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Comment by sullivanmatt | Hacker News Reader

I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster.

A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.

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That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it.

I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off.

Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.

In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.

Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.

That's so odd. I worked on a project involving some Chevron employees once, and we had a strange number of conversations about employer liability should someone injure themselves in the office. It's been years, but your comment reminded me. I thought it was just a quirk of that team, like one of them was just puzzlingly obsessed with it. Maybe the oil industry is just inexplicably plagued by slip-and-fall lawsuits?

Oil is slippery, and humans walking upright fall easily on slippery surfaces :) Check out e.g. HexArmor Rig Lizard gloves for the kinds of specialized safety gear they use to get a good cut-resistant grip on stuff.

It's not just slip-and-fall. Northern Alberta SAGD sites have 20km/h speed limits on premise - if you're a contractor you WILL be fired individually for going over (yes, they measure), and if you're a contracting firm two violations by your people will get your whole company kicked off site.

Oil and gas is safety obsessed.

> Oil and gas is safety obsessed.

And yet…

And yet they work on some of the most complex, hostile environments and typically operate safely.

People crash trucks (the rate at which they crash trucks is kinda impressive tbh), injure hands and backs moving heavy things around, get nasty stuff in their face all the time.

But those incidents cannot easily be characterized, quantifies and evaluated but a bunch of clipboard warrior paper pushers so instead you get a zero tolerance speed limit policy and everyone pats themselves on the back.

People only report it when it's going to be, or already is a big deal, but any injury is supposed to be reported. But yeah, on top of that there is a lot of shit that's real slow to build, RSI for example, or diabetes. Of course with all the rules, anybody that does get injured is going to be painted liable for it, and if you don't get your story straight it's an employment risk to the injured.

It's both the liability issue, but also how safety incentives are set at the highest level. It is not uncommon for senior exec to get bonuses tied to lost time incidents, hazard reporting and other safety metrics, which get cascaded down through the org (In Australia at least).

One office worker spraining an ankle on the stairs and missing a day of work muddies up the KPI's. Reinforcing the safety culture across the whole organisation between the high risk field work and office drones keeps the kpi's green, but its also an easier message to deliver to staff - everyone must play by the same rules.

I worked for XOM for years which also really pushed the "safety culture" in the office. We even had the same "fired for not using the handrail in front of the boss" stories. Wild how memes like that must have spread through the industry.

10 years later and I still can't use the stairs without instinctively grabbing for a handrail.

I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

I can't speak to what the (office) safety culture was like in the pre-spill days but at the time I found the office rules more than a bit ironic considering, you know, their most recent safety disaster was viewable from space.

I always thought of their rules as bike-shedding...but for safety regulations, with reasoning looking like:

1. Our biggest safety vulnerability is industrial infrastructure failures.

2. We can't make it safer (without spending money). We're out of compliance with federally-mandated inspection schedules but paying those fines is cheaper than risking discovering critical issues that'll be costly to repair. Plus, all those drill bits and pipes are hard to understand so it's better if we just don't think about it.

3. Now we have an unmitigated disaster on our hands and we must project that we're a safety-minded organization.

4. Quick! Instructing employees to tattle on each other about laptop charger trip hazards costs us nothing and is simple enough for everyone to understand.

5. So let's disproportionately obsess about that.

What's more (and even more ironic) is that mild trip hazards weren't even the biggest risk in the office. Apparently, the duty of regularly cleaning the office refrigerator wasn't assigned to any staff. It was cleaned on an ad-hoc basis by...idk...whoever got fed up with it first? So, first off--constant food safety issues are bad enough. But, one day, this gross fridge was apparently so full of abandoned paper-bag lunches that one resting against the refrigerator bulb began smoldering and smoking. We all evacuated the building and received a collective "stern talking to" about paper-bag-on-incandescent-refrigerator-bulb safety. Which, OK, I guess no one saw that one coming--but, like, still--can we all agree that the big, tar-covered elephant in the room is still clearly the crude-oil volcano in the Gulf of Mexico.

Safety theatre reminds me of COVID. Why upgrade HVAC it's too expensive, so let's just install plexiglass everywhere because people don't understand fluid dynamics.

I was consulting at BP back in 2002 - even back then the health and safety environment inside their offices (I was all over the world with them) was the same as their oil rigs ... no trip hazards go unreported, always hold the handrails, always cover a hot drink, no calls in the car even with handsfree, very low speed-limits (with cameras) on-site etc - it's lived with me all my days and is very valuable safety advice TBH - none of it was theatre.

Also, every meeting would start with a safety announcement, all fire exits would be noted etc. I've also worked for BHP in Oz and it was exactly the same - drill this into everyone and the risk of an accident is reduced

> I worked as a consultant for BP shortly after the Deepwater Horizon spill.

Then you'll remember that they were given an industry award for safety that year. Yes, after the disaster.

Actually having an adult discussion about safety tradeoffs at scale in this day and age of "but if it even saves one life" isn't possible. You simply can't go on record having acknowledged that tradeoffs even exist. Wherever you draw the cost:benefit line, no matter how generous, someone will try and make you look like the bad guy for not setting it a little more conservatively.

