The case for more regulation.

• Author: Aizenman, Nurith C.
• Position: Lax federal trucking and railroad safety oversight

In March of 1996, all 1,700 residents of Weyauwega Wisconsin skipped town for three weeks -- involuntarily. The reason for their impromptu spring break: an 81-car train carrying propane and sodium hydroxide derailed and exploded just outside the city center, creamy a toxic fire so dangerous the entire community had to be evacuated while authorities struggled to contain it. But the Weyauwegans should consider themselves lucky. In Chicago this past August, 19 people were treated for chemical exposure at area hospitals after the hose on a truck pumping sulfur trioxide into a holding tank broke and released a 50 foot high lethal cloud. And in California several years earlier, 700 people fell ill after a tanker-car full of metam sodium plunged into the Sacramento River, killing all water life within 40 miles and contaminating California's largest reservoir.

These events point to a disturbing trend: serious accidents involving the important of hazardous materials, or "hazmats," on trucks and trains have become an almost daily occurrence. In 1995 alone, there were 12,712 incidents involving hazardous materials released from trucks and 1,330 from rail cars. But what's really remarkable about these cases is that they were not more disastrous. Considering the recent massive increase in the volume of hazardous materials streaming across our nation's highways and railroads, combined with the industry's cavalier attitude towards safety and the government's cross-your-fingers-and-hope-for-the-best approach to regulation, it's a wonder we haven't witnessed a truly devastating catastrophe. Environmentalists warn it's only a matter of time before we're treated to a tragedy on the scale of the 1984 accident in Bhopal, India -- where 3,500 people were suffocated in their sleep by a 20-ton cloud of methyl isocyanate seeping from a Union Carbide plant.

That's not to say there haven't been lots of close calls. Lan December, the Department of Transportation's Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) discovered that despite the fact that military bombs being carried aboard a Union Pacific train had broken through their containers and were protruding onto the floor of a flat car, the company had allowed the train to travel from Oklahoma to California through several major terminals without taking any corrective action. As one FRA official noted in an internal memo: "[Union Pacific] needs a big time wake up call .... The way we see it, if they can't take care of class A explosives, makes you wonder what they are doing with other HM [hazardous materials]."

And there are plenty of other hazardous materials to wonder about. Between 1990 and 1995, hazmat transport by rail increased 27 percent to almost 1.8 million cars a year, each one carrying a payload that makes the lethal cargo aboard ValuJet flight 592 look like a shipment of fire-retardant blankets. Pick your poison: there are toxic-by-inhalation chemicals like chlorine and hydrogen fluoride, which can roll across miles of countryside in ground-hugging clouds that bum your body tissue, fill your lungs with fluid and cause you to literally drown in your own juices. There are explosives like ammonium nitrate -- mix that with little fuel and it's Oklahoma City time. Then, of course, there are your run-of-the-mill flammables, like liquefied petroleum gas, or propane, which comprises the bulk of the roughly four billion tons of hazardous materials hauled across our highways every year, and which, when released, vaporizes into a volatile gas that can ignite into a jet flame if so much as a spark comes near And finally, there's the mother of all hazmats, nuclear waste, which could become a lot more familiar if the government goes ahead with plans to open a temporary nuclear materials repository in Nevada. By as early as 1999, up to 100,000 shipments of highly radioactive spent fuel from reactors across the country could begin the long journey to the storage site by rail and truck-in containers whose crash worthiness has been tested almost exclusively through computer simulations. With an these goodies making their way from sea to shining sea, perhaps it's not surprising that even some chemical company executives are reaching for their gas masks. "It scares the living daylights out of me" confides one former DuPont official.

Dying for a Job

The ugly reality of our industrial advances and booming economy is that we need -- or at least want -- more and more products made from dangerous substances. Unless we drastically change our consumption habits, one way or another these hazardous materials are going to have to be lugged around the country But surely our government and industries have taken steps to ensure that the vehicles hauling these toxins are piloted by specially trained experts -- crack professionals, alert and ready for the worst, right? Try zombified novices, bleary-eyed and poorly prepared.

To start with, hazardous material transporters are dangerously overworked. At the railroads, the rise in hazardous shipments has been accompanied by large scale downsizing. According to a study by an environmental group called The Good Neighbor Project, between 1985 and 1995, Union Pacific, by far the nation's largest hazmat rail carrier, doubled the ratio of its car shipments to workers from 85:1 to 170:1. Freight trains once served by teams of 5 or 6 people are now left in the hands of one engineer and a conductor. This duo is expected to work for up to 12 hours, take 8 hours off (for eating, sleeping, bill paying, etc.), then come back for more. The length of their shifts is bad enough: It's hard to imagine staying focused on your favorite TV show for 12 hours straight, let alone an endless stretch of railroad track -- especially as viewed from an overheated, deafeningly loud engine cabin. But to make matters worse, rail workers are generally scheduled without regard to the basic requirements of a normal sleep cycle. Thus an engineer who is happily tucked in bed at 3 a.m. on one morning, is just as likely to find himself at the head of a 70-car train at 3 a.m. on the next -- having received no more than two hours advance nonce. "I've been forced to go out when I was so exhausted I hallucinated," recalls one Norfolk Southern engineer; "I've seen things that weren't there, almost gone past signals I thought were one color when they were another."

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