BELLEVUE, Ohio — On Tuesday, Norfolk Southern began training first responders from Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia in the event that there’s an emergency on the railroad.
“Rail incidents in general are so rare that most fire departments may not ever respond to one in their career,” said Norfolk Southern senior communications manager Connor Spielmaker. “If they do this hands-on training, it helps them have that muscle memory, that experience that they wouldn’t otherwise have.”
The training, taking place in Bellevue, will educate more than 350 first responders over the next two weeks. It includes these topics:
- Safety Around the Railroad
- Understanding Rail Shipping Documents
- Tank Car Identification and Assessment
- Tank Car Valves and Fittings
- Locomotive Emergencies
- Responding to Railroad Emergencies
- AskRail Mobile App
- Response Strategies and Tactics
The training comes as the company works to highlight it's safety efforts nearly two months after the fiery train derailment in East Palestine.
"Safety is first, and so what we're doing is we're working with the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), we're working with the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration), we're working with our customers to identify what we need to learn from them to make Norfolk Southern an even safer railroad company out of East Palestine," Spielmaker said.
Members of the East Palestine Fire Department were some of the two dozen attendees on Tuesday.
“Anybody that has a rail running through their community, they need to take the class,” said East Palestine deputy chief Rick Gorby, adding that every fire department needs to attend the training in order to learn about the trains going through their towns.
“I didn’t know the differences between certain valves and now I think I have a decent education on it,” said Gorby.
Gorby was hesitant to comment on the derailment. While he did say Tuesday's session was very helpful and informative, he believes it wouldn't have helped if his team had underwent the safety training before the derailment in his town.
"It was a whole different situation on February 3rd, we wouldn't be able to do what we learned today anyhow," Gorby said. "It was just too big of an incident. We knew what we had pretty quick off the get-go, so that's when we backed off."
The training in Bellevue will take place for two more weeks, with first responders spending roughly eight hours at the site.
“I just hope we never have to do it again,” Gorby said in regards to responding to the train derailment on February 3 in East Palestine.