<https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-trains>

Trains are getting longer. Railroads are getting richer. But these
omonster trainso are jumping off of tracks across America and regulators
are doing little to curb the risk.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign
up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyAre published.

JUST BEFORE 5 A.M., Harry ShafferAs wife called to him from across the
living room, where heAd fallen asleep on the couch, exhausted from
installing an aboveground pool. Did he hear that sound, that metallic screeching from up the valley? She opened the door of their double-wide trailer and walked outside as Shaffer closed his eyes.

A moment later came a thunderous crack of splintering lumber. Debris shot through the living room. Shaffer opened his eyes again to find a hulking
train car steps from where he lay. It had shorn off the roof, exposing the murk of the pre-dawn sky. He jumped up and ran outside and saw the garage
next door in flames.

Though it sat at the floor of a valley along a busy stretch of railroad tracks, the quiet town of Hyndman, Pennsylvania, hadnAt seen a major derailment in recent memory. Trains didnAt frighten residents like Shaffer even though 21 of them trundled through the townAs center day and night.

But unbeknownst to them, the corporations that ran those trains had
recently adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster than ever,
with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any
time in history. Driven by the efficiency goals of precision scheduled railroading, companies are forgoing long-held safety precautions, such as assembling trains to distribute weight and risk or taking the proper time
to inspect them, ProPublica found. Instead, their rushed workers are
stringing together trains that stretch for 2 or even 3 miles, sometimes without regard for the delicate physics of keeping heavy, often
combustible tanker cars from jumping off the tracks.

Rail safety grabbed headlines this February after a Norfolk Southern train passed sensors designed to flag mechanical issues and catastrophically derailed in East Palestine, Ohio; Republicans and Democrats alike are now calling for tighter regulations on company operations, especially in light
of precision scheduled railroading.

ProPublicaAs reporting suggests they should start by looking at federal regulatorsA ponderous response to the mounting warnings about the dangers
of long freight trains.

Before that morning in Hyndman in August 2017, regulators had already investigated seven long-train accidents in which the length was a culprit,
and the nationAs largest rail worker union had sounded alarms about a
pattern of problems.

None of this caused the Federal Railroad Administration, the agency in
charge of train safety, to intercede u even as more long trains crashed in
the years after the Hyndman derailment, sending cars spilling into other communities.

Today, the rail administration says it lacks enough evidence that long
trains pose a particular risk. But ProPublica discovered it is a quandary
of the agencyAs own making: It doesnAt require companies to provide
certain basic information after accidents u notably, the length of the
train u that would allow it to assess once and for all the extent of the danger.

oItAs one of our biggest frustrations, without question,o said Jared
Cassity, the alternate national legislative director for the International Association of Sheet Metal, Air, Rail and Transportation Workers, or
SMART. The union representative said the agency can track train length for accidents oand theyAve chosen not to.o

In the absence of data, the industry insists that long trains have
actually helped to improve rail safety, pointing to an overall decline in derailments. The Association of American Railroads, the industry lobby,
says safety is the priority when building long trains and notes that regulators have never cited length as the direct cause of an accident. The nationAs seven largest rail companies, the so-called Class 1s, echo these points, defending their safety practices and saying that PSR has led to
fewer problems.

To make sense of this gap in information, ProPublica reviewed court and regulatory records of thousands of incidents involving trains of all
lengths, as well as technical and investigative notes in federal files
from nearly two decades of long-train incidents. We conducted more than
200 interviews, including candid conversations with rail personnel who described how companies have sidestepped best practices when building and running long trains. Then we went to Hyndman to learn what happens to a community in the aftermath of a preventable catastrophe, uncovering damage that cannot be repaired, even with millions in rail company checks.

