Editorial: We can't be lulled to complacency on hazardous materials safety

Union Pacific spokeswoman Calli Hite observed in a Daily Herald story on rail safety Monday that, "More than 99.99 percent of rail hazmat shipments reach their destination without a release caused by a train accident."

That is a comforting statistic. No doubt, it reflects a combination of efforts by railroad companies, safety engineers and regulators. But it ought not lull us with overconfidence.

Because, that .01 percent accident can have catastrophic consequences.

The strategy for protecting against hazardous materials spills has two dominant components - making sure trains don't have accidents and designing and employing rail cars that will remain safe if they do.

On the first objective, we don't seem to have achieved a predictable trend. The number of hazardous materials spills on Illinois railways over the past five years have been 42, 35, 38, 22, and 33, moving backward from 2016. Such uneven levels of disparity from year to year emphasize the importance of the second objective. Since we have to accept that some risk of accident is inevitable, and we can't control the regularity of that risk, we'd best be sure that when an accident does occur, we can avoid disaster and react effectively.

Here again, the record is reassuring in its moderation, if not always comforting in the context of what might have been.

For example, no one was injured on March 5, 2015, for example when a Chicago-bound train derailed south of tiny Galena, Illinois, and exploded in a fireball that burned for days. But what if that train had been carrying a toxic chemical instead of crude oil? Or, what if the derailment had occurred not in sparsely populated rural Illinois but in the density of a suburb like Lake Forest - where, in fact, almost exactly two years later, a March 15 derailment near Route 41 scattered nine rail cars carrying liquid sulfur?

The result of that accident? Also a relief. None of the dangerous chemical leaked into the environment.

The trouble, of course, is that going by recent experience, under the best of circumstances, we'll see at least 21 more opportunities for tragedy, and, at the other end, we could see as much as double that number.

And, that's just for accidents involving spills. According to our Monday story by transportation writer Marni Pyke, who has written extensively on the dangers of hazardous materials carried by rail throughout the suburbs, the average number of derailments a year hovers around 112 in Illinois. In such a context, .01 percent begins to feel less and less reassuring all the time.

The Federal Railroad Administration and railroad companies, train-car designers and safety experts have been working - sometimes cooperatively, sometimes not so much - to minimize the potential for a hazardous spill disaster. As U.S. Rep. Brad Schneider, in whose district the Lake Forest derailment occurred, observed, the event is a reminder "that accidents do happen." And such reminders emphasize why all that safety work is so important.