Saturday, Feb. 3, marked a somber anniversary — one year since the fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.

It also marks a year with no serious action from Congress to ensure the safety of the public. On Wednesday, the National Transportation Safety Board announced it would issue its final report on the February 2023 derailment in June.

In the 12 months since the train cars released clouds of chemical smoke over a small town in Eastern Ohio, there have been claims from elected officials that they are working on preventing future derailments. Senators J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, and Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, introduced the Railway Safety Act within a month of the crash, and it has broad bipartisan support.

In the House of Representatives, Democrat Rep. Chris DeLuzio, who represents a northern section of Allegheny County, is one of the co-sponsors of a companion to the Senate bill. Last week, DeLuzio wrote to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., urging him to hold a vote on the House version of the bill.

So why, then, is the bill still languishing?

One potential culprit is corporate lobbying. Norfolk Southern, the railroad company that operated the train, spent $2,340,000 lobbying federal officials in 2023, up 30% from the previous year.

News website The Intercept reported more than $1.5 million of that was spent between April and August, after which the initial bipartisan push for the Railway Safety Act slowed.

Since then, there has been pushback from industry advocates arguing the bill is a gift to organized labor and wouldn’t help with safety.

What those advocates haven’t done is offer alternatives to the bill. Instead, they suggest waiting for the final report and argue U.S. rail safety is already very good.

But when it comes to safety, we might not know the full health impact of the East Palestine derailment for years. After the initial crash, unknown amounts of vinyl chloride were released into the air.

And part of the bill directly addresses something we already know contributed to the derailment. Under the proposed Railway Safety Act of 2023, the U.S. Department of Transportation would set regulations for sensors along the track to help find problems with trains carrying hazardous materials.

While the final NTSB report is going to be essential for understanding exactly what went wrong on and before Feb. 3, 2023, the crash laid bare real concerns about railway safety and maintenance.

Waiting longer to fix that is not only irresponsible, it’s dangerous.

— JK