That summer morning, the sky was burning red when Shaffer, a thin, stoic
man of 50, surveyed his neighborhood. Mounds of what looked like grain had spilled from the train cars and molten sulfur, like lava, crawled across
the grass. He spotted his wife standing on a neighborAs porch, but before
he could process the relief, he saw another neighbor, Kristina Sutphin, screaming from a second-story window. oHelp me!o she yelled. oI canAt get out!o

Sutphin, 27, had thought it was an earthquake when her house started
shaking, and sheAd rolled on top of her 2-year-old daughter, Mia, to
protect her. When it stopped, she hit the lights and found drywall dust everywhere. Her house, too, had been struck by a train car, knocking a
wall panel studded with nails over the stairs, trapping her and her
daughter as the fire outside grew.

Shaffer ran for a ladder, but the train car had demolished one side of his home, including the bedroom where, on any other night, he and his wife
would have been sleeping and where his German shepherd, Diamond, had her kennel. He couldnAt see Diamond, and he wouldnAt learn until a few days
later that she had been crushed to death.

By the time he got to Sutphin, her brother had run across the street and a neighbor had arrived with a ladder. Her brother climbed up and carried Mia down as Sutphin followed behind. Volunteer firefighters, fear on their
faces, raced door to door, urging people to evacuate.

For longtime residents, it felt like another dark chapter: In 1949, a Christmas tree fire burned through dozens of businesses and homes; a flood
in 1984 lapped at door frames and swamped basements; and in 1996, another flood submerged window sills in brown, swirling water.

But this disaster, thought Bobby Walls, HyndmanAs 36-year-old emergency manager, was something else. HeAd grown up in Hyndman, starting a family
in the green, peaceful valley. Now a flaming geyser towered over the
rooftops, and Walls wondered: Was anyone dead? As he ran toward the blaze
in his firefighting gear, Walls didnAt know that the tanker car at its
center contained propane u enough that if it erupted and set off the six others around it, the explosion could engulf the entire town of some 900 people.

The tanker car still howled about seven hours later as Walls and a number
of first responders waited in a cinderblock-walled classroom for word from
a train company crew that was monitoring the fire. Then, the door flung
open. The room quieted as a CSX worker hustled to the whiteboard and began
to write.

The tanker car is rapidly failing.

An explosion is imminent.

We need to evacuate now.

FOR GENERATIONS, railroad workers considered a 1.4-mile-long train huge.

Then Hunter Harrison came along.

Harrison was a railroading innovator with only a high school education,
hired as a car oiler in a Memphis yard in 1963. By the 1980s, he had moved into the top management of Illinois Central, a carrier he viewed as
bloated and fatally unprofitable. It was an era when most railroads,
including his, had an operating ratio in the 90s, meaning that the company
had to spend about 90 cents to make a dollar and was netting less than a
dime, or 10%, in profit.

Harrison, a self-described ostern, disciplinarian taskmaster,o was
obsessed with efficiency. At a time when other executives feared
computers, he used them to track every boxcar and locomotive and learned
which ones sat idle. oRailroads,o he once said, according to the biography oRailroader,o oonly make money when cars are moving. ... So why would we
lay down tracks just to have cars sit idle?o

When he became CEO in 1993, Harrison looked for even the smallest ways to
cut costs, from tearing up unused tracks to eliminating document storage
and overnight stays for train crews. By 1998, he had managed to drop the operating ratio to 62.3, a significant jump in profitability. But the
savings were never enough. He flew around in a corporate jet with a tail number that read OR59, his aspirational operating ratio.

In the years that followed, Harrison made his mark as a senior leader at Canadian National after it acquired Illinois Central; he sold off 35% of
its locomotive fleet and focused on moving cars in and out of yards at breakneck speeds. To do this, the employees had to work harder, and so did
the trains. oIAm impatient,o he once told Progressive Railroading. oIAm
also demanding. But IAm asking people to stretch.o By then, he was CEO.

Longer trains would become integral to the management philosophy he dubbed precision scheduled railroading. The rail industry makes its money by the weight and distance of the freight it hauls. A long train makes in one
trip what a short train would make in two or three or four, and with fewer employees. There was no need to design a new breed of super trains; these behemoths could be built from more of the same components: more cars with engines spliced into midsections to help move, and stop, more weight.

