YOUNGSTOWN — Jurors in the Norfolk-Southern civil trial will return today to begin deliberations to determine whether GATX, the company that provided the rail car that failed in the Feb. 3, 2023, East Palestine derailment should contribute some of the $600 million Norfolk Southern agreed to pay the community in a class action lawsuit.

OxyVinyls, the company that made the five tanker cars of Vinyl Chloride that derailed and were vented and burned Feb. 6, reached a settlement with Norfolk Southern last week and is no longer a party in the trial in U.S. District Court. Judge Benita Y. Pearson is presiding over the trial, which is now in its fourth week.

Norfolk-Southern attorney Howard Shapiro started his closing argument by talking about the “failed roller bearing” on car 32 N that caused the first car to derail and take with it 37 others.

A video showed the glowing bearing as the train headed down the track, and Shapiro said the engineer driving the train “tried to bring the train to a stop, but it was too late.” He described the failed wheel bearing being found along the tracks after the derailment. It had changed in shape from a cylinder to a cone. The parts of the bearing assembly were there on a cart in the courtroom close enough for the jurors to see.

Shapiro said there are three “pillars” of derailments — the tracks, the equipment and the train operations. But “only the wheel was responsible” for causing the derailment, he said. “Norfolk-Southern followed all of the rules.”

Shapiro also focused much of his time on Hurricane Harvey, which hit Texas Aug. 25, 2017, including LaPort, Texas, where Car 32 N that derailed was being stored at the time of the storm. He said the car was “in a railyard on a downhill slope in the lowest point in the rail yard.” The car was on the “low end of the Braskem Rail Yard, he said.

He held up a tape measure to show the jurors 48 inches, saying that is the amount of water that resulted from the hurricane over four days, adding that “roller bearings hate water.” The roller bearing that overheated and failed on Car 32 N only worked a fraction of the number of miles normally expected, Shapiro said.

Shapiro and Carrie Karis, a lawyer for GATX, took turns criticizing the expert witnesses each side employed during the trial.

Shapiro said GATX’s expert, engineer Lee Swanger, has testified in a variety of kinds of cases, such as carnival rides and ladders, saying “Apparently if you have a dispute, he has an opinion for you.”

He said GATX failed to ask “tough questions” to the operator of the rail yard in Texas about whether they inspected the wheel bearings on the cars that were caught up in the hurricane.

He showed a drone video of the aftermath of the derailment before officials at the scene decided to “vent and burn” the five Vinyl Chloride cars. He said “sustained water damage” to the wheel bearing on Car 32 N “caused that.”

Shapiro said if a Norfolk Southern employee in charge of monitoring the wayside-detection system that day would have seen that a wheel bearing was reading 103 degrees, he would have only “monitored” it because it was only three degrees above normal.

GATX CLOSING

When Karis took her turn at closing arguments, she tried to reverse the notion that GATX’s Car 32 N sustained wheel-bearing damage in Hurricane Harvey. She said 27 witnesses were called during the trial by Norfolk Southern, and “The evidence you heard is there is no scientific evidence, no support for the idea that … Car 23 suffered any water damage.”

“The whole purpose of a bearing seal is to keep out the elements,” she said. “As we know, trains are run in the elements.” Car 32 N was in operation from August 2017 until February of 2023, she said. “Ask yourself how did that car run for six years?” She said there were “100 different opportunities to inspect” that car’s wheel bearings over that time period, and there were “no issues with the wheel bearings.”

She said there were no documents, no evidence provided by Norfolk Southern to prove that Car 32 N sustained damage in Hurricane Harvey except for Norfolk Southern’s expert witness, Joseph Poplawski.

Karis said Poplawski testified that in 60 years, he had never offered an opinion before that a wheel bearing had been damaged by a high-water event.

She called the idea that the hurricane caused water damage to the wheel bearing a “novel theory of what happened to this one rail car.”

She said the wayside detection system picked up a 103 degree reading on the faulty bearing miles before East Palestine. The bearing on the same axle was reading 38 degrees, she said, adding “the same axle should not have a 70-degree temperature difference.”

But wayside detection employees were working “one person, 12 hours, no support. That is not how to run a railroad,” Karis said.

If wheel bearings can be damaged by flood water, “Wouldn’t there have been other (rail) cars with harm from having been in LaPort, Texas during the hurricane?” Norfolk Southern’s expert witness could not think of one, she said.

She showed a photo of the Braskem Rail Yard at the time of the hurricane and said it showed that the rail yard is “elevated.” She showed an image of a rail car wheel indicating the distance from the ground to the wheel bearing is about two feet. She said despite the large amount of rain associated with Hurricane Harvey, “There is no evidence of flooding.”