Far too many lives have been shattered and ended by accidents in which rail workers have been struck by or crushed between rail cars and locomotives.
By John Cooper, FELA Attorney in Virginia
As a Virginia-based attorney who specializes in representing railroad employees who get injured on the job and helping rail workers’ families recover fair compensation when a loved one loses his or her life due to a rail company’s negligence, I make it my business to stay up to date on accidents in rail yards, on tracks and aboard trains. Still, I was taken aback by the first line of an e-mail I just received from a fellow layer who handles personal injury and wrongful deaths cases brought under the provisions of the Federal Employers Liability Act, or FELA.
Here’s that shocking sentence: “During the first six months of 2011, 37 serious injuries occurred during switching operations, resulting in three fatalities and eight amputations, while over the past two years, five rail workers have died in accidents involving rolling rail equipment.”
What this means is far too many lives have been shattered and ended by accidents in which rail workers have been struck by or crushed between rail cars and locomotives that have rolled back into each other or collided. Those dangers are ever-present for the engineers, conductors, switchmen and trackmen who must go between rolling stock to connect car and engines.
Organizations representing railroad employees such as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen and the United Transportation Union have long recognized the safety risks and have worked with the Federal Railroad Administration since the early 1990s to reduce the number of rollback and crush injuries and deaths. Now, the FRA has issued a 2011-2012 Safety Advisory about how rail employees can protect themselves while working between cars and locomotives.
As published in the October 11, 2011, Federal Register, the advisory urges workers and railroad corporations to
- Review current operating and safety rules that specifically address both remote control locomotive and conventional switching operations that require employees to go between rolling equipment, and determine whether those rules provide adequate protection to employees or need to be updated or revised.
- Develop, implement, and monitor sound communication protocols that require employees on multiperson switch crews to notify their fellow crewmembers when the need arises to enter between two pieces of rolling equipment — regardless of whether the employee is the primary RCO [remote control operator] or working on a conventional crew.
- Review the Switching Operations Fatality Analysis (SOFA) Safety Recommendation 1, Adjusting Knuckles, Adjusting Drawbars, and Installing End of Train Devices [please follow the link] and communicate its procedures implementing that recommendation to employees working in yards or other locations where the possibility of entering between rolling equipment exists.
- Convey to employees that their own personal safety is their responsibility and that railroad management supports and encourages those employees that make safety their number one priority, regardless of their immediate assignment.
- Convey to employees that they should encourage fellow employees to perform their tasks safely and in compliance with established railroad rules and procedures.
The recommendations and reminders from FRA apply equally to Amtrak, BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, Union Pacific and all other long- and short-haul passenger and freight railroads. And while the advice for workers to take responsibility for their own on-the-job safety is apt, the rail companies truly do bear the ultimate responsibility for developing and enforcing procedures and practices that put employees at the least risk for suffering injuries or getting killed.
EJL
About the Editors: Shapiro, Cooper, Lewis & Appleton is an injury law firm whose attorneys have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases. Attorneys will our firm have served as chairmen of the Railroad section of the American Association for Justice. One of our attorneys wrote a major attorney’s encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Our offices are in Virginia Beach and Hampton, Virginia (VA), and Elizabeth City, North Carolina (NC). Our lawyers also hold licenses to practice in South Carolina (SC), West Virginia (WV), Kentucky (KY), Florida (FL) and Washington, DC, and have handled hundreds of railroad injury and FELA cases throughout the eastern United States. Rick Shapiro and James Lewis were included in the 2011 issue of Best Lawyers in America. They, along with fellow attorney John M. Cooper, were also named 2011 Virginia Super Lawyers for Personal Injury Law, an honor which fewer than 5 percent of outstanding lawyers receive. We would like to send you one of our FREE reports about railroad injury and FELA cases, such as Dos and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). We provide free initial confidential injury case consultations, so call us toll free at (800) 752-0042 before giving any statement or talking to a railroad claims agent. Our injury attorneys also host an extensive injury law video library on Youtube. Further, our lawyers proudly moderate the Yardlimits Railroad Community Forum and donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.
