You wake from a dead sleep to the wail of a train. It’s a familiar sound, once comforting. It meant connection, stability, a world you knew and trusted. Now, as you shelter in your bed between the thin metal walls of your camper, the sound of your family sleeping only a hand’s breadth away, the whistle sounds more like a shriek. The walls, the floor, your whole life on wheels shudders. Is it a warning? Or something in the air? Do you feel sick? Get out of bed, walk across the uncertain ground to the window. Look out towards the horizon: is that light the coming dawn, or is it fire?
This is every night for Maura Todd and the other survivors of the incident in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s a new nightmare, one created by the malfeasance and thirst for profit of the Norfolk Southern Railroad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation. It’s a night any one of us might have, thanks to Norfolk Southern. And, you know what? Their stock is up.
It’s been over a year since the catastrophe: a thirty-eight-car train derailment, due to what Railroad Workers United (RWU) called a “hedge fund initiated operating model” of overwork and cut corners. A disaster made magnitudes worse when the chemicals within certain cars were intentionally set ablaze, unleashing a toxic smoke cloud that could be seen for miles. Residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area were forced to flee under threat of imprisonment, even while they suffered the immediate effects of contamination. As is typical with crimes of capitalism, the perpetrators have been let off with a slap on the wrist while the countless victims are left to fend for themselves.
The victims in this case are truly countless. The contamination of the botched clean-up has spread to sixteen U.S. States and parts of southern Canada. As a study conducted by researchers for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the largest network focused on recording precipitation chemistry in the United States, attests: “Observations showed the expected high chloride concentrations, but also unexpectedly high pH (basic) and exceptionally elevated levels of base cations exceeding 99th percentiles versus the historic record.” Base cations are positively charged ions that affect the alkalinity of surface soil, water, etc. Excesses in these and in pH levels will tip the scales of ecosystems and agriculture in ways that are difficult to predict. Although this pollution won’t cause death and destruction in surrounding areas, experts say it will have wide-reaching environmental damage. Basically, in order to avoid the fallout of a small leak, Norfolk Southern’s contractors created a massive plume of poison that rained down on a third of the country.
RWU released a statement condemning Norfolk Southern. The statement describes the combination of factors that make such disasters inevitable, such as ever longer and heavier trains, cuts to maintenance workers, limited training with high turnover, and crushingly long hours leading to rampant fatigue — all symptoms of a greater sickness that is the profit motive.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also criticized Norfolk Southern for its atrocious handling of the chemical leak. Five of the scattered cars contained vinyl chloride, a substance that is not only carcinogenic, but causes neurological damage, behavioral issues, and permanently alters liver function. Essentially, while the liver and kidneys can process vinyl chloride, the toxic byproducts of the process remain in the body much longer, creating unpredictable harm. However, vinyl chloride has a low exothermic rate – it doesn’t give off much heat. The possibility of that vinyl chloride exploding after the crash was extremely low. The already small chance of an explosive chemical reaction can be mitigated further by the introduction of several different “free radical stabilizers,” the most common of which is 4-tert-butylcatechol. This would have made the small chance of explosion a non-existent one, but by skimping on these simple preventative measures, Norfolk Southern and its contractors decided to take a serious albeit manageable spill and transform it into an apocalyptic event.
According to testimony emerging from the NTSB hearings, in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, Norfolk Southern refused to share vital information first responders needed to appropriately address the crisis. They refused to disclose what was in the cars, even while they set them on fire. Norfolk representatives ducked phone calls. They refused multiple alternatives, like the aforementioned free radical stabilizers, or waiting for the train cars to cool. The company even consulted with Oxy Vinyls, the manufacturer of the chemicals in question, and they were told not to vent and burn the vinyl chloride. They ignored the advice, then claimed the call never occurred. By throttling the flow of information, they created a condition of confused panic. Once this was achieved, they presented the “choice” to local responders: vent and burn, or potentially let the cars explode. The East Palestine fire chief said he was given thirteen minutes to decide.
Capitalists created this crisis because they are motivated by a need for ever-expanding profit, they simply must pursue cutting corners, increasing exploitation, and deregulation. It isn’t a matter of individual greed — it is the necessary dynamic of capitalism. Capitalists then worsened this crisis for the same reason, as they’ve now been accused of enough times for them to issue threats to stop it. As Senator . J.D. Vance asked during a hearing in March: “A lot of people, including me, are wondering: did they do this not because it was necessary, but because it allowed them to move traffic and freight more quickly?”
This is the reason thousands of people fled their homes, only half of which have been able to return after a year. This is why people’s pets and livestock coughed up blood and died; why peoples’ health worsened and health complications returned; why black clouds filled the sky, made up of the gas used to kill soldiers in WWI, which was then rained back down upon the soil, waterways, crops of a hundred million people.
