[Our series on Dr. Martin Moore-Ede's testimony before Congress continues]
3. Has the risk improved or worsened since 1998?
When I last testified here in 1998, it was at a time when considerable progress had been made in developing awareness of fatigue as a key safety issue in the industry. We also had a steady rate of progress in key overall safety statistics such as the rate of FRA-reportable rail accidents per million train miles (excluding highway-rail crossing accidents which have a very different causation). The FRA reportable rate had progressively dropped each year from 4.25/million miles in 1993 to 3.54 in 1997.
Unfortunately, the trend has reversed since then. An examination of the published safety statistics of the Federal Railroad Administration shows the FRA reportable accident rate has steadily increased each year since 1998, and reached a level of 4.17/million miles in 2001. Obviously not all these accidents are caused by human error. Mechanical and environmental events, and hazards from trespassing & vandalism are also part of the mix.
However, when we isolate out railroad collisions caused by human error, we see a similar trend of increasing accidents. The accident rate per million miles of human error collisions progressively fell from 0.30 in 1994 to 0.18 in 1998. Since 1998 the trend has reversed, and it has again risen to 0.27 in 2000 and 0.24 in 2001.
The number of injuries and fatalities in human error-caused train collisions fell to an all time low of 30 in 1998, but rose back up to 136 in 2001. The cost of human error collision train accidents (equipment & track damage only – excluding third party liability, and environmental clean up) had progressively fallen to $12 million per year by 1997, but climbed back up to $37 million per year in 2001.
With numerous studies suggesting that over 50% of human error transportation accidents are fatigue-related, this increase in human error train collisions in recent years is a significant issue of concern, and indicates that addressing fatigue in rail operations must be high on the industry’s agenda.
The level of risk has also increased from another perspective. We are now in the post 9-11 era, where the potential loss of vigilance and situational awareness in fatigued railroad employees has also become a critical national security issue. Because they are responsible for the secure transportation of sometimes hazardous cargoes across our nation, the vigilance of railroad employees has now become doubly important.
We must ensure that the railroad personnel transporting freight or passengers are not impaired in their capacity for continuous vigilance because of excessive fatigue.
Related Posts:
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part I
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part II, sleep deprivation and alertness
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part III, safety threat?
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part V, hours of service rules
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part VI, train control technology
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part VII, alertness monitoring technology
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part VIII, risk-informed fatigue management
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part IX, parallel models
* Hours of service issues on the railroads: part X, how to proceed
Feb 21, 2008
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