By 2013, Harrison was CEO of Canadian Pacific when he wrote in its annual report: oWeAre driving longer and longer trains, which means fewer train starts, faster network velocity and better service at lower cost.o

AmericaAs largest railroads took note. They began making their trains
longer and their staffing margins smaller; in 2015, companies started
laying off what would become a fifth of the workforce at the largest railroads. That year, CSX bragged to its investors about its otrain length initiativeo and how longer trains helped to reduce staff needs. Harrison
left Canadian Pacific to run CSX in 2017; that year, the company reported
$249 million in oefficiency savings.o CSX told ProPublica that it oimpugns
the assertion that its management philosophy promotes dangerous
practices.o

Harrison died nine months after taking over CSX, but heAd already secured
his legacy. Many of the biggest railroad companies operating in the U.S.
had adopted precision scheduled railroading. They were running long
trains. The Association of American Railroads told ProPublica the industry
has been safely running long trains for more than 80 years. It says they
are more fuel efficient and allow companies to run fewer trains, which
means fewer chances of collisions at railroad crossings.

In April 2017, the Federal Railroad Administration got a letter from the nationAs largest railroad union, SMART. Workers had been seeing troubling patterns related to these long trains, wrote John Risch, the unionAs
national legislative director at the time. oWhile I am fully aware that
there are no federal regulations limiting the size of trains, running
these monster trains [is] inherently unsafe and FRA has broad authority to investigate the practice and put an end to it.o

By the time Risch sent his note, the agency was well aware that the
growing length of trains was creating unique issues. ProPublicaAs review
of more than 600 investigative reports on train accidents over almost two decades found that the FRA had known of problems for years.

The reports revealed that some long trains were too big to fit into
sidings off of main tracks that were often built to accommodate trains no longer than 1.4 miles, and passing trains were crashing into their rear
ends. It happened in September 2005 when a 1.5-mile-long BNSF train tried
to fit into a siding in Missouri that was 1.4 miles long. The same thing happened the following year in Utah to a 1.5-mile-long Union Pacific
train.

The hulking trains could generate forces powerful enough to break the heavy-duty materials their cars were made of. In March 2008, the rear end
of a 1.5-mile-long BNSF train ran forward as the front of the train decelerated, sandwiching the train and cracking an old repair on a tanker
car. The train broke in two in Minnesota, dumping 20,000 gallons of
ethylene glycol, commonly used in antifreeze, into a tributary of the Mississippi River.

And long trains that were assembled with too much weight in the rear and
too little up front were hurtling out of control and jumping off of
tracks. It happened in Virginia in 2006, in Wisconsin in 2015 and in Iowa
in May 2017. Short trains can derail in the same way, but experts say
longer trains can cause more damage when they fling dozens of cars and
their contents through neighborhoods.

The companies involved in these accidents did not comment on them specifically, but Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, in separate
statements, said they spend more than $1 billion annually maintaining and improving infrastructure for safety and work closely with regulators. See
what they said about their broader safety practices here. BNSF did not
reply to a request for comment.

On July 31, 2017, CSX assembled Train Q38831 in a rail yard in Chicago, destined for a city outside of Hyndman. It had five locomotives at the
front and 136 cars trailing behind, about half hauling hazardous material: propane, isobutane, ethyl alcohol, phosphoric acid and molten sulfur
heated to 235 degrees Fahrenheit. It was a bomb train, as some workers
refer to them, given its combustible cargo. When it left the yard and
traveled east, the train grew. In Lordstown, Ohio, workers added 28 cars.
In New Castle, Pennsylvania, they added 14. Now the train was 2 miles
long.

Engineer Donald Sager, who boarded the train on the night of Aug. 1 in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles west of Hyndman, was
uncomfortable with it. It was, he later told federal investigators, obig
and heavy and ugly.o It had 38 empty cars near the front with almost all
the trainAs tonnage behind them, so the empty cars would be lurching
around as all that weight bore down on them. He said the train would be bucking.

