University of Pittsburgh
09/23/2025 | Press release | Archived content
A new Pitt study helps identify where train derailments pose the greatest risk
A new Pitt study helps identify where train derailments pose the greatest risk
September 23, 2025
A crew removes a damaged train car from the track
The 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, caused millions of dollars of damage and long-lasting environmental and health concerns. A new briefing from Pitt researchers at the Pittsburgh Water Collaboratory maps 26 years of derailments in the Ohio River Basin, showing that such accidents are more likely to occur near vulnerable communities and bodies of water.
"Rail transport, in itself, is not a bad thing - it's probably something we need to do more of in the future," said study author Daniel Bain, an associate professor in the Department of Geology and Environmental Science at the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. "But when you're living next to the track, you shouldn't have to absorb the risk for everyone else's benefit."
Shortly after the East Palestine disaster, the Collaboratory released a report examining train derailments in the Pittsburgh area. But as water researchers, they also knew that waterways are connected across entire regions, and so a bigger lens was necessary to capture the true impact of accidents. In the follow-up, they looked at accidents since 1998 across the entire Ohio basin, an area that stretches from Pennsylvania to Kentucky and is home to about 10% of the U.S. population.
Mapping accidents may seem easy, but it's no simple matter. The work required sorting through literature and converting data about the accidents - listed along with mile markers on railroads - to formats that are more easily understood and compared. That translation work and analysis was primarily done by Water Collaboratory intern Geetika Godavarthy (A&S '25), who went on to a NASA fellowship after graduation.
Only a few derailments resulted in the release of harmful materials, the team found, but those incidents are 35 times more likely to occur near communities that are already vulnerable and more than three quarters of them happen within a quarter mile of a stream. The results don't come as much of a surprise to the researchers. Both train tracks and communities in the area are often built near rivers, creating a dangerous overlap.
"There are millions of people in Ohio River Basin, and a lot of them are concentrated on the rivers," said Bain. "So when you're looking for water to put in the pipes for people to drink, shower, wash laundry, it's the rivers." The co-occurrence of accidents with rivers risks undoing decades of progress of creating places where people can fish, kayak and swim. Each time the rivers are contaminated, that effort is set back.
The rail industry began to put a greater emphasis on safety in the 1970s, Bain said, and there's no reason the same thing couldn't happen now. By ensuring rail lines are well-maintained around vulnerable areas and putting in place more safety protections, the industry could lower the risk of harming communities that are already struggling.
"It's taken a long time, but the upper Ohio basin is really starting to wake up to the resource that the rivers are," said Bain. "For too long, we relied on rivers to be pollution diluters, and now we have to claw our way out of it."
The team hopes to build broader support for focusing on the issue of derailments and crafting policy solutions to protect vulnerable communities. Because of how interconnected our waterways are, every incident has regional or even national implications, said Water Collaboratory Director Jonathan Burgess.
"What happens in Pittsburgh can impact Cincinnati and hundreds of communities along the river, and that should factor into policy," Burgess said. "A big part of building awareness is analyzing and translating information that's out there into something people can actually digest."
Photography courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency
By Patrick Monahan
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University of Pittsburgh published this content on September 23, 2025, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on September 25, 2025 at 14:02 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]