NEW YORK – Railroads have failed to promptly report hundreds of fatal accidents over the past eight years, a violation of federal regulations that has thwarted numerous investigations into collisions with motor vehicles, The New York Times reported.
Enforcement of railroad rules is so lax that federal officials have said they were not even aware of the reporting problems, the newspaper reported on its Web site Saturday.
“It’s a systemic failure,” said James Hall, a former chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s been something that has just not grabbed the attention, unfortunately, of the public.”
On average, one person a day dies at a crossing in the United States. Over the past four years, more than twice as many people have been killed at grade crossings as have died in commercial plane crashes.
Most of those deaths are blamed on drivers. But some railroads have hindered investigations into their own culpability by destroying, mishandling or simply losing evidence or not reporting the crashes properly in the first place, the Times found after a seven-month investigation of the industry.
Union Pacific, the nation’s biggest railroad, was cited by The Times as an example of how railroads repeatedly denied their own responsibility at fatal grade-crossing crashes.
In one recent 18-month period, the newspaper found, seven federal and state courts imposed sanctions on Union Pacific for destroying or failing to preserve evidence in crossing accidents, and an eighth court ordered a case retried.
In 1997, Union Pacific secretly replaced a defective signal at a crossing where a truck driver was killed while hauling potatoes, the newspaper found. And in 1998, a federal judge found that the railroad knowingly destroyed relevant evidence after a collision in Arkansas that left a man brain damaged and killed his wife.
Kathryn Blackwell, a spokeswoman for Union Pacific, said her company’s policy was to keep records as long as federal law requires.
“Union Pacific did not purposefully destroy evidence to keep it from the jury,” Blackwell said. “Union Pacific would not destroy documents in anticipation of litigation.”
In a news release, Blackwell said courts in recent years have expanded the range of material related to grade crossing accidents that the railroad was expected to keep. Union Pacific changed the way it retains such materials in October 2002, she said.
Blackwell said during the course of the Times investigation, the company learned of “breakdowns” in its reporting and compliance processes that it immediately worked to correct.
Railroads point out that most accidents are caused by careless or reckless driving, citing a federal study released late last month that blamed “risky driver behavior or poor judgment” for 87 percent of fatal crossing accidents over the last decade.
Still, most of the 250,000 crossings nationwide have no warning lights or gates, and grade-crossing deaths are up more than 10 percent for the first four months of this year, the Times said.
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