Messrs. Miller's & Posner's remarks at Safety Conference, St. Louis, Nov. 2004 (cont.)

	SAFETY - A Global Perspective


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	SPEECH DIRECTORY: SAFETY AT IAIS History New Plan Summary Results Post 9/11 SAFETY OVERSEAS Local Conditions Safety Regulation Definition of Incidents Varied Needs Diverse Environments Results RDC's Philosophy CONCLUSION Q & A SESSION CONCLUDING COMMENTS		(Mr. Posner’s remarks continued) Safety Overseas - Diverse Operating Environments Finally, local conditions are very varied depending on where you are operating. For example, in Guatemala our biggest problems are theft, squatters, and other urban-type problems. In Peru the many problems are Mother Nature, landslides, 4.2% mountain grades, etc. In Estonia, the biggest problem is now that the country has become a European country; people are becoming wealthier and they are starting to be able to afford more automobiles and so we have a steadily increasing risk of grade crossing accidents. These are other examples of why benchmarking is impossible versus North America. Here are some graphic examples. In Peru, there are actually different names for different types of landslides. Pictured to the right is a Huayco; a Huayco is different than a Derumbe. A Huayco is a big landslide where the rocks are bigger than a house, as opposed to a Derumbe where the rocks are only the size of basketballs; this is kind of like Alaska where they have 26 words for different types of snow. In dealing with this we have several things we do in addition to having a full time dynamite guy on staff during the landslide season. We run a track motorcar ahead of the train (pictured Left). In North American practice that would be a no-no because you would be worried about the train running over the motorcar. We haven’t had any incidents with this, in part to the discipline. More importantly, the risk of coming around a curve and hitting a rock slide is greater than running over the track motor car so there are Solomonic tradeoffs that we need to make in this environment.
			In Guatemala, pictured to the right is our main line; this is an open-air market which came to be after the railroad was abandoned. When the train comes along people take their stuff off the tracks and let the train come through.
			Pictured to the left is a garbage dump which we operate through. In both cases, this is our main line and these are the conditions that we operate in on a daily basis; this was a national railway which was completely abandoned and so we started from less than zero on this one.
			You have just seen running through squatter colonies and garbage dumps. So why would we take chances in running trains in this environment? One of the reasons is because in a global sense we are indeed making the country a safer place. In 2001 a container fell off of a truck and hit a bus and killed 26 people (pictured Right). At that time we had zero percent market share on the container market from the Atlantic. Well, now we have 10%; little by little, that logic would suggest that if we can reduce container traffic by 10% on the highway, then we will have saved 2.6 lives using this example. So we are making Guatemala a safer place just by being what we are, which is a less-than-perfect railroad.

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