Pete Buttigieg is starting to rethink how he does his job after the East Palestine train disaster
EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan: EPA Action Plans for East Palestine, Ohio, to be held accountable for the September 13 Derailment of a Heavy Chemical Train
The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency traveled to East Palestine, Ohio, on Thursday and said the agency plans to hold the train company Norfolk Southern accountable for its role in the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals earlier this month.
Speaking to CNN’s Jason Carroll Thursday morning, EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan said the agency has full authority to use its enforcement capabilities over the crisis.
The company has signed a document that says they will be responsible for cleaning up the mess. “But as this investigation continues, and as new facts arise, let me just say, and be very clear, I will use the full enforcement authority of this agency, and so will the federal government, to be sure that this company is held accountable.”
East Palestine, a town of under 5,000 people along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, was badly damaged when a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed. The derailment was followed by a dayslong blaze and the ordered evacuation of residents until local and state officials declared the air and water safe enough for people to return – about five days after the wreck.
The water is safe to drink, even from deep wells covered in solid steel, according to the state. The governor said the EPA encouraged people to get water tested from private wells.
Despite the assurances, a chemical odor lingered days afterward and officials estimate thousands of fish were killed by contamination washing down streams and rivers, fueling residents’ concerns about water and air safety.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/us/ohio-train-derailment-east-palestine-thursday/index.html
The Ohio Railroad Derailment Site: Contaminants, Meals, and Public Awareness in East Palestine and Implications for Disease Control and Prevention
Hundreds of East Palestine residents attend a town hall to speak about their problems and distrust. The train operator had agreed to attend but later pulled out of the event due to safety concerns.
Regan visited the town Thursday and observed some of the remediation efforts following the hazardous train derailment. The state is in charge of the scene but the EPA is willing to partner and provide necessary resources.
“We are testing for the full breadth of toxic chemicals that were on that train that was spilled. He said that they have the ability to detect any adverse impact that would result from the spill.
Meanwhile, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said Thursday he has requested the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention immediately send medical experts to East Palestine to evaluate and counsel community members with questions or health symptoms.
In anticipation of rainfall, emergency response teams have plans in place to prevent contaminants not yet removed from the derailment site from washing into local waterways during the storms, DeWine said in a statement.
The Governor said the butyl acrylate in the Ohio river will be near Huntington, West Virginia, sometime tomorrow. Testing results indicate that the chemical is currently well below a level the CDC considers hazardous, he said. Agencies will continue sampling the river out of an abundance of caution, despite the fact that no vinylchloride has been detected.
The risk to livestock and the food supply in Ohio is safe, according to DeWine.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/us/ohio-train-derailment-east-palestine-thursday/index.html
State-of-the-art investigation of the East Palestinian train derailment and its connection with a chemical crisis, as described by Mayor Trent Conaway
“My concern is how many of those kids are laying in their bed in East Palestine right now that are not safe,” she said. I don’t trust them.
“There (were) two options: We either detonate those tanks, or they detonate themselves,” Mayor Trent Conaway told a group of reporters at Wednesday’s meeting. It’s true that harmful chemicals entered the air. I am sorry, but that is the only option we had. They were going to blow up if we did not do that.
Conaway told reporters that he needed help. “I have the village on my back, and I’ll do whatever it takes … to make this right. I’m not going anywhere, I’m staying.
Representatives of the train operator planned to be at the meeting to give information on how they are responding to the chemical crisis. But the company backed out, citing threats against its employees.
The company said that it has become increasingly concerned about the physical threat to employees and members of the community around this event due to the increasing likelihood of outside parties.
Nate Velez, who said he lives less than half a mile from where the train derailed, told CNN on Wednesday night that the company’s absence from the meeting was “a slap in the face.”
Velez and his family are temporarily staying in rentals away from the town. He previously told CNN that when he visited the town Monday, a chemical odor left his eyes and throat burning, and gave him a nagging headache.
“Most people did not want to go home, but they had to. He said the people who had to go home were complaining about things such as headaches, odors, and sore throats. “I have gone back a few times, and the smell does make you sick. It hurts your head.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/16/us/ohio-train-derailment-east-palestine-thursday/index.html
Reply to “Commission on Railroad Safety and Public Safety,” Ms. Cozza, R.C., N.T.B. Buttigieg
I was very disappointed that they did not show up for the meeting. The public deserves transparency,” he said. “The public deserves to have the latest information. It is our job, as the federal government, to hold this company accountable.
Speaking to CNN’s Don Lemon, Cozza said the railroad company told her it was safe to return home after conducting air testing. However, she insisted the railroad company run soil and water tests, and only then did a toxicologist deem her house unsafe.
Cozza would have been sitting in the house right now if he had not used his voice.
Buttigieg also wants Congress to raise the maximum amount the DOT can fine railroads for safety violations. He says fines right now are so low that he’s concerned the big railroad corporations just write them off as a cost of doing business.
