AILSA CHANG, HOST:
When you cross a bridge in your car or your truck, you can be pretty confident that it's regularly inspected by government engineers and that those inspection records are open to the public. But railroad bridges are a different story. That's the conclusion of a team of reporters from the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at Arizona State University, which found that just six federal inspectors are responsible for nearly 70,000 railroad bridges nationwide. Here's reporter Lex Doig.
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UNIDENTIFIED EMERGENCY DISPATCHER: Nine-one-one, what's the address of the emergency?
LEX DOIG: A freight train rumbles across western Oregon heading towards a nearly 75-year-old bridge when suddenly, a wooden trestle snaps.
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UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: The bridge completely collapsed with the train on it.
DOIG: Freight cars drop into the river below.
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UNIDENTIFIED CALLER: There is something dumping out of one of the freight trains into the river.
DOIG: Local environmentalists like Michelle Emmons are worried.
MICHELLE EMMONS: My heart just sunk. And the first thing that came to mind was, what was in the railcars?
DOIG: The answer - fertilizer. And nearly 150,000 pounds of it poured into the river. Emmons is the co-director of a local nonprofit called the Willamette Riverkeeper.
EMMONS: Hearing that they were still sending railcars over the bridge, became apparent that it was only going to be a matter of time before there could possibly be an accident.
DOIG: Two years before the collapse, local emergency officials fought off what they call a significant fire at the bridge.
EMMONS: The footers were blackened and burned. They looked like charcoal.
DOIG: In the U.S., nearly all of the 600,000-plus bridges that carry cars and trucks on public roads receive government inspections every two years and sometimes more often. And results are widely shared with the public. But railroads largely inspect themselves and can withhold the results from the general public. Portland & Western Railroad says it inspected and repaired its Oregon bridge after that fire, but the company would not share its inspection reports with us. And it's not just Oregon. In Colorado in 2023...
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JESSICA PORTER: Investigators believe a broken rail caused the deadly train derailment and bridge collapse on I-25.
DOIG: ...A BNSF railroad bridge collapsed in Tempe, Arizona, in 2020.
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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A train derails, causing parts of that bridge to collapse, sparking a massive fire.
DOIG: According to the Federal Railroad Administration, there have been about two incidents involving railroad bridges every year dating back five decades. And we've discovered the FRA has just six employees overseeing the safety of nearly 70,000 U.S. rail bridges. This troubles Jared Cassity, safety director for one of the nation's largest rail unions, SMART-TD.
JARED CASSITY: So, I mean, six workers for bridges is just shocking. And it's scary, is what it is.
DOIG: The FRA said in an email it responds to public complaints and estimates the U.S. has more than 750 railroads which it can audit. But data the FRA shared show more than 1 in 10 of those railroads have not had their bridge programs audited in the 15 years since the rule was enacted. We asked Mike Rush of the American Association of Railroads if it would reconsider supporting more transparency.
I mean, the process for getting access to normal bridge data is to just go online and download it. Why not make it that easy for the public to see railroad bridge data?
MIKE RUSH: Because the way in which we keep the records, it would be both indecipherable and liable to being misunderstood by the general public.
DOIG: Congresswoman Summer Lee, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, says even when government officials ask to see inspections of bridges in their own communities, railroads heavily redact what they share.
SUMMER LEE: It's not an issue that impacts blue districts or red districts, right? This is an issue of national safety, of public safety, all across the country.
DOIG: She plans to introduce legislation that creates a national public database of railroad bridge inspections.
For NPR, I'm Lex Doig. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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