The East Palestine derailment in Ohio is just the tip of the iceberg. There were 54,539 train deaths in the United States between 1990 and 2021, an average of 1,704 per year, according to the US Bureau of Transportation statistics. The federal government's poor governance of the country and the defects of US capitalism are behind the repeated rail accidents.
Compromised safety measures and a shrinking workforce are cited by experts as the main cause of the East Palestine crash. The rail company's profits are trying to maximize its profits, and the disaster has been judged to have been inevitable.
The lack of electronically controlled pneumatic brakes was said to have aggravated the severity of the crash. The order was rescinded in 2017 due to a Donald Trump administration assault on red tape and the Norfolk Southern Corporation train that was derailed in East Palestine was not equipped with ECP brakes, according to the former US president Barack Obama.
The rail company should have known how important it is for its freight trains carrying hazardous materials to have ECP brakes, but it puts profits before safety.
Instead of playing the role of supervisors of the US federal government, politicians in Washington represent the interests of capital rather than the well-being of American people and the future of the US as a whole.
Too old and shabby infrastructure has been a headache for the US economy for a long time and has contributed to the declining quality of life for people in the US.
The causes of train accidents expose the myriad ways in which things can go wrong. A crack in a track that the Norfolk Southern Corporation and its contractors didn't identify or act upon after learning about it caused a derailment in 2018. A broken axle in a train car is thought to be the cause of the East Palestine accident this time. All these accidents point to the fact that much needs to be done to make US railways and other facilities safe and fit for purpose.
In the past decades, nothing has been done. It was not the least because of the goal of the rail companies, which will never care about the healthy development of the railway industry.
More than 20,000 rail workers were laid off during a 12-month period in 2018 to 2019, representing the biggest layoffs in the rail sector since the Great Depression, and the railway workforce in the US has dropped below 200,000 - the lowest level since the peak of 1 million at the peak of the Great Depression. It is not because the rail industry does not need a workforce of that size but because cutting the size of the workforce reduces operating costs and increases the profits of the rail companies.
When seeking maximum profits is the primary goal, it is only wishful thinking that good governance can be achieved in the US for healthy social and economic development.