Pittsburgh fire chief says city is ready to deal with a hazardous train derailment

A top Pittsburgh public safety official said city first responders are trained and would be ready to respond to a hazardous train derailment.

“This is not something new, this is something that’s been on my mind since 2010,” said Darryl Jones, who serves as both fire chief and emergency management coordinator. “We’ve made some great strides.”

Jones headlined a virtual town hall event Thursday evening held by the advocacy group Rail Pollution Protection Pittsburgh, amid a greater interest in rail safety following the fiery February derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio.

A variety of hazardous products pass through Pittsburgh by rail, including biohazards, radioactive materials, gasoline, compressed gas and corrosives. In particular, Jones said larger “multitudes” of trains carrying Bakken crude oil once traveled by rail, moving between North Dakota oil fields and Philadelphia refineries.

Jones said the city began training first responders a decade ago on how to respond to derailments and conducts follow-up instruction every three months, so “we will be ready to respond.” If a derailment were to occur, he said the city would work to identify what was traveling on the train and potentially evacuate people within either a half-mile or mile radius of the tracks.

The city has the capability to send emergency information to residents, including through the Wireless Emergency Alert system, which is used for other purposes such as Amber Alerts. Jones said quickly communicating accurate information is important to him, a standard that he argued was missed by East Palestine officials.

“One of the things that I came across, that I noticed right away, is that leadership there did not issue enough information in a timely manner and left the people to guessing, which caused even more anxiety,” he said.

Jones said there are solid reasons trains carrying hazardous materials pass through populated areas, even though it can be worrying to residents. Trains can’t travel faster than 25 miles per hour in urban areas.

“They want the hazardous materials on the best-maintained tracks, and the best-maintained tracks are the ones that carry passengers — and passengers travel to urban areas,” he said.

Although local officials such as Jones have some tools to keep an eye on the railroads, including what he described as a secret phone application to look up information about specific trains, the federal government is the primary regulator.

“Our ability to do anything is very, very limited,” he said.

Railroads are required to report some information to state and local leaders. For example, they must notify states before they operate so-called “high-hazard flammable” trains, including a “reasonable estimate” of the number of trains that the railroad expects to operate per week through each county, the routes that the trains will take, a description of the hazardous materials being transported and other information.

The Union Progress submitted a records request to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency seeking all HHFT notifications submitted since last fall. The agency replied with only barebones cover letters filed by CSX and Norfolk Southern, as both railroads had invoked a part of federal regulations that permits them to block public disclosure of a notification if it “includes information that a railroad believes is security sensitive or proprietary and exempt from public disclosure.”

Both railroads used the same wording in their cover letters to describe why the notifications shouldn’t be released, saying the decision was based on “documented activities and aspirations of foreign terrorist groups and domestic extremists as well as threat assessments, analyses and bulletins produced by federal government law enforcement and security agencies.”

Not all trains with hazardous materials qualify as HHFTs. The train that derailed in East Palestine would not be included in the notifications. 

HHFTs are defined as a single train either transporting 20 or more cars of a Class 3 flammable liquid in a continuous block, or carrying 35 or more cars of a Class 3 flammable liquid throughout its consist.

State and local leaders can also request inspection reports on rail infrastructure. Pittsburgh’s Ed Gainey and five other local mayors announced in March that they would request such reports for bridges crisscrossing the region, some of which are aging and originally built more than 100 years ago.

Gainey’s spokesperson, Maria Montaño, did not reply by press time to questions about the requested reports, including whether the mayor has received them yet.