NBC Nightly News: Sunday Sept. 12, 2004

[Anonymous]

In NBC's Nightly News on Sunday they had a repot in their series "12 Ways to Make American Safer" about the railroads. Apparently there is a group of people that are trying to get a law passed that will remove all of the labeling off of Hazmat tank cars as to what chemicals or other liquids are in them. Supposedly in an effort to make it more difficult for terrorists to use them as a weapon (i.e. blow up a Chlorine tanker to kill half of D.C. was their example).

Of course there was another group, I think lead by firefighters, that said that they need those markings in order to safely respond to accidents that might involve these cars. They suggested a solution by not allowing these cars in certain areas and diverting them around cities like D.C.

I was just interested if any railroaders or railfans had seen this report and what their thoughts were on it.

[Anonymous]

I think the second one is a pretty good idea.

[MP57313]

I hadn't seen the report, but there was another thread on a similar topic (removing the placards) and the general consensus was that this is not a wise idea. The need for quick identification outweighs the terrorist risk IMBO (in my biased opinion). Running background checks on the people who work with these chemicals would be a wiser move instead of removing placards.

Tangent: A couple of years ago, the Calif. highway dept. taped over the signs that say "Los Angeles Aqueduct", where US 395 crosses over the aqueduct in the Owens Valley. This was a nutty move. There are many paper and on-line maps that clearly identify the aqueduct. Also, even the untrained eye can tell it is a canal or aqueduct full of water. I don't feel any safer now that the signs are taped over.

[tree68]

<News Item: Hundreds die as authorities attempt to determine contents of tank car>

<Fire and emergency management officials today said that hundreds of lives could have been saved if simple signs had been affixed to the sides of a railroad tank car that derailed near here. The signs, once required on all hazardous materials shipments, were ordered removed by a Homeland Security directive, citing the danger of terrorists being able to target such cars. Attempts to determine the contents from railroad officials were delayed when a key computer system failed, requiring a backup copy of the trains shipping documents to be retrieved manually. Documents usually found in the cab of the locomotive could not be located due to the damage to the unit.>

<Preliminary investigation of the cause of the accident indicates that it was caused by a broken rail. No indication of foul play has been found.>

Yep - Let's protect the populace...

[Anonymous]

Bah! These people are "Chicken Littles" who know nothing about what they are trying to do. They should do a little research and get educated first.

Yes, there may be enough chlorine in a tank car to kill half the people in DC, but only if you can keep it concentrated and close to the ground for a long while. It will be dissipated by the wind and beyond a few blocks will be an annoying odor that will make your eyes sting. Of course any kind of explosion will "burn off" a lot of it and also dissipate it before it moves very far from the release site.

As pointed out in the earlier discussion, there is no way around DC except through another major city, because that is where the railroads go! Only railfans want to get on a train and ride around out in the country!

[mudchicken]

Agree with Tree68, the whole premise is n___ing futs....Do they mysteriously want to pull the NFPA Hazmat diamonds off of buildingsas well?[:(!]...Send the clowns out to Rattlesnake Junction (AAR/TTC Pueblo) and let 'em figure their way out of trouble without the placcards. See how many of them are told they guessed wrong and they are now dead in a simulated incident[}:)][}:)][}:)]... Go ahead, train that firehose on that big sodium container....

Their efforts would be better spent trying to get people to manage the haz-mat paperwork that Joe Trucker never seems to have right or has the wrong forms for.

Would be like everybody living next door to meth labs....[:(!][:(!][:(!] Or...let's remove all the stop signs and traffic lights...dumb!

[cherokee woman]

You said it, Mudchicken!!

[jchnhtfd]

Amen, mudchicken... except that you didn't put it strongly enough! B____y idiots...

[Anonymous]

That was pretty much the response that I was expecting and totally agree with. I know that there is no way that I would approach a car that was not labeled.

But really, how realistic is the second option? I know that it works for trucks on the highway with Hazardous Cargo Routes around some cities and through the mountains (like no hazmat trucks through the Eisenhower Tunnel along I-70, they have to go over the pass on the old road), but I would think I would be a logistical nightmare with a train.

