, which is even less safe, or the economic activity will simply cease and tens of thousands of people will go unemployed. <br /> <br />OS
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