On February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train was rattling through the small town of East Palestine, Ohio, when an overheated bearing gave out and thirty-eight cars derailed. Twenty of these carried hazardous materials including vinyl chloride, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, and isobutylene.
After rejecting other options, local emergency officials conducted a controlled burn of the vinyl chloride, breaching the car to relieve pressure and burning its contents. This vent and burn was purportedly necessary to prevent a potential explosion, but it exacerbated the impact of the derailment as a thick black plume of carcinogenic byproducts rose above the wreckage, suffusing the town’s air, water, and soil. As a result of this decision, the situation morphed from an accident into a full-blown disaster.
Responders at the local, state, and federal level rushed to determine the extent of the pollution and estimate the long-term health impacts residents now faced from the billowing clouds of toxic gas and contaminated surface water. The situation was exacerbated by uncertainty: It was unclear what outcomes the town would face from the range of chemicals released. For this reason, the accident struck a chord with observers around the country, who suddenly became aware of just how little they knew about the hazardous materials flowing through the country.
The immediate questions were: Who was to blame? And how to prevent the next disaster? The former proved easier to answer than the latter. Norfolk Southern was held responsible as it soon came to light that they had reported a rising rate of accidents in the years preceding the crash, alongside record profits. Even major news outlets framed the problem as one of corporate greed. Issues like the length of the train and spacing between detectors, which would have flagged the overheating bearing, were laid at the feet of Norfolk Southern as signs of negligent safety practices.
Identifying the responsible actors was a swift and straightforward affair. But the political response was sluggish and convoluted.
Legislating Disaster
In the aftermath of the disaster, politicians on both sides of the aisle rushed to introduce legislation that would address the shortcomings in rail safety on display in East Palestine. Most notably, senators Sherrod Brown and J.D. Vance introduced the Railway Safety Act of 2023 in the Senate as a bi-partisan effort. The act would require shippers to give state emergency services advance notice on the movement of hazardous materials and an emergency response plan for dealing with potential spills. It would also set limitations on train length, weight, and speed, and require increased defect detectors like the ones that detected the overheating wheel bearing too late.
Finally, the act would require two-person crews and set minimum time periods for inspections. The specifics of these regulations stem directly from the points of failure and troubling practices that led to the East Palestine derailment.
The accident struck a chord with observers around the country, who suddenly became aware of just how little they knew about the hazardous materials flowing through the country.
The House of Representatives introduced several other pieces of legislation as well, including the DERAIL Act (Decreasing Emergency Railroad Accident Instances Locally), the RAIL Act (Reducing Accidents In Locomotives), and the Railroad Safety Enhancement Act.
None of these measures have been passed.
The lack of legislative response to the East Palestine derailment appears confounding. After all, the incident is a visceral indication of serious safety concerns in the shipping industry and grabbed the attention of the country.
Moreover, the incident provides clear and tangible issues to rally around, such as the placement of defect detectors or better advanced warning for potential disasters. Even the partisan split does not explain the lack of legislation. How do we make sense of such a hamstrung political response?
“Normal” Accidents
Understanding the response to East Palestine requires a critical understanding of accidents themselves. After all, the way an accident and its causes are understood directly relates to the measures deemed necessary in the aftermath.
Typically, visually shocking and dramatic incidents, like the derailment, get framed as extraordinary events. This framing focuses on what went wrong, the abnormalities of the event, and solutions that target those specific failings. While intuitive, this view proves rather myopic. It struggles to explain why a straightforward solution might fail to manifest.
In contrast, theories of accident researchers, like Charles Perrow, offer more substantial explanations. Perrow’s 1984 book, Normal Accidents, flips our inclination on its head. Rather than the extraordinary, Perrow focuses on the normalcy of accidents. Within systems of sufficient complexity that operate at large scales, the question is not if something will fail but when and how well the system can respond to or anticipate the failure.
When Perrow evaluates the specifics of an accident, he does not linger on the particular failures. Instead, he takes those specifics and zooms out to understand them as a product of the system’s overall organization. He examines those organizational characteristics, like complexity versus linearity, and the coupling of a sequence. Borrowed from engineering vocabulary, here coupling refers to the amount of slack in a system. A tightly coupled system runs more efficiently but becomes more susceptible to accidents as a single failure ripples quickly through the whole operation.
In short, normal accident theory shifts focus from examining proximate causes of accidents to their structural, organizational roots.
Deregulating and Derailing
The key to understanding modern railroads lies in an obscure industry practice known as precision schedule railroading, or PSR.
PSR often comes up as the ethos guiding the rail industry straight into this disaster. No singular definition of PSR exists, so depending on who you ask, PSR either represents a breakthrough in efficient railroading or a slash-and-burn cost-cutting strategy aimed at boosting profits for investors. Some feel PSR leads to longer trains and smaller staff, which make disasters like that in East Palestine much more likely.
The regulations proposed in the aftermath of East Palestine address these problematic aspects of precision schedule railroading. However, PSR is more than a set of dubious profit-seeking practices. PSR represents the culmination of a shift in the way railroad operations have been organized over the past forty-five years.
The rail industry we know took shape in the deregulatory environment of the late 1970s and 1980s. But deregulation can only occur in response to regulation. The Progressive Era and the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 set out to regulate a monopolistic railroad industry. The Interstate Commerce Commission, created by the 1887 Act, established maximum and minimum rates and enforced fair treatment of all customers under the common carrier obligation. While the railroads remained privately owned, these policies reflected a belief that railroads function as essential infrastructure for the common good.
