What dangers do railroad employees face on the job?
Video Transcript
I spent 11 years working through undergraduate school and law school with the railroads, and the things that I saw led me to believe that it’s one most dangerous occupations out there. Everything on the railroad is heavy. Everything on the railroad is steel. Everything on the railroad is moving. Everything out there can hurt you and can seriously injure you.
We have seen leg amputations. We’ve seen crushed body parts. We’ve seen people lose their lives.
Normally, what we see with railroad employees who are injured is sometimes a series of failures, not just one specific event. Sometimes it takes a combination of two or three things going wrong to ultimately end in a serious injury. But the one thing that we see that’s almost universal is rule violations. There are a lot of rules about how the railroads should operate. Sometimes we see production and performance supersede those rules, and when that happens, people get hurt.