And that's why they talked about charger cables and not the oil spewing elephant in the room.

I worked at a Shell site a few years earlier. The stats on accident in the office were surprisingly high. But the #1 cause of lost time was accidents on the 20 minute drive to the plant each day, especially at twilight.

Was this before or after Deepwater Horizon? From what I understand, there was open disdain for proper processes.

> It’ll take a disaster to fix it.

It didn't happen in the US, but it has happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...

There have been some horrible incidents in the US:

https://www.postandcourier.com/aikenstandard/news/rememberin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_rail_accidents

When I was a Civil engineer with a bridge project that was over a railway, it was required that I take a safety class from BNSF about how to be near the rails, and what not to do. The first thing in the class was that they noted the e,regency exit from the room. (Iirc, the room had one door, to the outside, that we had just walked through to get in the room).

It makes for a nice dog and pony show for the office workers who profess to care.

In the field the reality is that you can't do X, Y and Z because safety but if T, U and V don't get done on schedul-ish you and your buddies are fired so "don't ask don't tell" becomes the law of the land. In practice what this means is everything reverts to "common sense of the people doing the work" and everyone can be fired on a whim (because of the rampant safety policy violations).

Contrary to what the white collar internet may tell you, the workers aren't idiots. They don't disdain safety. They do this work every day and have plenty of experience with, PPE, equipment interlocks and guards helping them out (lord knows they're running on blow and monster energy at least one day a month). They disdain the office bound types and the clipboard warriors that don't understand the realities of the jobs they do yet feel entitled to create and perpetuate the incentive structure (in many areas, not just safety) they work under and that makes their jobs more miserable than they have to be.

My experience is with the industry in the US west, offshore and maple syrup land may be different.

Absolutely perfectly well put. It's always seemed to me to be a way to derive a narrative of plausible deniability, and nothing more.

This is a good point. Of course, I only ever had exposure to the white collar folks.

Those white collar folks could never make the work safe. But they could sure as hell f_ck it up. At least from what I saw, the safety theater was tremendously effective at telling the white collar folks not to demand stupid sh_t: once the guy on the ground says the magic words ("that's not safe"), conversation over. YOU, project manager/junior exec, didn't plan well enough. The guy on the ground is just doing his job.

I've been to some customer hq/office sites in oil/chemical industries and experienced similar.

One place had indoor escalator that you weren't allowed to walk on and must always hold the handrail as well. When it was broken, you couldn't use it as stairs and instead had to take this terrifying (though likely very safe) elevator.

Another rule I liked was to not allow strangers on the boat when you're rowing across the river. What river? What boats? What year was this written?

My sister was in oil & gas for about 15 years, up until a couple years ago.

The majors varied pretty dramatically in regards to safety. XOM, COP, and Shell were excellent. Chevron pretty good. BP was terrible - all safety theater without a whole lot of safety.

My sister was working at a competitor around the time Deepwater Horizon went down, and had previously worked at BP. She was not at all surprised that it happened to BP, and had complained to us around 2005 that BP was a disaster waiting to happen.

The pathological obsession with safety in the industry is a smoke-screen used to shield them from liability when accidents inevitably occur.

They will find ways to blame employee error instead of taking responsibility when their own policies contribute to accidents, especially if there are fatalities. The dead guy probably did it to himself. It couldn't possibly be related to lack of sleep, lack of maintenance of important tools in use at the time, etc.

It is definitely one industry where HR has the company's back and you are fucked if you raise any issues with them. I had a situation where I violated a company policy on location one time and this violation caused my crew and therefore the company, to be kicked off the location and replaced by a competitor's crew with a competing tool. This resulted in a nice meeting with my Field Service Manager (my direct boss), my Regional Service Manager (his direct boss), and a person whom I discovered after the meeting was a company lawyer who was present only to document my clear failure so that they could justify termination.

Questions were asked by my bosses and I responded with truthful answers and long-winded descriptions of the thought processes behind those actions. When they ran out of questions and thought they had clearly documented that I broke the company's rules about what I could tell clients about their tool's performance and that termination was justified, the lawyer introduced himself to me. I had had no idea who he was up to then, he was just a suit with a notepad who spent his time there taking notes.

He thanked me for my thoughtful replies and turned to my bosses and told them that they could not fire me since the client had specifically asked me to answer his question based on my own personal experiences and that when I answered I was careful to base my answer only on my own personal experience - for better or worse. Additionally, since they knew that the experiences that I used in answering the client's questions were true and not embellished (they both had direct knowledge of the problems I had encountered and later described), there were no grounds to terminate.

Up to that point I had no idea that they were trying to terminate me. Basically, the company policy was to parrot the marketing bullshit and lie to the client about tool performance characteristics under adverse conditions.

When the lawyer had delivered the bad news to them he stood up and extended his hand, thanked me for my time and told me to keep up the good work.

I was fortunate that I had been able to send resumes several weeks before while I was recuperating from job-related knee surgery. One of those resumes ended up giving my life back to me and allowing me to expand my career and eventually become a consultant to the industry. Though its been thirty years now I can still say - Fuck Scumbagger.

