Traveler's Friend

Spread out for almost half a mile along the banks of the Ohio River, the twisted pieces of rusted metal look like the junkman's answer to Lady Bird Johnson's beautification campaign. In fact, the giant junkyard is a painstaking attempt by a new federal agency to re-create the "Silver Bridge" that once connected Kanauga, Ohio, and Point Pleasant, W. Va., and determine why the bridge collapsed last December, carrying 46 people to their deaths in the river's numbing waters. The ugly jigsaw along the Ohio may have been the most visible effort, but it is only part of what the little-known National Transportation Safety Board has done in its first year in order to make it safer for Americans to travel about the U.S.

In recent months, the board has rebuked railroads for an accident rate that has jumped 71% in six years. Applying to a railroad accident the sophisticated techniques used to determine the causes of plane crashes--an obvious but hitherto unheard-of innovation --it has found the "probable cause" (a switchman's error) of a collision in New York City last year. After the foundering of a 60-year-old freighter on Lake Huron in 1966 (28 died), it ordered the Coast Guard to intensify inspection of older ships plying the Great Lakes. Even a proposal to widen the breadth of trucks by six inches (to 102 inches) has not escaped the board's eye; unless highways are correspondingly widened, the accident risk would also increase.

Indeed, as it celebrated its first anniversary last week, it seemed odd that until a year ago, the U.S. had no single agency to police the safety of its largest single industry--transportation. Under the chairmanship of Joseph O'Connell Jr., 62, a tax lawyer who has been in and out of government since 1933, the safety board has not only imposed some order on the safety work of Washington's raft of regulatory agencies; it has also confounded the skeptics who thought it unequal to its herculean task.

Looking for a Truce. The board's chief job is to bring a truce in what O'Connell calls the "war between economics and safety"--a war that until recently has been formidably one-sided. "We've found people too occupied with making money and getting another passenger aboard the plane," says O'Connell, "or patching things up till the steering wheel falls off. There hasn't been enough affirmative interest in safety." With blunt language operators and manufacturers have rarely heard before, the agency has indicated that G.M.'s Allison Division was careless in the manufacture of a propeller which tore loose on an airliner that crashed in Ohio last year (dead: 38) and has pointed to managerial sloppiness as the real root of a Frontier Airlines crash in Colorado in which the pilot and copilot, the plane's only occupants, died. At week's end, the safety board dispatched a special team to Texas to investigate the crash of a Braniff International Electra, with 84 aboard, during a heavy thunderstorm.

With a 275-man permanent staff and a minuscule budget of $4,700,000, the board is inadequate to police all safety abuses. Instead, it may play the role of institutional gadfly. "It's a hortatory role," observes O'Connell, "but I prefer it that way."

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