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January 20, 2014 - No. 1 Crimes Continue on Railroads Despite Lac-Mégantic Tragedy Derailment and Explosion
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The
Canadian Press reported January 10 that on Boxing
Day Transport Canada quietly approved new safety
rules drafted by the railway industry, just as an
emergency directive issued July 23 -- two weeks
after the Lac-Mégantic tragedy -- was set to
expire. The new rules, which were adopted without
public notification, include lifting one of the
safety measures adopted on July 23. Although
Transport Canada did not publish the new rules on
its website, it did not deny that the measure had
been lifted and the Railway Association made
public that Transport Canada had done this on the
advice of the railways. Plaster Rock, New Brunswick, January 7, 2014 (TSB Canada) |
There have been quite a few derailments of late. Each of them can happen for its own reasons, independent of the others. But the system itself is run pretty hard. One CEO says he likes to "sweat the assets," like a jockey running a horse right to the finish line. The downfall of that is that the assets get tired - whether it is people, rails, cars or maintenance. There is a movement now, an effort by the industry to keep everything moving, to not bring the cars into the rail yards for safety and maintenance inspections, but keep them running from one coast to the other. That is their objective. You hear the executives talk about that, that their operating ratio would deal with velocity and dwell time. When dwell time is low that means velocity is up. If a train is sitting somewhere it means it is not making money. They want to keep that train moving and they want to keep shoving money into the shareholders' pockets. This is a deliberate, conscious move; the operating ratio is a target. You will hear CPR's CEO Hunter Harrison talk to the shareholders and to the news reporters about driving down the operating ratio. That is his focus: improve velocity, sweat the assets and reduce dwell time.
TML: This means that the need to have governments that stand up and defend the public interest is greater than ever.
BS: Absolutely. It does not mean that government and industry can't coexist. They very much can, but you need a regulatory framework where Transport Canada is part of the process, not an observer; and right now they are simply an observer of the process.
TML: When they refer to railways, both Stephen Harper and Minister of Transport Lisa Raitt keep saying that the number of railway accidents is going down. What is your take on that?
BS: I don't know what the truth is any more, that is the problem. I don't think anybody knows what the truth is. As we recently found out at CN Rail between 2003 and 2007 there were 400 unreported runaways. We saw in 2013 where both CN and CP were not reporting derailments and the incidents that were occurring. I can't say for certain, and I am surprised that the industry or even the government would say that the number of incidents is down, because there is no sense at all that there is any confidence in those numbers. So much has gone unreported, there is a lack of confidence for sure. I really don't know how either CN or CP can say that the number of incidents is going down because when we start to look a little deeper we find that most of the incidents are unreported.
The railways are introducing a tricky nuance.
They say that main line derailments are down. But
they are not talking about sidings and non-main
lines. There are still a number of incidents, but
they will say that such and such track is not a
main line, it is not part of the main line. They
consider it a different reporting structure. The
numbers that they use are main line incidents. So
Lac-Mégantic would not be classified by CP Rail as
a main line. That to them would be a non-main line
incident.
Residents of Inglewood, a Calgary neighbourhood, protest CP Rail's transport of dangerous materials through the city, September 13, 2013, two days after the derailment of a CP train carrying nearly one million litres of highly
flammable material (G.C. Carra)
TML: Transport Canada has issued many statements about measures it is taking to improve rail safety in light of the Lac-Mégantic tragedy. Have you studied those? Do they mean anything in terms of improving rail safety?
BS: I had a look at them. For example, from now on there is going to be notification to the cities about the materials that the railcars are transporting when they go through the communities. It is a good step, I think, but it is not really what the cities are asking for. The cities are going to get a kind of year in review that this is what went through their community this year - whether on a quarterly basis or on a semi-annual basis - so many cars of chlorine, so many cars of bitumen oil, so many of aviation fuel, etc. So when the cities are doing a budget for their fire departments or for their emergency response planning, maybe they will say that they need to buy more self-contained breathing apparatuses, etc. I am not going to speak on behalf of the cities, but I think that they wanted something a lot more responsive than that. For example, when a train is going through their community, they would like to get an e-mail or a phone call or something automated, just to say that a train with this type of fuel is going through your community at such and such time so that by the time the fire department or the first responders are making their way to that derailment site, they have a complete comprehensive list of everything that is on that train. The railways are somewhat guarded on that because they don't want their competitors to know, from a commercial perspective, what they are hauling.
WF: We saw in 2013 a growing awareness amongst the workers and the public that when workers defend their working conditions they are actually defending the safety of the people and the communities at large. Do you see it that way?
BS: Absolutely. Our members go to work, we do all the maintenance and safety inspections and we want to make sure that when a train leaves the yard that it is doing so in a manner that is absolutely safe. Part of the problem is that the railway itself can override the mechanic. If a mechanic says that this locomotive or that railcar should not be in service, a supervisor has the right to say that for certain reasons he is going to let the locomotive make its way to Winnipeg or let these railcars make their way to Prince George - and this is part of the regulatory framework of Transport Canada. They can say that this is a maintenance issue, not a safety issue. I said to the industry and to the Minister that if a mechanic says that the bearing on the nosewheel of a plane is worn out and that the plane should not fly because of the potential that the bearing may fail when the plane goes to land, guess what, that plane does not leave until the bearing is changed. That does not happen on the railway.
