![]() Sean Wolters, an activist who lives near the planned Cop City site, connected Norfolk Southern’s lobbying expenses to its donation to the police training facility. A lot of times that means getting rid of people or selling off equipment, deferring maintenance, things of that sort.” Rail companies “do whatever they can do to show Wall Street that they’ve lowered their operating ratio. “It’s a hedge fund method of organizing the Class I railroads exclusively around lowering the operating ratio,” Edler said. Edler also said railroad companies have cut back on maintenance, which might have otherwise detected the broken axle that’s being eyed as the cause of the East Palestine crash. Norfolk Southern repeatedly lobbied last year against legislation that would require at least two crew members on freight locomotives. If one crew member is operating the locomotive, and the crew needs to take measures like splitting cars, “a single person can't do it, even though the industry keeps pushing for that.” “That’s the very minimum depending on what’s in the train,” Edler said. At the time of the crash, the Norfolk Southern train had a crew of two full staffers and one trainee, Fritz Edler, a special safety representative for the Railroad Workers Union, told The Daily Beast. Many of the workers’ key complaints remain unresolved, labor leaders say.Īfter the crash in East Palestine, railroad unions were quick to point to issues like understaffed crews and cuts to maintenance teams. The 2022 labor dispute, however, ended bloodlessly, with President Joe Biden signing a deal that blocked a strike but did not award sick leave. “Governors in several states called out the National Guard to assist strikebreakers.” “In multiple cities, armed company guards opened fire on striking workers, killing several and escalating the conflict even more,” the New York Times wrote in September of a notorious 1922 rail strike. rail strikes, which have seen bloody alliances between rail companies and law enforcement. ![]() The then-looming threat of a railroad worker walk-off prompted columnists and historians to revisit the history of U.S. Financial records reveal that Norfolk Southern spent at least $70,000 lobbying Congress to avoid a strike. In late 2022, railroad workers threatened to go on strike, demanding paid sick days and a better scheduling model. But while arsonists burned three Norfolk Southern construction vehicles in November, the railroad company was engaged in a more nationwide fight. Norfolk Southern is headquartered in Atlanta. Neither the APF nor the railroad company commented on the six-figure contribution. It’s unclear when Norfolk Southern made the donation. A 2022 financial report from the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is overseeing the project, shows a $100,000 donation from Norfolk Southern. Neither did hours of pushback in public hearings, legal challenges under the Clean Water Act, or protests against Cop City’s sponsors-a long list of foundations and corporations including Norfolk Southern. The open letter didn’t prevent the project from moving forward. “The city’s tree canopy, which is the most extensive of any metropolitan area in the United States and a city treasure, is our best hope for resilience against the worst impacts of climate change,” read an August 2021 letter by the Sierra Club’s Georgia chapter and 15 other groups that protested the development for environmental reasons. But this fire, which damaged three construction vehicles in Atlanta, was a deliberate act of arson, according to activists who took credit for the fire. In early November, three months before the derailment in East Palestine, another set of Norfolk Southern vehicles sat ablaze. We face the same consequences to our lives and our loved ones.” “But these are inextricably tied together. “I didn’t experience first-hand what happened in East Palestine, and people there will not necessarily experience, first-hand, the tearing down of this forest,” an Atlanta activist told The Daily Beast. ![]() As residents of East Palestine, Ohio grapple with financial fallout from the derailment, activists in Atlanta are drawing comparisons between the two environmental battles. Norfolk Southern gave $100,000 to a campaign to build a police facility (dubbed “Cop City”) in an Atlanta forest, financial documents show. The railroad company behind a disastrous derailment in Ohio is a financial backer of a controversial police training facility in Georgia that has drawn protests from environmental groups.
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