Vance Calls Out a ‘Need to Do Better on Rail Safety' on Norfolk Southern Derailment Anniversary
Vice President JD Vance visited East Palestine, Ohio on the two-year anniversary of the toxic train derailment that forced thousands of residents to flee their homes for days at a time with a clear message: 'We continue to need to do better on rail safety in this country.'
Returning to his home state where he was a state senator for two years, Vance said Norfolk Southern was responsible for 'making promises to this community that it didn't keep' regarding the transparency of the cleanup and long-term health impacts.
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'You can be damn sure that over the next six months, you're going to hear a lot from the Vice President of the United States and the entire administration,' Vance said. 'If Norfolk Southern doesn't keep these promises, we are going to talk about it, and we are going to fight for it.'
In response to Vance's press briefing and callout, a Norfolk Southern spokesperson told the Associated Press, 'We've made significant progress, and we aren't done.'
During his tenure as a state senator, Vance co-sponsored the bipartisan Railway Safety Act in the wake of the disaster.
That bill was introduced in the Senate in 2023, and was designed to create stricter safety requirements for trains carrying hazardous materials and increase the frequency of rail car inspections. But the bill has gone nowhere as there weren't enough Senate Republicans who publicly supported to the legislation, although the vice president said 'we had the votes to pass it' in the Senate.
'I thought then, and I still think now, that we could do a lot better. We could have smarter regulations that actually empower the railways to experiment with technology that will make their business safer, but most importantly make these communities safer,' said Vance. 'I think that we could do a lot better at ensuring that when you have a terrible train disaster like what happened in East Palestine, the railways actually pick up the tab.'
Upon his East Palestine visit, Vance toured the cleanup site with newly confirmed Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) head Lee Zeldin and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine.
The tour and press briefing coincided with another lawsuit lobbed at the railroad.
On Monday, 744 current and former residents of the Ohio town levied the first wrongful death allegations in connection with the derailment. The plaintiffs filed the complaint against the Norfolk Southern, the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and various state agencies.
Filed in an Ohio common pleas court, the suit claims seven people, including a week-old baby, died 'as a direct and proximate result of the incident and the negligence, recklessness and other wrongful acts of the Defendants.'
The lawsuit comes more than four months after a federal judge finalized a $600 million class action settlement with the railroad. That deal largely paid out economic damages, but did not including long-term health monitoring and mental health services for impacted residents. Norfolk Southern created a $25 million health care fund via a separate $310 million federal settlement it paid out with the Justice Department and the EPA.
Less than 1 percent of a potential class of 464,000 opted out of the class action settlement, with the majority of those entering the new suit.
'Norfolk Southern chose not to properly maintain its rail cars and allowed a train to proceed into the community with a car on fire,' said attorney Kristina Baehr in a statement. 'The defendants then failed to protect people when the rail car predictably derailed and blew up. Then they didn't clearly warn families in the affected areas and let Norfolk Southern take the lead on the botched testing and cleanup. That was like allowing a criminal to collect DNA and fingerprints at his own crime scene.'
Late last month, the railroad agreed to settle with East Palestine for $22 million, the latest of the various settlements it has engaged in
Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board determined last year that the 'vent and burn' strategy used to prevent an explosion was unnecessary. The board determined that the railroad failed to detect that the cars' temperatures had started to drop and wouldn't have exploded.
The vinyl chloride released because of the burn, alongside the spillage of other chemicals that caught fire generated the massive trail of thick, black smoke.
Norfolk Southern said the East Palestine derailment is expected to cost it nearly $2.2 billion in total with about half of that related to legal costs and settlements, including the pending class action suit.
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