Sager took the train with his conductor, James Beitzel, from the
Connellsville yard at 8:28 p.m. under a clouded sky and began climbing the backside of the mountain outside Hyndman. The climb was steep and the
train needed a push from an extra locomotive, which coupled onto the rear.
The locomotive broke off when the bulk of the train crested the mountain, passing a sign that read: oSummit of Alleghenies, Altitude 2258.o


THE LONG, WINDING DESCENT into Hyndman is one of the steepest in all of
CSX territory, and the train weighed 18,252 tons, heavier than 200 fueled
and loaded Boeing 737s. An engineer on a train like that has to closely
watch the speed. ItAs best to operate the brakes proactively, but as the
train started down the mountain, SagerAs instruments were telling him the
air brakes were beginning to fail. He stopped the train at 11:36 p.m. and radioed dispatchers.

oGot a problem with the train.o

Beitzel climbed down from the engine with his light and began walking in
the gravel along the tracks. He had to manually set the brakes on 30% of
the cars to be sure the train didnAt start moving on its own. Per company rules, he applied them on 58 cars near the front, cranking around and
around a big steel wheel at the end of each car. Then Beitzel walked
nearly 2 miles to the rear, where he found the problem at Car 159. A brake line had cracked and air was hissing out. That type of malfunction
typically affects the brakes on all of the cars, like a chain reaction.

About two and a half hours later, when he finally got back, his shift had ended and Sager was briefing a new crew. Mechanics replaced the brake line while Ron Main, the new engineer, and Michael Bobb, the new conductor,
waited. It was around 2 a.m. The train wouldnAt budge with the hand brakes
on, so Bobb climbed down and walked back, knocking off brakes as he went.
He released 25 and left the remaining set because the descent was steep, a practice at odds with accepted rail safety then and now, investigators and railroad workers say. Then finally, at 4:17 a.m., the train began rolling
down the valley into Hyndman.

BobbAs approach created a dangerous problem, investigators would later conclude. The 33 cars with hand brakes left on were toward the head of the train, and 13 of those were empty. There were also 25 other empty cars
near the front. This meant the lightest section of the train was doing the bulk of the braking. It also meant that the heaviest section of the train
u literally the rest of it u was bearing down on them. Such forces can pop empties or lightly loaded cars off the tracks, as had already happened in
at least three long-train derailments investigated by the FRA.

The other part of the problem was in the hand brakes themselves. They play
the same role as emergency brakes in an automobile; conductors usually put them on when they need to park a train. Applied and functioning properly,
they immobilize a train carAs wheels. But driving a train with the hand
brakes set can damage it, and thatAs what happened to the Hyndman train.
Its speed fluctuated as its locked steel wheels ground along the tracks, beginning to deform and lose purchase.

ItAd be easy to blame Bobb or Main for what was about to happen. But they
were only following CSX policy when they set the hand brakes on this huge, heavy train and sent it rolling down the long, steep hill. A safe and
proper move would have been to break the train into two at the top of the
hill and drive each section down separately, said Grady Cothen, a former
FRA attorney who has written a widely cited white paper on the challenges
of operating longer trains. But it would have taken more time, and the
train was already delayed. CSX at the time was the only one of the seven largest train companies to allow the use of hand brakes to control the
speed of a train down a hill.

It would also be easy to blame the crew in New Castle that had added eight empty and six loaded cars to the head of the train, making it longer and
less stable. Or the crew before it in Lordstown that added 28 cars, all
empty, to the head of the train. But these crews, too, were following a
CSX policy, which dictated they could ignore a more sensible policy u
donAt put so many loaded cars behind empties u if they were pressed for
time. It was a risky edict considering crews are always pressed for time
in the age of precision scheduled railroading.

