Roll Call, 5/25:
OpinionBy Joshua GotbaumAfter Derailment, NTSB Blames the Engineer, Not AmtrakDownplaying railroad's failure may have been a missed safety opportunityThis week I learned that railroad barons still have power: they have successfully resisted safety measures that have for decades been standard for airlines and other transportation. I also learned that, by focusing on the wrong questions, federal safety agencies help keep railroads unsafe.After a year of careful study, the National Transportation Safety Board announced that the likely cause of the Amtrak 188 derailment in May 2015 that killed eight people and injured over 100 more was the engineer. The Board noted repeatedly that, had Amtrak turned on a safety system it had already installed, there would have been no accident at all. Nonetheless, the NTSB just couldn’t bring itself to blame Amtrak – even though the railroad has itself already admitted legal liability and agreed to pay compensation for damages. The NTSB spent most of its meeting talking about the engineer, Brandon Bostian, saying that he'd lost track of where he was and was speeding up when he should have been slowing down. . . .
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NTSB is an exceedingly knowledgeable and professional agency. Both the board and staff clearly care about safety and safety systems, but after 45 years maybe they’d be more successful if they started recognizing that the lack of such systems kills, too.
Gotbaum is a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and was injured in the derailment of Amtrak 188 .