Safety & health: What about the rest of us?

A new report from the University of Illinois Chicago and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health shows an increase in black lung disease, even among younger miners, “at rates not seen since the early 1970s.”

When the Workers Memorial Day international holiday is marked this year on April 28 – the date when the Occupational Safety and Health Act was enacted 52 years ago – working people remember those sickened, injured or killed at work.

However, whether illnesses such as black lung, injuries from accidents, or illnesses tied to work, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is about OCCUPATIONAL safety and health. What about work outside the traditional employer-worker relationship?

What about bystanders to companies’ actions or lack of actions?

Corporations harm people beyond those on their payrolls, from selling products contributing to diabetes and obesity to unsafe material to accidents that spill over our communities? Corporations place profits over people: workers, consumers and members of communities where they operate.

There’s “a long history of corporations pairing deceptive marketing with powerful lobbying influence to shift the blame and responsibility on consumers, and ensuring that politicians don’t regulate them,” reported Heather Coleman of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, and Dr. Katherine Gergen Barnett, an associate at Harvard’s Center for Primary Care and a health innovator fellow at the Aspen Institute.

Stephanie Griffin, a former Union Pacific carman who complained that she was being criticized for reporting railcars for repairs, told The Guardian, “Most railroad workers are fighting against an entire system that only exists as a money-making apparatus to the wealthy. Those trains run through our towns, but they do not run next to rich folks’ homes, nor next to our politicians’ homes.”

The most recent example is this winter’s catastrophic derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where the community of 4,761 people still notice odors from the Feb. 3 disaster that saw some 38 of a Norfolk Southern train’s 150 cars derailed, including 11 which carried hazardous chemicals: Vinyl chloride, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, butyl acrylate, isobutylene, and benzene residue. Five other cars carried oil and another had fuel additives.

“Exposure to these hazardous materials at sufficiently high levels has been associated variously with an increased risk of cancer, risks to fetal development, damage to organs like the liver, kidneys, lungs, and skin, and other health conditions,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Venting five of the cars, supposedly to prevent an explosion, produced widespread air and water pollution in and around the town. A mushroom-like cloud, started by the fires on the derailed cars, hovered over East Palestine.

Despite evacuating, many East Palestinians after returning home had properties covered in soot of some sort, and they continue to complain about dizziness, headaches, numbness in their limbs, nausea, rashes, irritated eyes, and shortness of breath – plus sickened animals. Runoff of the chemicals polluted the water in the stream that ran through town, killing at least 3,500 fish. Pets died, too. And Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources Director Mary Mertz estimated that more than 43,000 wild animals died as a result of the derailment and its chemical aftermath.

A preliminary report blamed a single wheel bearing on one car of that train, which weighed 18,000 tons and stretched 1.76 miles.

Almost always ignored is the possibility of long-term effects – the lifetime impact on anyone at or near such mass exposures to toxins. The many derailments over the years have left victims akin to those affected by the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and cleanup.

“While the trains are still burning, they’re rebuilding the rails,” said Justine Mikulka, author of “Bomb Trains: How Industry Greed and Regulatory Failure Put the Public at Risk.”

He continued, “It’s again an excellent example of how they put profit over public safety.”

More than 12,400 train derailments happened in the United States in the last 10 years, and “only” 10 railroad accidents involving hazardous material occurred last year, according to the Federal Railroad Administration. The Association of American Railroads claims that 99% of their trains are safe.

(Excuse me? If you and some friends are watching the NBA tournament with a basket of 100 chicken wings, and 1 of them is poison, would you eat any?)

“The bottom line is that what happened in East Palestine could have just as easily happened in Illinois,” said U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.). Indeed, the Norfolk Southern train that dumped its chemicals in East Palestine started its doomed trek in Madison, Ill., almost 10 million tons of hazardous material moved through the state in 2019, and a staggering one of four freight trains in the country passes through Chicago.

                                                               

                                                                        CONSEQUENCES

In the aftermath of that derailment, the Environmental Protection Agency responded to start cleaning up. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launched investigations that expanded to Norfolk Southern’s entire system, not just the February accident. State and local authorities are pressing for safety reforms, from legislative measures in Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia to proposals from the National League of Cities.

The state of Ohio and the U.S. Justice Department filed suit again Norfolk Southern, and in Congress, a rare bipartisan measure was introduced to improve safety regulations, co-sponsored by Ohio Senators Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance.

“It shouldn’t take a train derailment for elected officials to put partisanship aside and work together for the people we serve – not corporations like Norfolk Southern,” said Brown, a progressive Democrat. “Lobbyists for the rail companies spent years fighting every effort to strengthen rules to make our trains and rail lines safer. Now Ohioans are paying the price.”

Vance, a Trump-backed Republican, added, “We have a choice: Are we for big business and big government, or are we for the people of East Palestine?”

Prevention is preferable, of course, and this industrial accident could have been avoided, according to NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy, who said, “I can tell you this much: This was 100% preventable.”

Meanwhile, Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw apologized and pledged to clean up the town and help its residents, plus he said he’ll support some reforms and even dropped the company’s long-time demand to cut crew sizes.

But the GOP’s zeal for deregulation remains, so some Republicans doubt there’s a need to change the rules of the railroads.

“The railroads have opposed any government regulation on train length; they have sought waivers to eliminate having trained inspectors monitor railcars; and they have pushed back on the train crew staffing rule,” said Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen (BLET) national president Eddie Hall.

“The railroads and their trade association the Association of American Railroads (AAR) employ armies of lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are there not to promote safety regulations but to slow the implementation of federal safety regulations – or attempt to eliminate them altogether.”

The researchers Coleman and Barnett said, “Americans should all be asking the question of what role corporations are playing on the health of our bodies. We cannot continue to let corporations decide what’s best.”

Government mandates are needed, according to Matt Weaver from Railroad Workers United.

“You can't trust a capitalist industry, a for-profit industry, to self-regulate,” he said. “We have to have government intervention. So it’s time for the regulators to regulate and the public servants to serve the public."