That same UP line goes east into Illinois. They aren't running 3-mile long trains out here at the edge of the Chicago metro. I wonder where they draw the line.

I actually thought that this article was going to be about the inability to hire train crews. The commuter rail in Chicago is run in partnership with the freight lines. The one I use is operated by UP. I've overheard that the reason they haven't added more trains is that they can't hire more train crews. On my line, there are 21 trains in and 21 out on weekdays - a fraction of the pre-pandemic service levels. They are getting to the point where many trains a so crowded that people have to stand in the aisles and really need to add more service.

Part of the problem with train crews is the Department of Transportation's antiquated laws on cannabis. You can't hire anyone who's used it in the last 90 days, that's a pretty huge fraction of the country. Actually you can't even hire them with the understanding that they need to stop immediately and be clean in 90 days, they have to have been clean for 90 days before applying on the DOT form or their application will bounce immediately.

Instead of reforming that law, or telling railroads to deal with it and pay more/reduce capacity, they're just gonna bend the safety laws instead.

Same problem applies to government and clearance jobs. FBI has said they can't find anyone to hire because everyone smokes pot now and that it's a problem for their hiring pipeline.

Are you sure a significant percentage of the target demographic they are wanting to hire regularly consumes cannabis and will gladly miss an opportunity for … cannabis ?

The question isn't "would you prefer a job or cannabis", it's "what fraction of the population is ineligible for consideration during the period when they're job-seeking". We have an extremely tight job-market right now and you're talking about adding a massive frictional force to employment in that job-market.

What is the average time a high-skilled professional (or even blue-collar) worker is unemployed between-jobs these days? Probably a lot less than 90 days, I'd think. And 2 years might as well be forever in this job market.

CDC numbers put the number of people who used cannabis at least once in 2019 at 18%, and it's probably only gotten higher over time. It's probably more like 25% nowadays - and sure that's "once a year" but the real number is likely also higher than a voluntary survey would find.

In market terms, reducing your supply by 25% or 30% is a lot and would significantly push your prices upwards. And if you don't let prices swing upwards enough, you'll get shortages.

On top of that it's just a generally undesirable job. Lots of time away from home, and extreme responsibility and stress, even in the best-case scenario, and they're making it even more unpleasant (the ever-popular "dead-sea effect") as they run out of people to do it. We're already seeing that showing up in similar jobs like nursing.

And then on top of that you've got the DOT requirements that exclude another big chunk of the population from consideration. So they're competing for an even smaller fraction of the job market, and they just aren't paying salaries to keep up with it all.

You seem to be assuming that the 25 or 30% of people who have used cannabis are all people that would otherwise be both interested and qualified as recruiting targets?

It's not clear to me that the requirement to be drug-free is excluding a lot of people who the railroads would otherwise want to hire.

No, they seem to be saying that people eligible and interested in railroads probably smoke weed at the same rate as the general population. There’s nothing to indicate that people who would be open and qualified are far more abstinent than the population at large.

The role of cannabis in hazardous jobs is very interesting.

Here in Aotearoa I had a glimpse into that world as we had a referendum on legalisation (that we lost 52-48%, weep) that I was involved in.

Work testing is a big issue, with experienced workers (I personally know a ocean going boat captain in this situation) being treated dreadfully and made to urinate in a cup under close supervision.

In the meat processing industry it has become competitive. I heard of two meat processing companies close enough to be in competition for workers.

Works A used urine testing. Smoking a joint put you in danger of getting fired for a week, or three. Works B used a sweat test which means 24 hours after your joint you are clear.

Works B has a line of hard working butchers.

Works A has a chain of drunks

Who wants to take a job that has so much control of your life they are dictating what you do in your personal life just to interview there?

Freight train jobs involve long hours, bad hours (middle of the night, very early morning, etc), and a decent amount of physical labor. Very few people will take the job just due to lifestyle issues alone. Further limiting your job opening by mandating against cannabis certainly doesn't help the job appear more attractive. Railroad salaries are quite high given the necessary education, but the job conditions often are not worth the money to many people.

As much as I'd like to agree, no. It's rapidly declining quality of life. Class 1s and especially BNSF is notorious for hiring, training, and then laying people off for what can be years, or training them in desirable locales, and then offering them work in shitholes. Beyond that the union negotiations are at a standstill, BNSF hasn't offered meaningful pay increases for years, the contraction of the labor pools means more work and less time off. Precision rail has made every craft increasingly uncomfortable, from the Surface Transportation Board hearing, the deposition given by every union sure makes it sound like every branch of every railroad is running a skeleton crew. Word of mouth goes a long way, and back in the day you had to know somebody to get an in on the railroad. They can't even get full training classes these days they've sullied their reputation so badly.

But most people will take the $100k plus over weed. And even once you're hired, you don't instantly get terminated for pissing hot or even coming in intoxicated. They'll send you to rehab and put you on probation, and even if one violates that probation one doesn't necessarily get fired. Plus you can afford cocaine on the railroad budget, or meth, or heroin. Anything but weed.

I live along the UP west line and saw, for the first time in my life a week or so ago a mid-train locomotive. I think they are running longer trains than you imagine.

That is interesting, I will have to pay more attention!

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