Chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure Peter DeFazio (D-OR), and Chair of the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines, and Hazardous Materials Donald M. Payne, Jr. (D-NJ) encouraged the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) to finalize the fatigue risk management program rulemaking, a congressional mandate that is a decade late, to mitigate railroad worker fatigue.

In the letter, the members wrote: “After decades of studying the issue, the FRA has a clear understanding of the safety risks posed by fatigue: fatigue symptoms include falling asleep, slower reaction time, attention loss, performance impairment, and increase error. A number of individual, environmental, and organizational factors can contribute to the likelihood of fatigue, such as general health and medical conditions as well as scheduling and other practices that affect opportunities for workers to obtain sufficient quality and quantity of sleep.”

They continued: “The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that the Federal Railroad Administration issued in December 2020 required railroads to identify and evaluate fatigue-related railroad safety hazards in their systems, determine the degree of risk associated with each hazard, and implement mitigation strategies to reduce the fatigue that safety-related employees experience and reduce the risk of accidents, incidents, injuries, and fatalities where fatigue is a contributing factor. We believe that attendance policies that not only contribute to fatigue but also penalize workers for taking off when fatigued or ill simply cannot co-exist with any serious fatigue risk management program.”

Original source can be found here.