He wants congress to untie the agency’s hands in regards to legislation that weakened the department of transportation’s ability to enforce certain safety and accountability rules.
Buttigieg said that “profits and haste must always outweigh the safety of the American people.” “We at USDOT are doing everything in our power to improve rail safety, and we insist that the rail industry do the same — while inviting Congress to work with us to raise the bar.”
According to Buttigieg, his decision to stay away from the crash site allowed the National Transportation Safety Board to take the lead in the investigation and for emergency management to focus on the immediate response. He says he hopes to visit the site sometime in the future, but no date has been set.
Speaking to reporters, Buttigieg said he wanted rail companies to speed up the phased introduction of more puncture-resistant tank cars. The DOT mandated the new tank cars be in use and older, weaker ones to be phased out by 2025. But Congress delayed that new tank car deadline until 2029.
The maximum fine for egregious violations involving hazardous materials causing the loss of life is $225,000, he said. “For a multibillion-dollar rail company posting profits in the billions every year, it’s just not enough to have an adequate deterrent effect.”
Buttigieg added that the DOT is considering revising how it classifies certain toxic and volatile chemicals. The derailed Norfolk Southern train was one carrying hazardous materials, but not a “high hazard flammable train” which requires certain safety protocols be followed.
And he says he wants to move forward on requiring trains carrying such hazardous materials be equipped with a higher level, electronically controlled braking system. The DOT had passed a rule requiring pneumatic brakes on trains with more than 20 HHFT cars, but congress mandated a cost benefit analysis before it could take effect, and the Trump administration repealed it.
PETIEG Buttigieg: Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and the Case for a T.J. Maxx-Kohler Train Derailment
“We can’t treat these disasters as inevitable or as a cost of doing business,” Buttigieg said. “There’s a window of opportunity with Congress now after what happened in East Palestine that I do not think existed before, and we aim to use that window of opportunity to raise the bar” on safety.
Some of these folks are lifelong card-carrying members of the East Coast elite who would probably not know their way around a tax cut for the rich, even though it was their top economic policy priority. You believe that Tucker Carlson knows the difference between a T.J Maxx and a Kohl’s?
If Buttigieg had gone earlier he might have made a difference in the Department of transportation response, but there is very little to do with the agency he controls. He conceded that it would have aided the residents of East Palestine to see a well-known politician there to show them that they were heard even if no previous secretaries had toured the sites.
But he also punched back at critics, arguing that many of the problems he’s being blamed for are only partially connected to his portfolio and mostly out of his direct control.
A Democratic Member of Congress said Buttigieg would be a new face who wanted to move the nation forward, similar to Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. “It’s sad to see him become a partisan brawler on Twitter and cable news. He’s become the most polarizing member of Biden’s Cabinet.”
Now, to the left, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the corporatist compromiser without the vision or guts to go as big as he should. To the right, he is the embodiment of elitist abandonment of real Americans, hopped up on his own grandiosity, who thinks more about social engineering than transportation.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-ohio-train-derailment/index.html
Pee Buttigieg: How the Ohio Railroad Derailment prompted Mike DeWine to write to the Secretary of the National Transportation Safety Board
Buttigieg doesn’t have to worry about getting fired – “whether it’s sickening attacks on his family or disrespecting a community’s pain with failed attempts at exploitation as a political prop, nothing saps credibility like following debunked smears with even more debunked smears,” said White House spokesman Andrew Bates.
Still, to political chatterers, nearly every transportation-related problem has prompted a round talk of how this could be what destroys his obvious future ambitions.
Policy and performative work are sometimes needed by people, he told CNN. To get to the top, you need to be prepared to serve both.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has praised the cooperation he’s been getting from the Biden administration. No one can say with certainty that Buttigieg failed around the train accident, including House Oversight Chairman Rep Jim Comer, who wrote to the secretary complaining about the safety issues with the National Transportation Safety Board.
He didn’t think that he would go to a site, because no previous secretary had done that. But he says when he finally did go, the experience was searing.
“I could get technical readouts, information about the response. Buttigieg said that it was important to hear about how the community was responding, how they were worried about it and what it was like to smell chemicals in the air. “It just feels different.”
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-ohio-train-derailment/index.html
The Times of East Palestine: Buttigieg’s Report on the Expo, the USDA, and the Kansas City Train Derailment
The secretary visited East Palestine a day after former President Donald Trump went to the town, calling out President Joe Biden for not having made his own visit and slamming the administration’s response.
Buttigieg said that the EPA was the one thing standing between that community and a total loss of accountability for Norfolk Southern, which is one of the reasons why Trump decided to visit there.
As for any suggestion from Trump or supporters that the former president’s trip to East Palestine pressured him to go: “That’s bull—-,” Buttigieg said. “We were already going to go.”
For now he wants to use the attacks to take action, which could take a long time to come through government bureaucracy.
The price of eggs spiked in January, but there were no news segments about Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. EPA head Michael Regan is the one whose agency has actually taken the lead on the response to the East Palestine derailment – including signing off on the since-questioned decision to do a controlled burn of some of the hazardous materials – but few in Washington or beyond could pick him out of a crowd.
