State,
Safety Activists Seek Solutions To Stem Rise In Rail
Crossing Crashes
By: David Patch,
Blade Staff Writer
The car-train crash
in Williams County that killed five Indiana residents - including
four children - a week ago today and a quadruple fatal in
Crawford County in February have helped push Ohio's death
toll at railroad crossings this year above the total for
all of 2000.
After years of fairly
steady decline, the number of crashes and pedestrian accidents
at Ohio railroad crossings increased slightly last year to
a total of 140, or 13 more than in 1999. It was the first
such rise since 1989 and the biggest increase since 1984.
"It doesn't
seem to make any sense," said Rob Marvin, the Public
Utilities Commission of Ohio's deputy director for transportation.
He maintained that Ohio has "been doing a very good
job" tackling the crossing safety problem, "but
this reminds us that there is still work to be done."
Sheldon Senek, the
Ohio coordinator for Operation Lifesaver, a national nonprofit
educational foundation supported by the railroad industry
to reduce crossing accidents, said the recent trend is proof
that upgrading warning devices at crossings is only part
of the safety solution.
Last year, half
of all crashes in Ohio occurred at sites with active warning
devices, while six of this year's 10 fatal crashes have been
at such sites, Mr. Senek said.
"We need to
continue aggressive education and public awareness," said
Mr. Senek, a retired Ohio State Highway Patrol commander.
Law enforcement agencies need to make crossing-law enforcement
a higher priority too, he said.
Crossing safety
activists maintain, however, that neither government agencies
nor the railroad industry are devoting sufficient resources
to the problem.
"They have
done some things, but they haven't done enough," said
Debbie Klostermeier, a Liberty Center resident whose daughter,
Taneeca, died in a 1994 car-train crash near Swanton.
"If they'd done enough, five people wouldn't have been
killed" on July l, she said.
Vicky Moore, a trustee
of Angels on Track Foundation, of Canal Fulton, Ohio, said
she is particularly irked by a state official's recent disclosure
that $24 million in crossing safety funds had accumulated
unspent before being assigned to projects this spring.
"How
long had they had that money, and how many peopleâs
lives could have been saved had that money been spent?" said
Mrs. Moore, who used a $7 million jury award from the death
of her son, Ryan, in a 1995 crossing crash to start the foundation.
The 140 crossing
accidents reported last year to the state utilities commission
was a little more than one-fifth the 679 accidents that occurred
in Ohio 20 years earlier, and one third of the 418 reported
in 1989. But it was the highest annual total since 1997,
when 172 accidents occurred.
The death toll,
after declining steadily through the early 1990's, has fluctuated
since 1996, when it reached a modern low of 13 deaths in
12 crashes.
One reason for the
death toll's sudden rise this year is that just two crashes
have accounted for nine of the 10 deaths, whereas each of
the 15 fatal crossing accidents in 2000 involved a single
fatality.
Wanda Petre, 37;
her daughters, Amber, 14, and Chelsea, 11; nephew, Bradley
Krontz, 12; and Chelsea Green, 10, a member of the same church
as Mrs. Petre's family, died when their car collided with
a train at a crossing on Williams County Road I a week ago.
The five were headed home to Angola, Ind., after a church
potluck.
Less than two hours
later, Shawn Steffan, 18, of Leipsic, was killed and a passenger
was injured when his vehicle was struck by a train at a crossing
hear his home.
Early Feb. 3, four
people were killed near the Crawford County village of Chatfield
when their car ran into the side of a slow-moving train,
then was hit by a second train on a parallel track. John
W. Moore, 26, and Shona Marie Moore, 24, of Putnam County,
W. Va., twin bother Jim Moore, of Chatfield, and Denise Salyer,
25, of Willard died in the crash on State Rt. 103.
Nonetheless, the
10 fatal crashes so far this year put Ohio on a pace for
its highest fatal-accident total since 1997.
State officials
and Mr. Senek said there is no obvious reason for the increase
in crashes and deaths. What is clear, they said, is that
the crossings with the worst statistical histories have all
been upgraded to full arrays of warning lights and gates.
