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Date : 10/10/2005
Source: Department of Transport
Title: Radebe: International Railway Safety Conference


Keynote address by Minister of Transport, Jeff Radebe, MP, at the International Railway Safety Conference 2005, Somerset West

Allow me to join my colleague, the Minister of Public Enterprises Alex Erwin, in welcoming such a distinguished group of international and local specialists in all aspects of rail safety to our country and to Somerset West. I think it is quite appropriate that this conference on rail safety convenes in the Western Cape as it is here that concerns about the standards of safety, especially for commuters, have led to the development of a vigorous local community organisation and activism that led to an all-important decision handed down by the Constitutional Court not long ago.

Master of Ceremonies,

My remarks this morning are not aimed to pre-empt any of the conclusions that any of the conference contributions will present. My task, simply, is to locate rail safety within our current transport policy and to identify a number of challenges for the country and the rail community generally. If this leads to debate and discussion later on, I will be all the more delighted!

In a nutshell, rail safety needs to be located within a broad context of pressures arising from, and the impact of, increased economic development of our country and region. That context has development, spatial and security aspects that need to be identified and considered as well. Building from there, we should then be able to identify more accurately the regulation, infrastructure and investment environment that informs the implementation of rail safety measures. Finally, we can identify certain challenges that will confront us across the years to 2015 and beyond. Let me expand a little on each of these items.

South Africa’s economic development over the last decade or so shows enormous growth in key sectors. We have witnessed a shift towards a manufacturing and service economy with a high emphasis on an export orientation. That has been complemented by an increase in the competitive advantage of some of our high value sectors, such as the automotive manufacturing sector, and including processed steel and chemicals. All estimates to hand indicate further growth in the manufacturing sector and the continued need to service a robust mining and agricultural sector that are turning to more modern methods of production.

To cut a long story short, Government, in the recently adopted National Freight Logistics Strategy suggests that the “development of South Africa depends primarily on its ability to move goods and deliver services to their destinations with speed and reliability, without failure and fear for their safety.” We have also accepted that “restoring rail reliability is fundamental, and is the single most important challenge facing the freight logistics sector in South Africa.”

Currently rail carries a disproportionately low volume of freight compared to road. We estimate that only about 180 million tonnes of total surface transport volumes are carried by rail, a figure that represents a slight decline in rail volumes compared to an average 4% per annum increase in road volumes. Indeed, for a number of reasons, we have unhappily witnessed a general shift from rail to road, even of some cargoes that should ideally be transported by rail for safety and other reasons. We aim to reverse this phenomenon over the medium term.

I would urge commentators and specialists alike to look at the National Freight Logistics Strategy and the forthcoming provincial and metropolitan freight logistics plans. We should all expect significant increases in traffic, volumes and changes in the nature of rail freight cargo in the not too distant future, particularly as the immediate multi-billion Rand improvements to the rail infrastructure and rolling stock emanating from Transnet and Spoornet in particular kick in. And this has major implications for safety and security.

We also recognise that we “lack accurate forecasts of demand for freight logistics”. This problem is highlighted for example by the simple fact that nearly all of the Moving South Africa growth projections down to 2020 have either nearly all been met, or in some instances have already been surpassed, some 16 years ahead of time!

As our economy grows, and as the structural nature of that development alters and adapts to new conditions, so we can expect the ingredients of a more diverse and modern economy to expand as well. Without getting too technical, it seems a truism that we can expect greater demand from both within our own and the regional economy, for the movement of chemicals, fertiliser minerals, and liquid fuels that are not carried by pipelines, and so on. At the same time, our mining industry will continue to require major services of similar hazardous and dangerous materials, including explosives, for their continued successful operation.

Currently, for example, chemicals move through the corridors from Cape Town to Beit Bridge, to Port Elizabeth, and East London. But the bulk of dangerous goods move from Richards Bay, Durban, Beit Bridge, Komatipoort, Maputo and Mafikeng to and from Sasolburg. And whilst containerisation is becoming more and more familiar in the transport of dangerous goods, the vast majority still travels in specialised tankers or wagons designed for the tasks at hand.

It is enormously difficult to identify trends because the data is spread across operators, some of which have been reluctant up until now to provide information. But as mining, agriculture and manufacture continues to take advantage of diversification, exploration and changes in production methods, so we will probably notice changes in the geographic or spatial distribution of dangerous goods. Much of our planning in the next 20 years or so must take into account the fact that rail will be needed to carry much of these goods to areas where there are no services today. We will also see greater access in the future to more licensed operators on all our networks. We will therefore expect the rail safety regulator to make adjustments to its scope of operation as its mandate alters as the secondary or branch line network is released from its current status under Spoornet’s safety management plan. But this is still down the line.

Fortunately, the Rail Safety Regulator’s work is beginning to help the situation, although capacity problems still need urgent attention. We all agree that there “are disturbing numbers of occurrences”, even including hazardous and dangerous materials, “which cannot be ignored.” So for example, between 2002 and 2004, leaking tankers accounted for some 418 incidents, and there were 117 derailed tankers, 661 incidents of decanting and 53 spillages. Although most leakages and spillages occurred because of faulty valves and not derailments as such, the question does arise concerning safety management of stationary tankers, monitoring of maintenance, and so on.

Nonetheless, disruptions to the system can have economic impacts beyond the scope of a particular incident. Even relatively minor derailments that don’t involve injury to people can cause sufficient damage to the track to cause closure of the line for anything from a few hours to a day or two. Or even relatively minor chemical spills require extensive cleanup operations and checks for the contamination of water resources of local communities, adding to anxiety and the potential disruption of everyday life.

