Truck crashes involving hazardous chemicals cause more accidents in US: scholar

Truck crashes when transporting hazardous chemicals cause more accidents, deaths and damage than rail transportation in the United States, a scholar has said.

The derailment of the freight train carrying chemicals in the US state of Ohio earlier this month has made headlines recently.

While truck incidents involving hazardous materials don't look as dramatic as train derailments, they represent more fatalities and property damage, and there are thousands more of them every year, professor from the University of Dayton Michael F. Gorman has said in an article published by the media network the Conversation on Wednesday.

"Today, trucks carry the largest percentage of hazardous materials shipped in the US — about twice as much as trains when measured in ton-miles, according to the Department of Transportation's Bureau of Transportation Statistics' latest data for 2017," Gorman wrote.

According to the article, truck-related hazardous materials incidents caused over 16 times more fatalities from 1975 to 2021 — 380 for truck, compared with 23 for rail.

The difference is more pronounced in the last decade when US rail transportation of hazardous materials caused zero fatalities and truck incidents were responsible for 83, it said.