The
other issue with rail safety is that less and less
the railcars are coming to our rail yards for
maintenance and safety inspections. Trains are
getting longer, they are moving a lot of products
across the country. They will change the crew on
the main line somewhere, bypassing maintenance and
safety inspections at locations along the way.
When trains run 3,000 km without inspection, the
railways say this proves that the trains can run
3,000 km without inspection and that inspections
are not needed before that distance. And if they
can run 3,000 km without maintenance and safety
inspections, then why could they not run 6,000 km
without them? The railways go by performance, but
going by performance is very deceptive. The logic
they use is the same as they use with human
beings. Even though a man has some aches and
pains, he is still moving, and the same applies to
the railcar. Our workers are the last people that
take a look at stuff to make sure it is safe
before it heads out and there are fewer and fewer
of us across the country who do that work.
And then there is the unstated pressure that we all know exists in the workplace and that is to "hurry up and get your job done." Where we used to have six people doing it, now we have only three. People have to do more with less. There have been huge innovations with technology in the industry but you still need two pairs of eyes to look at both sides of a train, that is the minimum. And you need boots on the ground to make sure that the maintenance and safety inspection is done.
WF: What do you want to see happen in the New Year?
BS: I would like to see a change in the way the industry is handling this bitumen fuel. We need the right cars to carry that fuel so that it is safe. The government should call a moratorium on using Department of Transport-111 cars for bitumen.
In the public interest, there should be a moratorium on exemptions or there should be a complete stop to granting exemptions to the railways on safety and maintenance inspections and rules. Right now the railways can apply for exemptions to rules of the regulatory framework and that has to be stopped. The railways are still being granted exemptions.
There should be more inspections by Transport Canada. The Safety Management System has to move away from a self-regulatory auditing kind of thing. It is in the public interest for Transport Canada to ensure that the railways are safe. And that is not done just by checking papers. We need to make sure that the people who are doing the maintenance and safety work are given the possibility of doing it right and the inspectors should have the right to pull trains over and make sure that these trains are being maintained as they should be. The inspectors currently have the right to do it, but there are simply not enough officers in the field to do it.
The public has the right to ensure that the transportation system is safe. They have every right to do that. The industry has every obligation to make sure that it is safe.
ArcelorMittal Railway Workers Say No! to
Unsafe Conditions
TML: What workers does Local 6869 of the United Steelworkers of Quebec's North Shore represent?
Philippe Bélanger: Our local represents about 600 ArcelorMittal railway workers. ArcelorMittal owns 460 km of track between the mine in Mont-Wright and Port-Cartier. We move the ore that is extracted from the mine. Our workers do the maintenance work on the tracks, transport the iron ore and do the mechanical maintenance in Port-Cartier. We maintain the tracks, run the trains, maintain the fibre optics being used in communications and all the equipment, receive the ore when it arrives in Port-Cartier, stock it in the yard and move it into the ships.
TML: What is the situation in terms of rail safety, which has become one of workers' main concerns in recent years?
PB: Historically the company had regulations that were tougher in terms of safety than those of the federal regulatory framework. Today, the company is ArcelorMittal but before 2007, it was Quebec Cartier Mining. The company had its own rules, approved by the Quebec Ministry of Transport since we work under Quebec's jurisdiction.
However, in recent years a lot of new managers have come from CN Rail and CP Rail. They came with a different vision and started to challenge our safety regulations. These are new players, hired by the company in the wake of the restructuring at CN and CP in which they lost their jobs. They looked at our regulations and decided that in some cases they were hindering productivity. They began to remove some of the measures that we had provided for ourselves based on our experience.
One must understand that behind each rule in our safety book is someone who has died. That does not mean that they all died at our workplace but there is an injury or a fatality behind each rule in the book. We work under Quebec's jurisdiction, but we always refer to the Canadian Rail Operating Rules (CROR) because in essence the Quebec Ministry of Transport implements the federal rules. The new managers began to challenge and remove the rules arguing that they are not part of the CROR. According to them, this meant that they did not apply.
TML: Did anything change after the Lac-Mégantic disaster?
PB: What happened in Lac-Mégantic was a cold shower for some who wanted to get rid of our safety measures. At the moment, the company is watching very keenly what will happen at the federal level in the federal regulatory framework for the railways before it decides how to proceed with respect to safety measures. We would be dreaming if we thought that a company is able to regulate itself when we know that the ultimate goal of a business is profitability. A company really does not have moral values. That makes it all the more important for a government to play its role in rail safety. The government must intervene but unfortunately, with the federal government that we have at the moment, it is very unlikely that we are going to see any change. But as a union it is our duty to put pressure and to speak out.
Many strange things are happening, where people are at risk because of a lack of regulation. There are not many people at the Quebec ministry full time. We talk with them. We can see that there is a malaise. We can see that these are competent people who would be able to sit down and identify which things are not right in terms of safety. It is the same thing at the federal level. They have a good knowledge of the hazards and of the accidents that have happened. Many times they know what caused them. But the inspectors have to abide by what is written, they can't do as they feel, and today there is very little written in terms of rules that are straightforward and have to be implemented. What we face today is profitability at the expense of health and safety.
There comes a time when a government has no choice but to stand up and protect the people and not just businesses and their profits. A government is duty-bound to protect the people.
(Translated from original French.)
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