As a Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, we also need to spend more time towards the harmonisation of the implementation of SADC standards and better integration between safety permit systems and inspection with respect to cross border traffic may be an area. We are not in total harmony yet. A case in point may be the management of consignments that may be illegal in the transit country, for example, certain organo-phosphate poisons, but where they need to move through one country to reach their final destination. The control of hazardous cargo shipments across borders needs to be better managed, while not imposing on the sovereignty of the receiving country or the transit country. Integrated systems of inspection to ensure uniform standards are critical to this work.

The Rail Regulator will also need to work towards incorporating an increased level of access that South Africa must give to rail companies from our neighbours and the region as the reforms and rejuvenation of rail in southern Africa take root as well. The multiple compliance regimes must be reduced to allow SADC and African rail companies to participate without undue red-tape, but ensure that the acceptable standards implemented by all parties are harmonised, and this cross border traffic will not result in increases in accidents on the different networks because of different levels of loading, speed, safety regimes and other factors. Taken together, these developments must lead to greater attention on our rail safety regime itself. We have found for example that “safety and environmental regulation are hampered by the poor asset quality that is found within the freight logistics environment” and “particularly within the rail sector”. Furthermore, and this is critically important for the general discussion, “safety records in rail are established in an environment where neither infrastructure nor assets have been adequately maintained and operational procedures must be adjusted to take this into account.”

As we move to revitalise the branch line network, which we prefer to identify in terms of its function within the logistics chain rather than in terms of its financial contribution or profitability, we will encounter even greater legacy issues of aging infrastructure, a total absence of maintenance of track and erosion of embankments and so on. In this situation, we must address the perceived imbalance in investment towards major corridor lines compared to regional or branch line systems.

But let no-one misunderstand what I am saying: as far as the actual management of safety and its regulation in South Africa is concerned, we have much to be proud of. We use the internationally recognised system of registering hazardous and dangerous materials transported on our rail system into nine major categories. Their transportation is carried out according to all international norms and standards, including various international conventions and requirements.

These are all embodied in national legislation and regulations and are carried further by the all-important South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) codes of practice that all operators are required to abide by. Similarly, all operators are required to have contingency plans in place, and these are also integrated into the emergency management plans of local authorities. It is also their responsibility to carry out simulation exercises regularly and to ensure that plans are updated when necessary.

In July this year we released the South African National Standards (SANS) 3000-1, the first national standard for railway safety management. Last Friday, we issued a number of permanent safety permits as part of the continuing drive by the Rail Safety Regulator to beef up our systems. Currently the Regulator is addressing the recruitment, training, retention and deployment of personnel to act as inspectors, auditors, investigators and assessors of a range of functions, including independent incident and occurrence investigations. Whilst operators must continue to be responsible for the development and implementation of disaster management plans, we must ensure that suitably independent monitoring of those plans and actions can be undertaken and indeed verified by the Regulator and Government as well.

But development issues include not only the economics of the freight logistics sector and its direct and indirect impact on other sectors of the economy. They also must include our perspective for the revitalisation of rail within the public transport and mass transit system in South Africa. Thus, the consolidation of the various entities currently engaged in long-distance and commuter services such as Metrorail, Shosholoza Meyl, and the SARCC, runs parallel to the rationalisation of bus, taxi and rail routes and subsidies operating mainly in metropolitan areas.

Put together with longer-term expansion of the public transport rail services to include elements like the Gautrain project and the introduction of light rail systems, we must expect to see increased numbers of trains and services and passengers taking advantage of a world-class rail-based public transport system in the future. Some of these initiatives, of course, are associated with preparations by some smaller metros and potential bid cities for the 2010 FIFA World Cup; but others are already emerging from local government integrated transport plans.

The rail community and the Rail Safety Regulator (RSR) will need to be seised of the absolute need to address current shortcomings in the implementation of safety standards as these pertain to public transport. I alluded to the important directives of the Constitutional Court at the beginning of my address, and I would merely stress that action to implement that decision is not negotiable.

But there are other factors involving rail safety and the broader public, some of which have been highlighted by the RSR in their 2005 Annual Report. These include the unacceptable number of level crossing occurrences, and action is being taken to assess what changes are needed both to the regulations and even legislation to deal with this problem. Another unacceptable situation is the high number of people struck by trains on running lines: 582 people in 2003/04 and 455 in 2004/05. Painfully, some of these were suicide cases, but the majority are people either walking alongside railway lines or attempting to cross where they should not.

The Regulator highlights the “the mushrooming of informal settlements along the railway reserve, the removal of fencing, the lack of facilities to serve communities which necessitate crossing the line, general ignorance of the dangers inherent in railway operations, and the flagrant ignoring of the law” as some of the contributing factors to the situation. Once again, measures are planned to begin addressing these issues in earnest in the immediate future. These include community and school awareness programmes, provision of more adequate footbridge facilities, fencing, and so on.

I would also urge at this point that we must never forget the trauma that such incidents cause to train drivers and other personnel, who, in many instances have been shown to be over-worked, or working shifts that are simply too long to promote safety and alertness where it counts most. Operators must re-emphasise conditions of service from a safety perspective for all concerned rather than as an instrument to cut costs or push rationalisation beyond reasonable limits.

Master of Ceremonies, at the heart of it all is our understanding that the rail safety system faces a number of challenges. On the one hand it needs to seek a balance between what could be seen as safety engineering on the one hand and reliability engineering on the other. Safety engineering emphasises the introduction and use of technologies designed to prevent any possible incident, whereas reliability engineering depends on mathematical probabilities of the remoteness of types of incident happening and suggests the possible adoption of compromises in technology design that are usually determined by cost factors.

But at another level, the issues become a little more complex. Safety is frequently placed in a separate compartment to security, and often for very sensible reasons. However, we would be na

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