Authors: Testimony of Kenneth M. Mead before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Government Activities and Transportation, Committee on Government Operations

Date of Publication:  January 13, 1992

Sponsoring Agency:  U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)

Performing Organization:  U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO)

Report No: GAO/T-RCED-92-23

Abstract:

We appreciate the opportunity to participate in this hearing on rail safety.  Our testimony today will discuss the rail safety work we have conducted over the past three years and our views on the four bills you have introduced in response to recent rail accidents involving the release of dangerous chemicals.  As you requested, we will also provide accident trend information over the past 10 years for both the railroad industry in general and for Amtrak.  There were a number of highly publicized rail accidents in 1991, including the devastating hazardous materials accident on the Sacramento River.  We are not able to include 1991 accidents in this testimony, however, because complete data is not yet available.

In summary, our past work showed that:

• The Federal Railroad Administration's (FRA) enforcement program did not ensure that the nation's railroads comply with federal safety regulations.  The penalty settlement process was so slow - taking 36 months to settle civil penalties in 1989 - that it rendered the enforcement process ineffective.  However, the backlog of 18,000 violations awaiting legal review in 1989 has been reduced to 9,500 by the end of 1990, according to FRA's Administrator.
• FRA did not have standards defining the frequency of railroad inspections or the size of the territory an inspector could cover.  Without such standards, some railroads went uninspected, and FRA did not know whether the size of its inspection staff was adequate.  Also, the inspectors did not uniformly apply safety regulations throughout the industry.  As a result, inspections in some FRA regions often cited serious safety problems as violations while in other regions inspectors rarely cited violations for the same safety problem.
• Hazardous materials inspectors generally did not target high-risk shippers and railroads for inspections and did not evaluate the effectiveness of shippers' and railroad's safety procedures.  These problems occurred because FRA had not provided adequate guidance to the inspectors and did not have enough hazardous materials inspectors to carry out its programs.  We also found that complete information on the identity of hazardous materials shippers was not available.  In November 1990, the Hazardous Materials Transportation Uniform Safety Act mandated a shipper registration program that will give FRA more complete information.

No. of Pages:  20