Did the Ohio train derailment break a social contract?

The descriptions that accompanied pictures of the dark cloud which hung over East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month were apocalyptic. A train derailment on Feb. 3 released hazardous chemicals into the air, water, and soil. Residents were evacuated. Dead fish littered the streams. Ohio national guard members walked around in hazmat suits.

My heart broke for those living in East Palestine, and then I found out the name of the railroad company responsible for the wreckage: Norfolk Southern. It’s a name that still shakes a town practically in my backyard, Graniteville, South Carolina.

Nearly 20 years ago, in January 2005, two Norfolk Southern trains collided near the Avondale Mills plant in Graniteville. The wreckage released 11,500 gallons of toxic chlorine gas into the air and claimed the lives of nine people. More than 500 people sought treatment for chlorine exposure, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

At the time, I was a sports reporter at The Aiken Standard, and the only track I thought about involved track and field events. But Mike Gibbons, who was then an editor at the Standard and part of the team covering the tragedy, remembers the literal and figurative cloud that hung over Graniteville.

“Once it started to become clear what happened, most everyone knew the death toll would be high, and based on the chlorine cloud, we had no idea how widespread the damage was going to be,” Mr. Gibbons says, recalling the 2005 collision.

“It reeked of chlorine … [a mile] away, so I could imagine what it was like closer,” he says. “I had a pool at the time, and I remember thinking I had never smelled that concentration of chlorine, even when putting it in my pool.”

The wreck also effectively forced Avondale Mills, a textile plant, to shut down operations in two states, which left some 4,000 people out of work. Norfolk Southern settled with Avondale Mills and numerous families, and the rail company paid a $4 million penalty levied by the Department of Justice. To many, those settlements feel insufficient in the wake of lives lost and more than a decade’s worth of persistent health issues.

As someone who worked in manufacturing years later in Graniteville, I often thought about the idea of the social contract. In terms of business ethics, the social contract suggests that big business should make decisions that positively affect society. I question how corporations, and specifically modern-day railroad barons such as Norfolk Southern, can suggest, as they do on the community page of their website, that they are acting in good faith when it comes to a social contract. It’s not enough for a corporation to produce jobs and support local events and charities as a trade-off for environmental calamity and insufficient infrastructure.

On Tuesday, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg suggested as much when he recommended rail reforms and an increase in fines for safety violations in response to the East Palestine derailment. “Profit and expediency must never outweigh the safety of the American people,” he said in a statement.

Norfolk Southern’s CEO visited East Palestine on Saturday, but at a town hall meeting earlier in the week, where the residents of East Palestine were seeking answers for what happened, representatives from Norfolk Southern were notably absent. Does this suggest that working-class people, both on the job and otherwise, are collateral damage instead of community partners? Infrastructure concerns shouldn’t speak just to upgrading crumbling rails. They should also speak to favorable policy when it comes to paid sick leave, which, if provided to railway workers, could strengthen the bonds between workers, their families, and their communities. Those bonds should be the crux of the social contract.

It’s also worth mentioning that railroad tracks are a reminder of perpetual racial discrimination. Enslaved laborers built much of the country’s railway infrastructure during the 19th century – a fact that has rightfully resulted in calls for reparations. Further, Black people were denied upward mobility in the railroad industry into the 21st century, with Norfolk Southern paying a $28 million settlement in 2001 for a class action suit brought by Black employees alleging discriminatory promotion practices.

The dark clouds that hang over places like Graniteville and East Palestine are remnants of a failed relationship between corporations and everyday people. That deteriorating infrastructure is particularly ironic because local municipalities are always longing for big business to come to town. It is time we look at how much those partnerships cost, not just in terms of creating jobs, but in terms of environmental, racial, and labor justice.