March/April 2015 Rail-related injuries
in scrapyards are rare, but a rail car’s weight and momentum mean unsafe
behaviors easily can result in serious injury or death.
By Ken McEntee
About
an hour past sunset on Oct. 21, 2011, a 29-year-old employee of a scrapyard in
San Antonio was trying to stop a runaway rail car. According to a report from
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Washington, D.C.), the car
derailed and landed on its side with the employee underneath it. He was crushed
and pronounced dead at the scene.
Catastrophic rail accidents like this one are
rare at scrapyards, industry sources say, but when they do happen, they have
the potential to be deadly. “Unforgiving is the word I use most often when it
comes to rail safety because when something goes wrong, it can go very wrong,”
says the safety manager of a large scrap company. “Because of the weight and
the momentum involved, your ability to correct something once it has started to
go wrong is basically nonexistent, regardless of what type of cowboy you might
have trying to do something about it.”
Silent killers is what Tamara Deiro, director
of safety for SA Recycling (Orange, Calif.), calls these machines. “Rail cars,
as massive as they are, have so much weight behind them that you would think
people would hear them as they are moving along the track, but that isn’t
necessarily the case,” she says. “You literally cannot hear them when they are
moving, so you have to be very careful and very alert any time you are working
in and around rail cars.”
These and other safety professionals say it’s
important to stress caution and common sense to people who work on or near rail
tracks, rail cars, and other equipment that’s part of the rail operation within
the scrapyard.
Likely Injuries
Rail-related
accidents tend to result in injuries that fall at either end of the spectrum:
common, fairly minor injuries or major, catastrophic injuries and deaths. For
an example of the former, throwing a railroad switch improperly can result in a
sprain or a wrenched back, says Tony Smith, safety outreach director for ISRI.
Workers can avoid those types of injuries with proper training, he adds. “I
always teach people how to throw a switch properly. There is a two-step shuffle
method so you are not lifting the switch up and turning sharply and wrenching
your back.” Improper technique while handling a handbrake can result in a
similar injury, says Dane Boykins, logistics and transportation resource
specialist and rail safety instructor for OmniSource Corp. (Fort Wayne, Ind.).
Multimedia Training Systems (Pittsburgh), which
offers safety training to scrap recycling and related businesses, identifies
three categories of more serious rail-related injuries. The first is crush
injuries, in which someone is crushed between two rail cars or between a rail
car and another object. For example, in August 2005, an employee at an Iowa
scrapyard was working on a locomotive when it rolled backward and pinned him to
a 250-pound rubber slab, according to published news reports. The man was
pronounced dead at the scene. The report said no one was inside the locomotive
and no rail cars were attached to it.
The second is struck-by injuries, in which
someone is struck by a rail car or something that falls off a rail car. Rail
cars can factor into other struck-by accidents as well. On July 6, 1988, an
employee at an Illinois scrapyard was struck by the counterweight of a crawler
crane traveling parallel to the rail tracks. According to the OSHA accident
report, “the crane body was positioned so that the counterweight was close to
some rail cars sitting on the track. The crane operator was unable to see the
area between the [rail] cars and the counterweight and did not utilize a guide.
[The killed worker], who had no business being in the area, stepped from
between two railroad cars into the path of the crane. He was struck by the
counterweight and pinned against the side of one of the rail cars. He was
killed.”
The third category is falling injuries, from
falling off a rail car or other vehicle on the track. With luck, falling might
result in only relatively minor injuries, such as a sprained or broken ankle.
But because these accidents occur on or near tracks that carry heavy, moving
rail cars, they also can result in amputations or death.
In an accident last year at a Cleveland-area
steel mill—which could as easily have happened at a scrapyard—a 62-year-old
brakeman died after getting trapped between two parked rail cars. Published
news reports said he was riding on the side of a train when it hit the parked
cars. According to the OSHA report on the fatality, the steel plant “permitted
employees to operate a locomotive in the facility on rail tracks that were
covered with snow and ice which resulted in frequent derailments of rail cars
and subsequently in a fatal struck-by and pinch point incident.” Considering
the risks, “some scrapyards have policies that prohibit riding on a moving
[rail] car,” Smith notes.
Scenarios that lead to those catastrophic
injuries most often involve rolling rail cars, rail car derailing, and coupling
and uncoupling, scrap industry safety experts say.
Rolling Rail Cars
Because
of their sheer size and weight, rolling rail cars are always dangerous, whether
workers are intentionally moving them through the yard or whether they begin to
roll on their own. “A lot of facilities have a grade to them, so cars can begin
to roll if they are not properly braked,” Smith says. He describes the hazard a
rolling rail car creates: “Gondola cars that are used to haul scrap metal weigh
around 60,000 pounds empty, and at full weight [one] could weigh as much as
285,000 pounds. If you have four cars, that’s more than a million pounds. …
It’s difficult to hear them coming—and even more difficult to stop [them].”
Runaway rail cars can roll for several hundred yards or more, he says.
“In some yards, the railroad pushes the cars
into the yard, sets them in place until they are loaded, then moves them out,”
the safety manager says. “If that’s the case, then there is no reason why a car
should be moving unless the railroad is moving it.”
When a scrapyard moves its own cars, the safety
manager says, workers should use extreme caution. “Our focus is on having no
uncontrolled rail car movement.” At one of his company’s facilities, workers
use a locomotive to move rail cars; the smaller facilities use mobile rail car
movers, such as those made by Rail King (Houston) or Trackmobile (LaGrange,
Ga.).
