Day two of testimonies regarding the East Palestine train derailment disaster continued after a brief break with even more revelations surfacing.
 
According to testimony from Brotherhood of Railway Carmen representative Jason Cox, the derailment likely could have been prevented with more safety regulations in place.
 
Cox testified that under current standards Norfolk Southern carmen are only given one minute to inspect a train car, which is equal to 30 seconds per side.
Prior to these more relaxed standards, carmen were given three minutes per car or a minute and a half per side.
 
Additionally, Cox testified that Norfolk Southern carmen were allegedly scorned for taking 45 second to inspect each side of a car, but were praised when they reduced inspection time to 30 seconds.
 
Cox says these current standards cause a lot of problems to be missed.
 
"When you decrease from three minutes per car to a third of that, you see issues creep into the system. Defects that should be detected can't be detected under that type of time stress," Cox said.
 
According to NTSB officials, 20 out of 77 cars on the train, or 25% of the cars had defects. Cox says these defects were discovered visually by the FAA after the derailment.
 
Norfolk Southern Vice President of Communication and Signals, Jason Hopewell says he's unaware of the circumstances these defects were discovered, and that inspection and quality control aren't in his line of work.
 
Hopewell also said there is no established time limit for crews to inspect cars.
 
Cox added that the amount of inspection points had decreased, and also says the derailment could have been prevented had the ATC desk analyst seen the alert of the hotbox issue prior to the derailment and ordered the train to stop.
 
Hopewell says based on the temperature of the wheel bearing when that alert came through, the analyst would not have been required to order the train to stop, but had the authority to do so if he felt the need.