"The easy victories
have been won in the past decade," said James Seney,
director of the Ohio Rail Development Commission and a former
Sylvania mayor. The challenge now, he said, is predicting
which of the remaining crossings are most likely to be accident
scenes.
Including federal
funds, Ohio allocates about $15 million annually to crossing
upgrades, of which $3.2 million is spent by PUCO using a
federal statistics formula.
The rail commission
will devote the remainder, Mr. Seney said, to improving the
warning devices along certain Ohio rail corridors that have
the highest volumes of train traffic. Many crossings along
those routes have warning lights and gates, but certain exceptions
remain that need to be addressed, he said.
Mr. Seney conceded
that the crossing at which Mrs. Petre and her four passengers
died might already have been upgraded had the corridor approach
been adopted sooner.
The
rail line involved, which cuts diagonally across Williams
County from northeast to southwest, accounted for six of
the nine fatal accidents in that county between 1991 and
2000 even though an east-west mainline there had many more
trains. That pattern, Mr. Seney said, indicates that the
crossings involved may be problematic for motorists even
though theyâre not as busy as some
others.
All four of the
crossings involved in those six crashes had only crossbucks
signs at the time of the accidents, including the County
Road 20 site where two fatal accidents occurred in 1993 and
a third happened in 1995. Road 20 and County Road 10 have
since been upgraded, while lights and gates at County Road
H, where Sheena Jones, 17, died on June 30, 1999 in the most
recent crash, are to be installed by January.
Mr.
Marvin said the utilities commission has no current plan
to upgrade the Thomas Avenue crossing in Alvordton, where
a fatal crash occurred on June 5, 1999. He said he did
not know why that was the case, but speculated that the
tiny street has too little traffic to qualify under the
statistically based rankings despite the fatality. The
rail commissionâs corridor
program may include Thomas Avenue, he said.
It was Mr. Seney
who reported in April the $24 million in unspent safety money.
He said the money had accumulated because previous rail commission
officials spent it only in response to projects proposed
by other governmental entities, rather than developing their
own plan.
At an estimated
$150,000 apiece, Mr. Seney said, the money should provide
lights and gates for about 150 crossings. But with 2,926
of Ohio's 6,181 crossings lacking any active warning devices
based on the state's most recent count; thousands will still
have only crossbucks for years to come even if the installation
rate accelerates.
Making exceptions
only for industrial spurs that are rarely used by trains,
and then only at very low speeds, Mr. Moore's foundation
advocates lights and gates for all railroad crossings.
"Lights and
gates have been proven to be 90 percent effective in eliminating
crashes," she said.
Fred
Agler, the utilities commission's transportation director,
said that while universal lights and gates "certainly is a worthy
goal", fiscal constraints limit how many such installations
can be done, and likened lights and gates to traffic signals
at intersections.
"There are
a lot of places where you have only stops signs," he
said.
How to increase
funding for crossing improvements is a sticking point between
safety activists and the railroad industry. Activists insist
that the industry should contribute more to the effort, while
the railroads maintain that they do their share by maintaining
the warning devices perpetually after installation.
Ohio law request
railroads only to post crossbucks signs, leaving it up to
the state to determine which sites warrant more elaborate
warning systems.
Officials are perplexed
about what to do with the problem of motorists who drive
around lowered crossing gates and are killed or injured in
train collisions. The Fulton County Road 4 site where Taneeca
Klostermeier and a companion, James Miller, 17, died in 1994
was the scene of one such crash three years later. The Hallett
Avenue crossing in Swanton, where 35-year-old Brenda
Spangler, of Lucas
County's Harding Township, died in early April, is similarly
equipped.
But Ms. Klostermeier,
whose Hands Across the Rails organization hopes to stage
a trackside rally at Williams County Road I on September
8 with similar, simultaneous rallies in other states, said
the relatively few deaths at gates locations are more than
offset by the lives she believes are saved.
"It shouldn't
be about the money," she said. "There are people
losing their lives."
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