The logic you used, if I may summarize: "There's lots of accidents, some of them have been ignored for decades, why care about this one?" Frankly because it's

The logic you used, if I may summarize: "There's lots of accidents, some of them have been ignored for decades, why care about this one?" Frankly because it's high time people cared about what's happening to their environment and cities. Norfolk Southern is banking on the fact that rural areas and places like Oakland won't get national attention because they don't carry a lot of homogeneous national favor. Most of these derailments happen in rural areas that are cash strapped, just like the city of Oakland. Places that will be dependent on the company to come out and clean up their mess. Places that won't have funds unless aided by the EPA to check that the company actually cleaned up, and thoroughly. Places that don't have the national umph to make the NTSB to force the railroads into safer behavior. What you've failed to see here is that the Venn diagram of disasters that happen and get ignored in Oakland are a circle with places like Ohio. We all lose if a company can ignore devastating parts of Oakland or Ohio.