The 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, caused millions of dollars of damage and long-lasting environmental and health concerns. A new briefing from Pitt researchers at the Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory maps 26 years of derailments in the Ohio River Basin, showing that such accidents are more likely to occur near vulnerable communities and bodies of water.
“Rail transport, in itself, is not a bad thing — it’s probably something we need to do more of in the future,” said study author Daniel Bain, an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science at the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. “But when you’re living next to the track, you shouldn’t have to absorb the risk for everyone else’s benefit.”
Shortly after the East Palestine disaster, the Collaboratory released a report examining train derailments in the Pittsburgh area. But as water researchers, they also knew that waterways are connected across entire regions, and so a bigger lens was necessary to capture the true impact of accidents. In the follow-up, they looked at accidents since 1998 across the entire Ohio basin, an area that stretches from Pennsylvania to Kentucky and is home to about 10% of the U.S. population.
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