That August morning, the train hit a speed of 29 miles an hour as it
reached the bottom of the hill, passing the house where Shaffer slept on
his living room couch. Main and Bobb felt a lunge in the cab. The trainAs emergency brakes kicked in and it screeched to a stop.

oHey, Alex,o Main called to the dispatcher. oWe just went into emergency.
... IAm not sure whatAs going on back there, but the conductorAs getting
ready to get on the ground.o (Main, Bobb and Sager could not be reached,
and Beitzel declined to comment. Their remarks are from transcripts in the federal investigation of the accident.)

Bobb climbed down from the cab and began walking toward the problem.
Suddenly, there was an explosion and a fireball rose into the night about
a half-mile back from the engines. Main, up in his locomotive, hadnAt
noticed. He didnAt learn about it until a man drove up to his window and yelled the news into the cab.

Federal investigators would later learn that Car 35 u empty, hand brakes
set u had jumped the tracks on a curve, and two cars ahead of it and 30
behind it had followed.

After the derailment, the National Transportation Safety Board recommended
in a letter that CSX prohibit using hand brakes on empty cars to control a trainAs speed down a hill. It also recommended that large blocks of empty
cars be placed near the end, not the front. oWe would appreciate a
response within 90 days of the date of this letter, detailing the actions
you have taken or intend to take to implement these recommendations.o

But CSX responded more than two years later and only after ProPublica
began asking recently why it had ignored the NTSB. In its response letter,
CSX says the agency was wrong; the trainAs makeup did not contribute to
the crash. However it still reformed the policy, requiring, among other things, placing more weight near front of the train and prohibiting trains from ohaving more than a third of its weight in the trailing fourth of the train.o It also adopted the NTSBAs other recommendation on hand brakes, prohibiting their use on empty cars in omountain grade territory,o a
company spokesperson told ProPublica. It said the derailment was caused by ohand brakes on empty rail cars to control train speed on steep grade ...
not PSR.o


BY THAT AFTERNOON, emergency manager Walls and the other first responders
had evacuated everyone who would agree to leave Hyndman. The tanker burned
for two days and yet did not explode. Though it came close: The pressure inside the car caused the steel wall of its inner hull to stretch as thin
as a credit card. TheyAd come 1 millimeter, Walls said, from disaster.

The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee took note of
the derailment and asked the Government Accountability Office to study the safety and impacts of long trains. The committeeAs two ranking members
hadnAt even signed the letter before CSX derailed another long train in Georgia, just two months after Hyndman.

It was 2.4 miles long, and like the Hyndman train, a bulk of its tonnage
had been loaded in the rear. When the engineer began to brake, the back of
the train slid forward and shoved a car ahead of it off the tracks on a
curve, and 13 other cars followed. One car crashed into a home and the
person inside was rushed to a hospital. The man survived. CSX did not
comment on this accident but did tell ProPublica the company is committed
to operating safely and is constantly evaluating its rules, specifically
on train handling. See what else it said about its safety practices here.

It was only after all of this happened that the FRA, in March 2018,
replied to the union officials who had expressed concerns that previous spring. In a letter, the agency said it obegan looking at the length of
trains as a potential contributing cause of FRA reportable accidents/incidentso in 2016. The agency still did not have othe
sufficient data or evidence to justify an Emergency Order limiting the
length of trains.o

In May 2019, the GAO completed its study, coming to a similar conclusion:
long trains may be dangerous, but more information was needed. Its effort
was partly stymied, the GAO said, because most rail companies refused to
hand over enough of their private train-length data to allow investigators
to make findings. The FRA also told ProPublica it has asked companies for
this data but never gotten it.

On Thursday, the FRA told ProPublica it is starting the process of
requiring companies to disclose the train length for every reportable accident, a move prompted by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
But there is no guarantee the regulators will succeed. The FRA said it
first needs to publish a notice of the new data-collection effort and ultimately the Office of Management and Budget would need to approve the measure.

