Railway safety is facing more scrutiny following last month's train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Leaders in the Hudson Valley recently wrote Ulster County Executive Jen Metzger about the need for updating emergency procedures in the event of a derailment.
“We rely on a hazardous mitigation team that comes up out of the city of Kingston, which is great, but the delay in response for that challenge is our emergency services response team,” said Saugerties Town Supervisor Fred Costello.
The town has three railway crossings for the CSX West Shore Railway Line. It’s a line with more than 20,000 miles of track, crisscrossing much of upstate New York.
What You Need To Know
- 7 Ulster County municipal leaders penned a letter to County Executive Jen Metzger, calling for a review of the county's preparedness in the event of a train derailment
- The CSX West Shore Rail Line runs through Ulster County and covers much of upstate New York
- In a statement, CSX said out of “an abundance of caution, each of our over 1,000 wayside detectors has been thoroughly inspected and calibrated"
Rep. Pat Ryan wrote letters to CSX President and CEO Joseph Hinrichs. It calls for the companies to enact, what Ryan calls, common-sense safety measures to prevent accidents like the one in Ohio.
But Ryan says he hasn’t heard back yet.
As a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, he said he’s prepared to push rail safety legislation forward.
“Increasing the brake safety requirements," Ryan said. "This was a big problem in this Ohio crash where basically the standard of automatic braking wasn't stringent enough. And that allowed this tragedy to happen.”
At the local level, Metzger said she’ll work with other elected officials to make sure they’re comfortable with response plans, along with pressing for federal officials to conduct a new inspection on local railways.
“We need to get our rail inspected here and make sure that it is in good working order," Metzger said. "There have been concerns over the years about maintenance of those tracks, and so we need to make sure they’re in good working order.”
Ulster County officials said a roundtable discussion will determine how to best alter the county’s emergency procedures in an effort to make residents feel safer.
“The lessons that we're learning, watching the response unfold in Palestine and what we can implement here to give our residents the assurance that we can handle an event of this magnitude here," Costello said.