Combine the safety board’s criticism with the rail workers’ union statement, that the initial cause of the crash was a “19th-century-style mechanical failure” — an overheated bearing on one of the axles — something that should never occur in the 21st century, except for a callous disregard for public safety, and it is clear that our current political-economic regime is one of systemic arrogance and callousness. They make disaster inevitable because it is in their interest to do so, then they kill the chance of solutions because those suffering the consequences aren’t of their class.
Officially, Norfolk Southern will have to pay $1 billion as consequence:
- A $600 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit that encompassed 31 individual claims and may likely preclude anyone within 10 miles of the crash from making any future claims.
- $235 million for all past and future clean-up costs.
- $30 million for groundwater and private drinking water monitoring.
- $25 million for a 20-year community health program.
- $15 million for a civic penalty.
Assuming that “affected area” means those in the immediate vicinity of the fallout, and not the sixteen states as well as Southern Canada, this is still a spit in the face of the people of East Palestine. People like Maura Todd, who had won a battle with cancer prior to the derailment, which, in its wake, has returned. Norfolk Southern will pay for Maura’s check-up, if they don’t manage to weasel their way out of that one. Her life-destroying treatment, on the other hand, is her individual responsibility.
Throughout all of these detestable revelations, Norfolk Southern has maintained its PR campaign. The webpage they set up in damage control, “Norfolk Southern: Making it Right” promises: “We’re staying in East Palestine as long as it takes. As we move forward, we will continue to listen to the community, and we will continue our work to help the area recover and thrive.” Predictably, the true intentions of the capitalists lay beyond their hopeful press releases and social media. At every point in the NTSB investigation into the derailment and vent and burn, Norfolk Southern tried to hide the truth. Hiding records they claimed not to have kept about train car temperatures; ignoring demands for access to locomotive and event records until they could comb and erase all but 20 minutes of footage; even manufacturing evidence of chemical reactions using off-the-shelf vinyl chloride, which Norfolk Southern then demanded NTSB include in the investigation, and circumventing them and trying to pressure government officials — NTSB’s bosses — when investigators refused. The capitalists lied, threatened, and threw tantrums when the state officials didn’t do what they expect them to: heel and roll over.
Of course, despite facing the public and promising to ensure this sort of tragedy never happens again, Norfolk Southern’s lobbyists and pet politicians have done all they can to ensure all regulations responding to this disaster are gutted or die outright. Politicians who used the derailment to attack Biden for the sake of their polling have forgotten such righteous anger the second their pockets got a bit heavier. The railroad companies closed ranks, the capitalists marshaled all their discipline, and Norfolk and its competitors joined forces to lobby and weaken the incoming railway regulation as much as they could. As executives celebrated the possibility of “real bipartisan change,” their cronies warned in private against “micromanaging” railroads, against “proposals motivate[d] by politics”. “I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, ten years from now, [and] we can be proud,” said CEO Alan Shaw to local reporters in January. What Shaw means is, “If we can get away with all of this, we’ll look back with a lot of pride!” You can practically hear Shaw chuckling when you read this. You can hear the ice in his glass as he laughs over drinks, as he laughs all the way to the bank.
But even if he doesn’t, even if the most far-reaching and robust railroad regulations could, by some miracle, pass, it wouldn’t be enough. If somehow a class movement of railroad workers and East Palestine residents were to organize and rally, and every demand they made was met by policy and then implemented, it wouldn’t ensure this sort of disaster never occurs again. Corporations like Norfolk — all corporations — as we have covered, are motivated by profit, not greed. It’s not human sin that determines the fabric of our society, it’s material reality. Dynamics like these are ensured by material conditions. If one capitalist doesn’t pursue maximum profit by any means they can get away with, they will be outperformed by another capitalist that will. Our kind capitalist gets as a reward their worst nightmare: becoming a worker. Norfolk Southern has failed to meet profit projections for the last year. Within 2023, they had a revenue of $12.2 billion and operating costs of $9.3 billion (of that, the East Palestine expenses account for $1.1 billion, or just under 12%), leaving them with a profit of $2.9 billion dollars for that year, down 41% from the last. Despite this, Norfolk’s stock is rising. This doesn’t indicate the value of the company in any strict sense regarding profitability, but the confidence shareholders have in it, its value as a corporation.
Where is this confidence coming from? It comes straight from Norfolk Southern’s willingness and ability to crush attempts at regulation, while putting on a nice face for the public.
Even if, by some miracle, laws are passed to protect populations and railroad workers, before such robust regulations could even be implemented, the railroad corporations would yet again pool all their might towards planning its destruction. We have the whole late half of the 20th century to look to for examples. While we should appreciate any regulations that might save lives and reduce suffering in the meantime, real victories can only be won by the organization of the very working masses who toil beneath the black clouds. The only way to ensure disasters like the one in East Palestine don’t happen in the future is for the working masses to win political power, and build a world that acts in the interests of humanity, rather than the profit motive.