Had the FRA issued an emergency order as the union requested in 2017, a
rare and extreme step, the railroads would have likely gotten a judge to
block it, said Cothen, author of the white paper on longer trains. He acknowledged that most of the long trains in the country arrive at their destinations without incident, but he feels the railroads are operating
with an unreasonable degree of risk. He believes the FRA has the evidence
it needs to start crafting a rule to limit train lengths, a process that
would include input from the industry. oMy issue to this point,o Cothen
said, ohas been that effective action has not been taken.o The FRA says it disagrees.

Across the country, worried state lawmakers have tried to cap the lengths
of trains that roll through their communities. Since 2019, in Arkansas,
Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Washington, Arizona and other states, lawmakers have proposed maximum lengths of 1.4 to about 1.6 miles. But
every proposal has died before becoming law. Opponents, which include
Class 1 railroad companies, claim that the efforts are driven by unions to create jobs and that the proposals would violate interstate commerce laws.

Georgia state Sen. Rick Williams, a Republican, attempted to work around
this angst by offering a simple resolution last year that would have urged
the FRA to limit train length. Even that died. oItAs frustrating,o he
said, owhen you see something that happens, like in East Palestine, Ohio,
and you know it very easily could happen here and we could suffer the same consequences.o

Democratic Arizona state Rep. Consuelo HernandezAs bill to limit train
length was approved by two committees this session with bipartisan
support. But Republicans refuse to put the bill on the floor for a general vote, and so it has stalled. ProPublica spoke with her the day after a 1.9-mile-long BNSF train derailed there. oThe train companies are so powerful,o Hernandez said. oWhat it comes down to is public safety versus corporations.o

Many states have passed laws that would punish railroads for blocking road crossings, but that power, state courts rule every time, rests solely with
the federal government.

At any moment, Congress could intervene and limit the length of trains. If
it did, independent experts say, thereAd be more trains, moving faster
with fewer breakdowns and derailments, and customer service would improve.
But the rail companies, which move 40% of the countryAs cargo, have a lot
of leverage. For more than a century, the industry has convinced lawmakers that the success of America is tied to the success of the rails; itAs a
view that persists today, sustained by the $10 million the Association of American Railroads spends some years lobbying Congress.

So long trains have continued jumping the tracks.

In June 2019, one month after the inconclusive GAO study, a 2.2-mile-long Union Pacific train derailed in Nevada. It was so long and the terrain so mountainous that at times sections of the train climbed uphill while other sections climbed downhill, which made driving it a nightmare. Ultimately
the engineer couldnAt manage it, and the train lifted a car up and dropped
it on the ground. Twenty-seven cars followed.

In July, a 2.5-mile-long Union Pacific train derailed for the same reasons elsewhere in Nevada.

In August, a 1.6-mile-long Union Pacific train going 48 miles an hour
derailed in Texas. The company ran computer simulations after the crash
and concluded it never should have been operating the long train at that
speed at that spot on the tracks.

In September, Union Pacific crashed yet another long train. It was 1.5
miles long and broke in two in Illinois. Half of the train rolled out of control away from the other half. It then slowed, stopped and began
rolling back. The two halves collided and exploded. The fire spread underground through a storm drain and ignited a holding pond at a chemical plant. More than 1,000 residents and at least 1,000 schoolchildren were evacuated.

And then in October, in separate instances, Norfolk Southern derailed two
long trains, both in Georgia. One was 2 miles long. The engineer had
struggled to control it, and his use of the brakes caused the rear of the train to run into the front and lift a car off the tracks. The other train
was 1.6 miles long. Its autopilot had the brakes applied in the front and
the engine in the middle giving it gas, and as it reached the bottom of a
hill the opposing forces popped 32 cars off the tracks. They ruptured a pipeline, which released nearly 2.3 million gallons of natural gas.

The following summer, in June 2020, a 2.3-mile-long Union Pacific train derailed in Idaho because it was too big, the FRA determined. It was constructed unevenly with 34 empty cars coupled near the front and loaded, heavy cars behind them. The heavy cars pushed the light cars off the
tracks. The FRA also determined the engineer lacked the training necessary
to operate a train of that length.

