NTSB Investigative Hearing Announced – 7-10-13

The National Transportation Safety Board published a hearing notice in Friday’s Federal Register (78 FR 39017-39018) concerning an investigative hearing that will be held in Washington, DC on July 10^th, 2013. The hearing will be looking into the Conrail derailment outside of Paulsboro, NJ on November 30^th, 2012, and the subsequent release of 180,000 lbs of vinyl chloride.

According to the notice, the hearing will discuss:

• Conrail bridge operations;

• Conrail procedures;

• Incident command actions and emergency response decisions in the first day;

• Hazardous materials emergency response operations;

• Roles of the response teams;

• Evacuations and communications;

• Incident response protocols;

• Hazmat training;

• Oversight of Paulsboro emergency preparedness;

• Roles of local, state and Federal agencies in emergency hazmat response; and

• Interaction between state and Federal agencies in establishing a unified command.

The NTSB intends to use this hearing to:

• Gather additional factual information regarding the actions of the first responders in Paulsboro;

• To explore the hierarchy of New Jersey State and local emergency management;

• Training, regulations and standards applicable to emergency response personnel; and

• To examine the oversight of the Paulsboro emergency operations

The hearing will be open to the public and the NTSB will web cast the hearing on its web site.

NOTE: It will be interesting to see if the issue of dispersion modeling that I discussed here after that accident is raised.