Through the second half of the twentieth century, the rise of the trucking industry, combined with regulations slowing the railroad industry’s ability to modernize, led to bankruptcies and the imminent financial collapse of the industry. Following the prevailing economic reasoning of the times, the solution for a dying private rail industry was deregulation.
So long as the operational logic of Precision Schedule Railroading prevails, regulations like the Rail Safety Act miss the mark by acting as an extraordinary response to a normal yet tragic event.
Deregulatory measures took effect throughout the latter half of the 1970s and reached their apex in 1980 with the passing of the Staggers Act. On paper, the Staggers Act simply overruled the regulations of the previous era. For the most part, railroads could set their own rates, negotiate private contracts with shippers, abandon routes more easily, and perform mergers and acquisitions with less oversight. In practice, the railroads took on a whole new mode of existence. Rather than operating in the service of the common good, the railroads could seek maximum profits as their main objective.
Based on the ledgers alone, the Staggers Act was a great success. The industry rebounded economically. However, deregulation recreated near-monopoly levels of consolidation. The number of Class I railroads dwindled from forty down to seven, with four of these companies controlling nearly 90 percent of the market.
Railroads became an oligopoly.
The unleashed industry became an ideal environment for private equity. By 2010, investors began seriously eyeing the railroads. As PSR became the industry norm, Norfolk Southern let go of 10,000 employees and saw an 80 percent increase in their accident rate.
The precedent of deregulation established in the 1980’s produced an incredibly consolidated and powerful railroad industry. Their pursuit of cost-cutting measures is the culmination of railroads reorganized around free market principles and private capital.
What’s Normal?
In the wake of the East Palestine accident, commenters quickly homed in on PSR as an underlying cause. The tighter operations and longer trains incentivized by PSR contributed to the overall conditions that led to derailment.
In Perrow’s terms, PSR creates increasingly tighter couplings, which makes the whole system more vulnerable to the failures of a given part. In this sense, derailment is actually a normal accident within the typical operation of deregulated railways. Beyond the crash, normal accident theory also informs the stagnant political response.
Normal accident theory shifts the focus from proximate causes of accidents to their structural, organizational roots.
Lobbying is the most immediate explanation for stalled rail safety legislation. The railroad industry spends tens of millions of dollars at the state and federal levels every year fighting safety regulations anathema to the PSR model. The lobbying power of the rails manifests out of the post-Staggers landscape of extremely concentrated private interests. Behind its lobbying, the rail industry puts forward a narrative of risk and safety that more accurately reflects the reality of the derailment.
As noted, if we take the idea of normal accidents seriously, derailment represents a probable outcome of the system operating as intended. The rail industry can genuinely say that the measures of the Rail Safety Act would not meaningfully prevent a similar accident because the crash did not occur from a single outstanding oversight. The accident occurred within the accepted cost-benefit standards of operation. It represents an endemic part of the system. Therefore, legislation that targets isolated human or mechanical failures, like the spacing of heat sensors, falls flat. These regulations treat a normal accident as extraordinary, which does not reflect the reality.
Normal accident theory does not excuse accidents as inevitable but turns our attention towards their systemic character: in this case, the deregulation of the rails and rise of PSR. In a way, PSR warps the conversation and creates its own Overton window indicating which risks and regulations are acceptable. Viewing the East Palestine derailment as a normal accident reveals how the political struggle over rail safety takes place within these confines. So long as the operational logic of Precision Schedule Railroading prevails, regulations like the Rail Safety Act miss the mark by acting as an extraordinary response to a normal yet tragic event.
The Need to Reorganize
There is still a chance legislation will pass, despite earlier failures. President Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance are spearheading another attempt at passing the Rail Safety Act. While this most recent push currently divides the GOP, there is no guarantee that these particular regulations remain dead in the water.
Reading the East Palestine derailment through normal accident theory reveals the uphill battle such regulations face. At the same time, the theory brings to light potentially more effective routes for legislating such issues. Taking cues from Perrow, perhaps the focus should shift to the organization of the railroads.
The East Palestine derailment could have fomented an industry-wide reckoning with PSR and the entire paradigm of post-Staggers railroads. In fact, the CEO of Norfolk Southern did attempt to back off from PSR in the wake of the crash, but he was brought in line by activist investors who mobilized to oust him. These same investors stand to benefit considerably from a potential merger between Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific as the industry further consolidates. Until the roots of the risk are addressed, accidents like the East Palestine derailment will continue as the normal state of affairs.
Featured Image: Drone footage shows the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Photo by National Transportation Safety Board, 2023.
Alex George is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography, Environment and Urban Studies at Temple University. His area of interest revolves around infrastructures, their breakdowns, and possibilities in shaping and reshaping modern life. Contact.
Kimberley Thomas is a political ecologist and associate professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Urban Studies at Temple University where she serves as Graduate Chair and the Director of the Climate Justice Field School. Her research focuses on the political economy of climate adaptation and the vulnerabilizing effects of large-scale infrastructure in the Majority World. Her last contribution to Edge Effects was “The Colonial Costs of Shipbreaking” (July 2026). Website. Bluesky. LinkedIn. Contact.
.jpg){kind=link}
You must be logged in to post a comment.