Typically, the movement of rail cars is a
two-person operation: the operator of the locomotive or mobile car mover and a
ground person providing what the safety manager calls “head-end” or “lead-end”
protection: He or she operates the rail switches and observes whether the area
around the tracks is clear of people and obstacles with which the rail car
might collide.
According to an MTS rail safety training video,
the operator of the moving vehicle and the ground person should maintain both
visual and radio contact at all times. Rail car movement should stop
immediately whenever they lose contact. Smith concurs. “Communication is the
most important factor. The team has to be tight. [The two team members] have to
understand each other. And it is important that they have their own radio
channel. I have been in situations where the folks on the rail crew were on the
same channel as the [other] folks in the yard. One wrong word can cause the
operator of the Trackmobile to push a load when the person on the ground is not
expecting it.”
Smith and the safety manager both warn that
uncontrolled rolling can result when workers move rail cars using improper
equipment. If you’re moving rail cars by pushing them with the bucket of a
front-end loader, “that is uncontrolled movement because you don’t have a way
to stop the rail car from getting away and rolling down the track on its own,”
the safety manager says. “In our facilities, we only move rail cars with proper
equipment that has the knuckle attachment that attaches to a [rail] car. A
properly attached car can’t roll away.” Several companies sell coupler
attachments for front-end loaders or other mobile scrapyard equipment, Smith
notes. The safety manager agrees that such attachments can move rail cars
safely, but they are not as common in the industry as they should be, he says.
Derailing
A
rail car can derail when it moves on a track that’s damaged, contains
obstacles, or is improperly gauged. Some derailing is intentional, however,
points out Rick Hare, director of safety for Consolidated Scrap Resources
(York, Pa.). A derailing device on a track causes a runaway car to exit the
track into an open area where it will do minimal damage. “You have to be sure
to properly set the derailer so that if, by chance, a car would break loose, it
automatically derails,” Hare says. “The brake should prevent that from
happening, in a perfect world, but the derailer is just another stop-gap
measure that prevents a runaway car from coming back into your yard and running
into a person or a piece of equipment.” Without a derailer, a runaway rail car
also could roll out of a scrapyard and on to a main railroad line, where it
might hit another train.
Such devices don’t guarantee safety, however.
The fatality in San Antonio occurred after the runaway rail car intersected
with a derailer, went off the track, and fell on the worker. Low light and
obstacles near the track seem to have been contributing factors. The OSHA
citation reports that the worker was “exposed to trip and struck-by hazards
when working with low visibility of 0.1 foot-candles at night while repositioning
railcars.”
Even if a runaway car derails safely, safety
professionals warn against trying to get it back on track. “I have a
prohibition on re-railing cars,” the safety manager says. “That is a recipe for
disaster. Too many things can go wrong.” Hare agrees. “Re-railing is not quite
as easy as it was with the model trains we had when we were kids,” he says.
“Normally, what you have to do is unload the car so that it can be properly
maneuvered back onto the tracks.” Smith suggests unloading the car and then
calling your rail carrier, who can bring a rail crane to safely return the car
to the track.
To prevent unintentional derailment, the safety
manager says he emphasizes keeping the tracks—and the area around the
tracks—clean of debris and equipment. “Don’t park cars or other vehicles on or
near the tracks,” he says. Workers also perform routine track inspections to
look for damage that could cause a derailment.
Coupling and Uncoupling
A
worker who gets between cars that are being connected or disconnected—coupled
or uncoupled—can be crushed. Trying to adjust the couplers—the parts that lock
the two cars together—with hands or feet while the coupling is in progress can
result in amputation. SA Recycling forbids workers from getting in between rail
cars during coupling or uncoupling, Deiro says.
Safety Training
Although
SA has not experienced rail-related injuries at its 56 facilities, it has made
safety around rail a priority. “Two years ago, we established six categories of
‘critical lifesaver’ rules in our company,” Deiro says. “In January we added
critical lifesaver rules specific to safety in rail car movement.” Why? “There
is a history in the industry of very severe injuries, so safety is something
about which you have to raise awareness,” she says. “We would rather be
proactive than reactive.”
SA consulted with safety experts, including
people from the railroad industry, to help develop its rail safety rules, Deiro
says. Among those rules is the establishment of a barrier around the rail area.
No one except the workers directly involved in moving the cars is permitted
within the barrier. “Whenever a car is being moved, an alarm is sounded so that
people in the area know that it’s moving,” she says.
The training program at Consolidated includes
proper procedures for setting handbrakes, coupling and uncoupling rail cars,
mounting and dismounting cars, and otherwise working around rail cars safely,
Hare says. “We have a training program for those who operate the Rail King, and
we also have safety videos that we have received from Norfolk Southern that
teach about routine safety procedures.”
Boykins, who worked for Norfolk Southern
Railway (Norfolk, Va.) as a terminal transportation officer before he joined
OmniSource, agrees that rail carriers that serve the scrap industry are a good
source of rail-safety resources. “They share a lot of their rail safety
materials with shippers as an additional step to help keep our employees safe,”
he says. In training, he adds, “I believe in leading by example, being
consistent in rule compliance, and consistently educating your personnel. It is
important for a company to promote safety as a way of life.”
Ken McEntee is a writer
based in Strongsville, Ohio.