Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg is pointing to the Trump administration after Republicans accused him of not doing enough to assist with the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
The 41-year-old former mayor pushed back against claims his department was not helping enough with the fiery derailment that forced some 5,000 from their homes in a thread on Twitter.
Buttigieg pointed specifically to an electronic brake rule the Trump administration repealed and his own Transportation Department has made no effort to bring back.
‘We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015), but we are using the powers we do have to keep people safe,’ Buttigieg wrote on Twitter.
Buttigieg pointed specifically to an electronic brake rule the Trump administration repealed and his own Transportation Department has made no effort to bring back
Though the Trump administration did roll back a regulation requiring modern braking systems on some trains, the Obama administration had already hollowed out that rule so much so that the modern braking systems would not have been required on the train that derailed in East Palestine.
The 2015 Obama-era rule required trains carrying crude oil and some other chemicals to use electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes but left out many other hazardous chemicals after industry pressure.
Then in 2017 Trump’s Transportation Department under Sec. Elaine Chao rolled back the ECP brake rule even further.
The Department of Transportation’s Pipelines and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) said at the time that the safety benefits ‘do not exceed the associated costs’ and were not ‘economically justified.’
Norfolk Southern, the company that owned the train that veered off-track in East Palestine, previously touted the technology as having the ‘potential to reduce train stopping distances by as much as 60 percent over conventional air brake systems.’
But ultimately it lobbied for the rule’s repeal, telling regulators it would ‘impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.’
Steven Ditmeyer, a former top official at the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA), told investigative news outlet The Lever that having ECP brakes would have reduced the ‘severity’ of the East Palestine incident.
‘Would ECP brakes have reduced the severity of this accident? Yes,’ Ditmeyer said.
But rail regulators in Buttigieg’s Transportation Department have not proposed bringing the rule back.
The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) could not immediately be reached for comment on if Buttigieg’s remark signaled that they might bring the rule back.
Buttigieg said that his department was making ‘historic investments’ in rail safety through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, such as the $120 million in grants sent out in June to expand passenger rail safety, the $3 billion dedicated to reduce rail crossing crashes and $32 million for hazmat incident response.
The Transportation Department’s FRA recently proposed a rule requiring two-person train crews to improve safety, which is currently in the public comment period.
Meanwhile, Repulicans continue to hammer Buttigieg for having not addressed the derailment in public remarks on Monday.
‘Secretary Buttigieg laughing about Chinese spy balloons, while ignoring the Ohio train derailment, shows you how out of touch Democrats are,’ Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
‘He’s more concerned about racism and white construction workers,’ Ohio GOP Sen. J.D. Vance told DailyMail.com, referring to comments Buttigieg made about lack of diversity in construction.
About 50 cars on a Norfolk Southern Railroad train veered off-track while traveling from Illinois to Pennsylvania. The train had been carrying toxins like vinyl chloride, phosgene and hydrogen chloride.
Meanwhile, two other trains derailed in the past week – one in Houston, Texas and another in Enoree, South Carolina.
Train derails in Houston, Texas on Monday
According to the National Cancer Institute, vinyl chloride is associated ‘with an increased risk of a rare form of liver cancer (hepatic angiosarcoma), as well as primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia.’
Officials carried out a controlled burn of the substances and evacuated residents within a one-mile radius of the incident, but some local advocates say the burn was delayed two hours due to high winds.
Emily Wright, a local activist who runs River Valley Organizing, told Fox News the community is seeing ‘dead animals everywhere asthma symptoms, nausea.’
More than 3,500 fish have died due to what residents believe is a toxic runoff, and chickens have been found dead in their cages, while footage of the aftermath shows plumes of toxic smoke still lingering in the area.