In their final hearing on the East Palestine train derailment on Tuesday, officials at the National Transportation Safety Board expressed their displeasure that these tank cars are still in widespread use and will continue to be so for about five more years.
“We should not wait until 2029 to retire these,” said NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy. “We have issued recommendations since 1991 that say these should no longer be in service.”
Environmental groups and NTSB officials argue that federal lawmakers should speed up the nationwide repeal of DOT-111 if they want to avoid another East Palestine. But such action is unlikely. The railroad industry has effectively put on hold the rail safety legislation being considered by the Senate. The chemical industry also warns that speeding up the repeal could lead to a shortage of tank cars that transport oil and chemicals widely used in industry and energy production.
The DOT-111, a general-use tank car, has long been a concern among safety experts because of its inability to withstand the force of an impact. Over the past decade, DOT-111 cars have been involved in numerous derailments in the United States and Canada that have resulted in deaths and the release of ethanol, crude oil and other hazardous materials. According to the NTSB, 54 percent of DOT-111 cars involved in accidents have released their contents.
In the East Palestine case, three DOT-111 rail cars carrying flammable or combustible materials ruptured, including one containing butyl acrylate, which is highly flammable and sparked a fire after the derailment. Norfolk Southern officials feared the fire could ignite individual tank cars carrying vinyl chloride and cause an explosion. To avoid that risk, officials dumped and burned the vinyl chloride, sending a black cloud of toxic fumes over East Palestine and surrounding areas, terrifying residents for miles around.
In his hearing On Tuesday, investigators and NTSB board members said the venting and burning of the vinyl chloride-carrying tank cars was unnecessary and could have been avoided if the DOT-111 cars had not started the fire.
“The rupture of just three DOT-111 cars in a derailment resulted in a large, raging fire that overwhelmed rescue workers and set off a chain of events that resulted in the explosion and burning of five vinyl chloride tank cars,” said NTSB member Michael Graham.
NTSB investigator Paul L. Stancil added that “the vent-and-burn incident could have been avoided if there had not been DOT-111 tank cars containing flammable and combustible liquids on board the train.”
After several derailments over the past decade involving DOT-111 cars, federal authorities began looking for solutions. After the Lac-Mégantic disaster, manufacturers developed a tank car shape that is less prone to breakage, which the NTSB has recommended to shippers. Announced in 2015, the DOT-117 features a steel shell that provides thermal protection in the event of a fire. The DOT-111 model lacks such protection.
Later that year, Congress passed the FAST Act, which would phase out the use of DOT-111 buses to transport hazardous materials, including crude oil by 2018 and ethanol by 2023.
Under the law, flammable materials – like the butyl acrylate in one of East Palestine’s tank cars – will no longer be allowed to be transported on DOT-111 trains starting in May 2029. According to a 2024 report by the Association of American Railroads (AAR), 25,000 DOT-117 trains are currently used to transport flammable materials, while 17,000 DOT-111 trains have yet to be retired. However, DOT-111 trains will still be allowed to transport other materials, including flammable materials that require a higher temperature to ignite than combustible materials.
Railroads have no control over the cars they use – that decision is up to the shippers of the goods, said Mike Rush, senior vice president of safety and operations at AAR. Those shippers are the ones subject to the phase-out rules.
Switching to a different wagon model is primarily a financial decision for the freight companies, said Robert Sumwalt, executive director of the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and former chairman of the NTSB.
“The lifespan of these cars can be 20 to 30 years,” Sumwalt said. “If you bought a tank car in 2014, you plan to retire it in 2034, and now someone tells you, ‘You have to get rid of these things.'”
Replacing or retrofitting the DOT-111 cars can be costly, and a shorter timeframe may not be feasible because of the limited speed at which new cars can be built and put into service, says Jeff Sloan, senior director of regulatory affairs at the American Chemistry Council, which represents the chemical industry. According to the Railway Supply Institute, a new DOT-117 tank car cost between $150,000 and $170,000 last year.
The NTSB first published a study on the DOT-111 in 1991, which found that these tank cars have thinner shells than other models, making the cars more susceptible to damage in an accident. The 2009 derailment of a train carrying ethanol in Cherry Valley, Illinois, killed a local resident and sparked investigations into this type of tank car. In 2015, another group of 107 train cars carrying crude oil derailed in Mount Carbon, West Virginia, forcing the local community to evacuate and closing two nearby water treatment plants.
After each incident, the NTSB issued recommendations to improve construction standards and add thermal protection. However, after further incidents, some questioned whether even the higher-standard DOT 111 regulations were robust enough.
“The DOT-111 should no longer be running on the tracks and everyone knows it,” said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with the environmental group Earthjustice.
“East Palestine was a tragedy and a disaster, and I was hoping that Congress would act and speed up the timeline for removing all of these (DOT-111s) and derailing them,” she said. “But that hasn’t happened.”
Justine McDaniel contributed to this report.