[Anonymous]

If you removed placards, you would also have to remove some reporting symbols as well. It doesn't take a brain surgeon much thought to figure out what a hazardous car load is. Like sealed tank cars departing a chemical plant. Or cars marked DODX. The EPA and HAZMAT regulations concerning transport of hazardous materials are public knowlege. All you are doing by removing placards is making it a lot harder for firemen- and police officers- to respond appropriately when something breaks. It doesn't matter if it's a truck or a train car.

Rerouting trains would be wonderful if trains had the same diversity of routes that trucks do. They don't. I doubt the feds are going to mandate diverting trains around cities without the railroads asking for land grants and financing to support new rights of way. It's especially difficult to re route a train that originates hazardous material within metropolitan areas- like Houston. Ed, are your ears burning? (Not from someone blowing your train up, I hope!)

Erik

[Modelcar]

....Yes, I saw the news program....and my thoughts are that it seriously needs attention. Thought the idea of routing the haz-mat stuff around big cities, if an appropriate route is available might be reasonable. I'm not the expert on the subject, but common sense tells us all the situation requires serious and tightly controlled attention to these movements.

[morseman]

Will homeland security also advocate hazmat placards from trucks. Was any mention of the trucking industry mentioned on the rv broadcast ?????

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by morseman

Will homeland security also advocate hazmat placards from trucks. Was any mention of the trucking industry mentioned on the rv broadcast ?????

No, this segment was only about the railroads, but it sounded like it was a whole series of things that people are trying to do in the name of safety, so it is very possible that there was another segment devoted to the trucking industry. However, by pure luck, the rail one was the only one of the 12 that I saw.

[halifaxcn]

Interesting thread. I work in public safety and were are taught to check for the placards on trucks, rail cars etc. If you study the major haz-mat incidents that have occurred in the United States in the last two decades, you would find that only a few have occurred in major cities. These turn out to be rail yard derailments, tank cars leaking chemicals etc.

IMHO the removal of the placards makes no sense and would only endanager the public safety and the welfare of first responders. This is another dumb move by the people who are just looking for some publicity for their own agenda. Now I have come to realize over my 25 year career that there are some people who do consider us to be expenidable, and the removing the placards just proves my point! BTW the codes on the placards, as I am sure that you all know from the DOT guide also have United Nations numbers. So it would have to be addressed in that forum, not just in the US.

Don't mean to upset or anger anyone, but this is my life we are talking about when I respond to a tank car leaking an unknown substance, because of "security" I wind up dead with a lot of other people. This nonsense has got to stop!

Regards

[MP57313]

QUOTE: Originally posted by halifaxcn
This is another dumb move by the people who are just looking for some publicity for their own agenda. <snip> This nonsense has got to stop!

halifaxcn,
I agree this nonsense should stop, and that it's a dumb move.

Where I work (not in the RR industry) the people who implement changes in a knee-jerk reaction are not always looking for publicity. Instead they are doing something/anything quickly in reaction to a fist-pounding mandate from the boss. The boss isn't seeking publicity either, he just needs to have something to point to in case someone asks "What are you doing about the risks?"
MP

[eastside]

In the previous week, ABC News ran a similar story. In their simulation, again the spreading dark cloud of death, they showed the effect of blowing up a tank car full of chlorine in mid-town Manhattan, right in my neighborhood. Pretty scary, and laughable since without railroad tracks one wonders how terrorists would get the tank car there in the first place. Yes there are those tracks to Grand Central, but those are under Park Avenue and freight trains don't run on them, of course. Trucks remain the most logical threat, but ABC didn't mention that.

[adrianspeeder]

Morons, I hate when the media runs around with its head cut off from common sense. I get the same thing back home with Three Mile Island. Everyonce in a while some moron will start yelling that TMI could blow up in a giant mushroom cloud and kill everything. The only way a mushroom cloud could happen is if a nuke bomb was dropped on it.

The power plant has the wrong type of urainium to explode like an atom bomb.

Adrianspeeder

[BR60103]

During World War 2, Britain removed or painted over all the identifying signs at stations and signposts on highways and everything else so that invaders would not know where they were. Of course, no one else knew where they were, either.
(Lovely bit in a Beynd the Fringe sketch, where some workmen have just mixed up all the pointers on a sign: "'Ere, Fred, 'ow do we get 'ome?")