In July 2020, a 2-mile-long BNSF train derailed in Arizona for similar reasons: a long block of heavy cars coupled behind a set of empty cars squeezed them off the tracks.

The companies involved in these accidents did not comment on them specifically. See what they said about their safety practices here. BNSF
did not comment at all.

Finally, in September 2020, the FRA launched a study examining the brake systems in long trains. The agency did not say why it took three years
after the Hyndman derailment and the warnings from the union to begin examining the issue. It plans to complete the study this year. Also, late
last year, it completed a small survey of rail workers, labor unions and railroad managers. Managers claimed long trains pose no new dangers, but government employees and labor unions said they are concerned.

The National Academies of Sciences, doing a separate assessment of trains longer than 1.4 miles at the request of Congress, must report its findings
by June 2024.


THREE DAYS AFTER the evacuation of Hyndman, Walls and his family returned home. TheyAd been gone only 72 hours, but it felt like a reunion with neighbors they hadnAt seen in years. He mowed his grass. It felt good
doing something so pedestrian.

But Shaffer and his wife never returned to their doublewide trailer. It
wasnAt safe, Shaffer recalls being told by CSX. oPretty much had to fight
with them to get my guns and stuff out of there,o he said. The company
paid out a settlement the couple used to buy a big house with a big porch
7 miles out of town, far away from the railroad tracks. But even years
later, the derailment haunts him, whether he is waiting uneasily in his
truck at a railroad crossing or watching the news. When the East Palestine disaster appears on his TV, he has to get up and walk away. oItAs
definitely still with me,o he said.

Sutphin and Mia bounced from her auntAs house out of town to a hotel with
her stepdad then to a house on Myrtle Beach, an upscale vacation town on
the coast of South Carolina, and stayed there for a year. Every time an airplane flew over the house, Sutphin shook and ran to the window, afraid
that something was about to crash into them. Mia rarely slept through the night. Sutphin financed their long vacation with a $50,000 check from CSX.
The railroad also bought her a brand new Hyundai Santa Fe valued at
$32,000.

After it nearly razed the town, CSX handed out a lot of money. It bought residents clothing, medicine, food, gas and hotel rooms. It reimbursed businesses for lost revenue. It paid volunteer firefighters every day
about $1,000. It gave residents so-called inconvenience fee payments of
about $300 a day. It gave one family $10,000 for veterinarian bills and
damage to its property. It gave the fire department $190,000. A church
pastor said residents welcomed the payments, but he also said they felt
like ohush money,o and thatAs the effect the money appears to have had on
some residents. When ProPublica asked about the derailment, many said that
the railroad did oall right byo them. Cleaning up and rebuilding the town
and the tracks, according to the FRA, cost $9.6 million. CSX defended the money it spent around town, saying it did not ask the residents to release their legal rights in exchange for the payments. oSuch actions,o a spokesperson told ProPublica, oare part of CSXAs industry-leading standard
of care when incidents like the derailment in Hyndman occur.o

Walls remembers a CSX official walking up to him while he was standing on
the front steps of the charter school on the morning of the derailment, a
gray column of smoke from the tanker car still billowing into the sky. oI
know we came in and messed your town up,o the official said, obut weAll
make it right before we leave.o Walls appreciates the money CSX spent on
the town and its people. But that was the railroadAs responsibility. What would make things right, he said, is omaking sure that the trains coming through here are safe.o
--
"LOCKDOWN", left-wing COVID fearmongering. 95% of COVID infections
recover with no after effects.

No collusion - Special Counsel Robert Swan Mueller III, March 2019. Officially made Nancy Pelosi a two-time impeachment loser.

Donald J. Trump, cheated out of a second term by fraudulent "mail-in"
ballots. Report voter fraud: sf.nancy@mail.house.gov

Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.

Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.

President Trump boosted the economy, reduced illegal invasions, appointed dozens of judges and three SCOTUS justices.
--- Synchronet 3.19c-Linux NewsLink 1.113