Gasoline Transport Called Worst Offender : Safety Steps on Hazardous Cargo Urged

Federal safety inspections of shipments of hazardous materials have been cut by more than half since 1979, while the annual volume of such shipments has increased 20%, the congressional Office of Technology Assessment said Monday.

The nonpartisan agency, concluding a two-year study, issued a 265-page report criticizing government enforcement and regulatory efforts and calling for coordinated action to improve the safety record on hazardous cargoes.

Some 1.5 billion tons of hazardous materials are moved each year on trucks, trains, barges and airplanes. While the number of such shipments has increased by 3% to 4% a year since 1979, the report said, the time that the various arms of the Transportation Department have spent inspecting them has declined by more than half.

“Budget constraints have reduced federal enforcement below an effective level,” the study’s staff director, Edith B. Page, told a Capitol Hill news conference. Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), a member of the Senate Commerce Committee, used stronger terms. He called current regulation “frighteningly inadequate.”

“We can’t afford a haphazard approach to such a serious problem,” Gore added in a statement distributed with the report. The committee chairman, Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), said that new safe-trucking legislation will be considered at a July 15 hearing.

The technology office’s report, citing human error in 60% of the accidents involving hazardous materials, called for development of a national truck driver’s licensing program as an important first step toward improving the safety record. Eventually, it said, special training and certification could be required to drive trucks with hazardous cargoes. California already has such certification.

Gasoline Tankers Cited

About one of every 10 trucks on the road today carries hazardous cargo, the report said. It singled out gasoline transport as causing “more deaths and damage than all other hazardous-materials accidents combined.”

The report cited “serious questions” about the stability of a type of tanker truck that is widely used to move gasoline. It said that switching to a tank designed to have a lower center of gravity could reduce the number and severity of gasoline truck accidents.

While gasoline is involved in far more accidents than nuclear materials or other hazardous wastes, the report noted that states and localities most often impose restrictions on the latter types of cargo. It said that this has resulted in a “patchwork of regulations . . . confusing and burdensome for industry and enforcement officials alike.”

The technology office said that federal record-keeping is so “fragmented and incomplete” that many accidents never show up in government statistics. It estimated damages from accidents involving shipments of hazardous materials to be at least 10 times higher than what is reported annually.

The largest “unmet need” is for training of emergency personnel, the report said. Only about 25% of the nation’s 1.5 million firefighters, police and emergency medics have had adequate “first response” training to deal with hazardous-cargo accidents, it estimated.