Pete Buttigieg Discusses Rebuilding the Baltimore Bridge

A massive cleanup operation is underway at the site of the deadly bridge collapse in Baltimore last week. Crews are undertaking painstaking tasks, removing sharp twisted steel and concrete debris from the port. No one knows just yet how long it will take to clean up the wreckage and reopen the channel. But the Biden administration has pledged to help rebuild the bridge and the President is expected to ask for more federal funding soon to make that happen. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is going to play a key role in all of this, and he joins us now. Welcome back to the News Hour.

Good to be back with you.

The Washington Post reported that rebuilding the Francis Scott Key Bridge will take years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Do you agree with that assessment, and how difficult will it be to get that funding given Congress's inability to pass much of anything these days?

That assessment is certainly plausible. We have not yet seen a hard timeline, and remember there are a lot of things yet to be known, both in terms of the condition of the parts of the bridge that did not collapse, and in terms of the design of what will take its place. For example, one advantage of having a design that's identical or similar to the old bridge is it could be done more quickly. On the other hand, there may be advantages to having a different design. Those are decisions that the state under the leadership of Governor Moore will work through. We're not going to dictate that. What we are going to do is make sure that there's funding and whenever requested technical assistance to help them get that job done. We've already moved the first $60 million made available through our emergency relief program. There is certainly going to be a need for more funding. We'll do what we can with the dollars we have, but if we need to turn to Congress for more dollars, I hope and expect that that'll be a bipartisan priority. (01:48) If you think back to the Minnesota Bridge collapse back in 2007, it was a matter of days before Congress passed legislation to get more funding to make sure that they were able to rebuild that bridge. And a little more recently, the bipartisan infrastructure package itself was delivered with a bipartisan vote. So I know that this is a polarized time, but I'd like to think if there's anything that Democrats and Republicans can come together on, it's supporting a part of our country that is hurting and getting infrastructure back the way it needs to be.

Will the administration waive certain regulations to speed up the process of clearing the debris and ultimately rebuilding the bridge?

We will tear down any bureaucratic or administrative barrier that we responsibly can. To be clear, this has to be done safely. It has to be done properly, whether we're talking about checks to make sure that taxpayer funds are being used the right way or any safety consideration. But within that and within the framework of the law, we're going to provide as much flexibility as we responsibly can, because we've got to get this port back open and we got to get that bridge back up. The port reopening will of course come sooner than the bridge replacement, but both of those are important, not just for Baltimore, but really for our supply chains, for the US economy. We've got to do everything we can to get it done.

I want to ask you about rail safety because you announced a new rule today requiring two person crews on railroads in a move to improve safety after that toxic derailment in East Palestine last year. The railroads say that the size of train crews should be determined by union contract talks and not by federal regulators, since there isn't enough data to support this notion that two person crews are actually safer. What's your reaction to that?

I would start with common sense. The idea that you could run a two mile long train, maybe even a longer train than that. Some of them are getting closer to three miles, and have only one human being on board that train. My guess is most Americans would be surprised to learn that until this morning, that wasn't already prevented. We're talking about the absolute common sense minimum here of having two people on board a freight train that could be moving through an American community. And again, these trains are getting to be two miles long or longer. (04:05) Now, this is something that was developed actually back in the Obama administration was the first work done on this. The Trump administration halted that work. We picked that work back up even before what happened in East Palestine, but our attention to rail safety measures, including this one was of course supercharged by the national focus on railroad safety that East Palestine brought. And that's just one of many areas that we've been working on. I also want to reiterate my call on Congress to do more. They have a bipartisan Railway Safety Act just sitting there waiting its turn. It's been more than a year since that Ohio crash. Congress needs to act. Anything that doesn't require an act of Congress we're going to seek to do on our own here at the department, like today's rule.

It strikes me freight trains are getting longer in the US, as you say, in some cases three miles long. You also have cargo ships that are in some cases now dangerously big, like the one that caused the bridge collapse in Baltimore. In your view, are the modes of transport getting too big or do we need to improve our capacity and our infrastructure to accommodate them?

I think it really depends on the mode of transportation. It's not automatically intrinsically safe, unsafe to have a larger ship or a larger train or for that matter, a larger vehicle or a larger aircraft. But it is very important that every step be taken to make sure that as they grow or as they have any other feature that's different from before, that it is safer than ever. And that's where regulation comes in. It's vitally important that we maintain the pattern we've had in this country of making our modes of transportation more safe, and we still have a long way to go, especially on highway safety, but also in railroad safety.

Lastly, a question about Boeing. They're facing a significant safety crisis after that door panel flew off that Alaska Airlines flight some months ago. The company's CEO announced that he's leaving at the end of the year. The head of the commercial airplanes at Boeing has already left. What concerns remain? Is this leadership overhaul sufficient?

I would say it's going to take a lot more than what individual has what title at that company, and that's something I have communicated to the senior leadership at Boeing. It's something that our FAA administrator, Mike Whitaker, made clear after his visit to their key manufacturing facility and has put them on a ninety day clock, we're roughly 30 days into that, to put together a comprehensive plan. And FAA is not going to let them increase their rate of production until and unless they demonstrate that they can do it safely. (06:37) We're talking about operational issues, we're talking about observations that were caught in the audit on the shop floor. But we're also talking about culture, and I would say that whoever winds up at the helm of Boeing as well as their board and everybody up and down that entire organization, they all have to be prepared to put safety first. So much depends on it. Look, the aviation safety record of the United States of America is extraordinary, but there is nothing about that that guarantees that it'll be the same for the future. That's why every incident like this gets an extraordinary amount of attention. It's why Boeing is under a microscope and it's why it's going to stay that way as they work to demonstrate that they can safely increase their production.

Do you feel safe flying on a Boeing made jet?

I fly on a Boeing made jet just about every other day. And yeah, every time I step on an airliner, I know that I am safe. And if I'm with my family, I know that my family is safe because of all of the work that goes into overseeing that, the work of the FAA, the work of all of the professionals in the aviation sector. Including importantly, those flight crews on board who do such good work. Every time I get on that airplane, I know I'm participating in the safest mode of transportation in America, which is an astonishing thing if you consider what air travel is, flying through the air at nearly the speed of sound. But again, you can't take that for granted. Safety is not a destination. It is something that we have to continually work toward and reinforce.

That is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, thanks again for your time and for your insights this evening.

Thank you.