According to Marty Walsh, outgoing Labor secretary, he might be an easy target to hit, as he ran for president and has been in the middle of a number of intense negotiations. People always ask, what is Secretary Buttigieg going to do next? What’s Buttigieg going to do next?’ We have talked. He will be the Secretary of Transportation.
On Monday, Buttigieg traveled to Kansas City to open the first new airport terminal in over a century, but was late because of his own delayed Southwest Airlines flight.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-ohio-train-derailment/index.html
The Southwest Airlines Meltdown, And It Wasn’t: A Political Scenario For The Southwest Divide And Its Effects On Airlines and Their Crews
“There’s always a political spin on a lot of things in the world nowadays that we see all the time. But the reality of it is when you come to infrastructure, infrastructure is good for everybody,” Parsons said.
With DOT tracking a sizable increase in flights being canceled last summer, he called in the CEOs of the 10 largest airlines and pressed them on stress testing their schedule and improving customer service.
He wrote the CEOs a letter instead of waiting for the regulations to be passed. In two weeks, he told them, he was going to publish a chart of which airlines offered which compensation for cancellations – cover a meal? A hotel? Can you book the ticket automatically? There would be green checks and red Xs. He’d do interviews, more tweets like the ones breaking down the dollar value of bonus miles, to help people avoid getting ripped off.
Southwest was one of seven airlines that announced their own guarantees before he did. Two more have followed. Next week he will be publishing a chart of which airlines have the most family friendly seating. Already, American Airlines announced on Tuesday plans to institute a new policy.
Imagine, Buttigieg mused to CNN, how much worse the Southwest meltdown around New Year’s would have been for customers if those guarantees hadn’t been in writing already.
When the 17,000 Southwest flights were canceled over just 10 days, thanks to the combination of a winter storm and an outdated crew scheduling system, Buttigieg was hammered again. Republicans attacked him for dodging the crisis. Progressives complained that the company was being hit with not enough fines after Sen. sanders called for more pain. He was “in the hot seat,” or according to one chyron: “Mayor Pete Leaves Southwest Customers Stranded.”
“We’re attacking the secretary over bad business decisions by an airline and things out of his control,” said Texas Rep. Colin Allred, a Democrat whose district includes Southwest headquarters and is home to many airline workers.
If Democrats had pushed for higher fines, mass layoffs would have been the other way around, Allred said.
“Play it out, if he had decided to make this the biggest issue in the world, it would appear political, because it’s outside the scope of what we’re used to seeing secretaries of transportation do,” Allred said.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-ohio-train-derailment/index.html
Peter Buttigieg: The Problem of Public Accountability in the DOT Era and the Roads to Safety for the Ohio Railroad Derailment
Buttigieg pointed out that 2022 saw the highest amount of fines in DOT history, with $1 billion over his time as secretary, before any Southwest money is included.
He has a long list of issues he says have continued to be top priorities as public attention faded, like the data sharing pilot program created in the wake of the 2021 supply chain crisis to integrate information between major retailers, trucking companies, shipping companies, ports and labor. Or his mediating a negotiation between cellphone companies eager to install 5G towers and the airlines worried those signals would interfere with old altimeters and make planes fall out of the sky.
The DOT points to meetings Buttigieg had in Washington, DC, where 12 unions called for more attention to the lack of personal protective equipment for clean-up workers and the health problems they are having, and a voluntary safety reporting system that all seven top railroad companies.
Asked what he believed holding him to account would be, Buttigieg said, “I want to be able to say, ‘We did everything within our power to hold Norfolk Southern accountable, that we made major strides in the level of rail safety and anything that the people of East Palestine came to us and needed, we addressed,’” he said. All of them require being in it for a long time.
Being a lightning rod, Buttigieg knows, will make that harder. He pointed to an appearance he made last week at the National Association of Counties conference. He wanted to address the topic of 40,000 roadway deaths per year, which killed 100 Americans a day.
But the only attention he generated was a pile-on over a passing comment about how construction workers needed to diversify so they came from the neighborhoods in which they’re working in.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/05/politics/pete-buttigieg-ohio-train-derailment/index.html
The response of the Kansas City mayor to Secretary Buttigieg on his upcoming trip to the presidency and on his boots in the airport opening ceremony
Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, said he had two informal experiments about how people respond to Buttigieg – one when he posted on social media about the upcoming visit, one when he watched the interactions the secretary had at the airport opening ceremony.
The response was huge and both excited likes and vicious repeats of standard attacks such as on those boots he wore in Ohio when taking maternity leave. Lucas thought that Republicans, Democrats,business leaders, and union workers all felt a connection to Buttigieg and wanted to speak with him, even though the opening ceremony was more subdued.
“Attacking the president for not being an Everyman is darn near impossible, so I think there is a search from my friends on the right for someone to fill that role,” Lucas said. They are trying with Secretary Buttigieg, but it is not working.
