If you are even remotely good at staying up-to-date on national news, one trend that you are sure to notice is the ever increasing amount of train accidents. Some of these accidents are indeed caused by drivers – as was the case just last week in Garden City, where a 49 year-old man was killed after having driven around the crossing gate – but, a vast majority of accidents are being blamed on the Federal Railway Administration (FRA), a railroad regulating body.
Over the last few years, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has made many dozen recommendations to the FRA, but those recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. Recently, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has placed the blame for some of these accidents on the FRA for not enforcing the recommendations, and feels that the FRA is a, “railroad safety culture in disarray.” Blumenthal was mentioning the FRA’s negligence for not enforcing over 60 recommendations by the NTSB over the past few years as his reasoning.
Because of the ever growing concern of accidents, the NTSB has ordered safety redundancies such as shunting, which uses an electrical signal to mimic the existence of a train and motion oncoming trains to stop. As good as this approach may be, it doesn’t protect passengers and employees from an engineer who has fallen asleep.
On December 1st, 2013, four passengers died when the engineer fell aslepp, leaving the train traveling at 82 mph at a 30 mph curve. While the engineer was later found to have undiagnosed severe sleep apnea, if an FRA regulation requiring medical screening for sleep disorders would have been in place, the accident may have been avoided altogether. If protection practices are changed and more precautions are taken, such as inward- and outward-facing cameras and a cab alert system, then commuters can once again have the kind of assurance they rightfully deserve when traveling. Either way, the maritime lawyers at O’Bryan Law will seek out the justice you deserve from any injury on a railroad. Contact us for help today.
