Which group of the wealthy/powerful would attention to this issue benefit?

Like to be clear not only is it not an issue that's going to be addressed, the Biden administration is actually looking at loosening safety regulations further. Republicans are not going to go against industry. It's an industrial state that flagrantly does not care about pollution issues (like building a shopping mall on top of a toxic waste dump level flagrancy) and nobody involved wants to rock the boat right now.

https://twitter.com/RebeccaJBurns_/status/162413713998106215...

https://apnews.com/article/law-enforcement-pennsylvania-mike...

https://architecturalafterlife.com/2020/07/city-view-center/

The fundamental underlying issue is there's not enough people to run the trains. The train lines don't want to pay a high enough salary that the supply would meet demand, and DOT weed testing regulations are reducing the pool of eligible applicants as well, pushing that curve downwards further. They've been running fewer and fewer people per train and longer and longer trains, and it's getting unsafe.

(it's the same reason freight trains no longer yield to passenger in america despite being statutorily required to - the freight trains are too long for the sidings, oops, guess we can't pull over, you'll have to! Trains have just gotten longer and less staffed and much closer to the safety capacity of the equipment as they get longer and heavier, and this is just one of many exciting ways this is playing out!)

There is no way out of this without getting more people into train crews and reducing the size of the trains. The brakes on these trains can't safely stop a train of this length, and the derailleur equipment currently installed can't even safely derail trains of these lengths if they break loose, so when they go they go into a big pile of other cars and you get a massive industrial accident. It is. not. safe. to. run. trains. this. long. You need more crews and larger crews running smaller trains again. This is an issue that has crept up in the last 20 years and become a critical issue in the last 5 years.

But pushing back on industry is a big no in America these days, Republicans aren't going to do back a union let alone go against industry (name a single ohio republican that would not have leapt on the framing of "Biden picks unions over rail jobs and christmas") and this isn't the fight the Biden administration wants to pick right now, they want this to go away. They already slapped down the union, which really pissed off quite a few of the base... but what are they gonna do, vote republican? The biden admin wants the trains to run on time so people get their amazon shit.

And the local elected officials are on the 'locking up journalists who try to report it' level here, not actually doing anything that would inconvenience industry. And Biden just wants the trains to run on time, he's already made that very clear.

So again: which set of powerful people are going to be making a big ruckus in the media? Everyone is OK with this. Ohio is an industrial state, they keep voting in Republicans (even in statewide offices) and fighting against unions. This is what Ohioans collectively signed up for and continue to sign up for every election. Open for business, right?

Remember this when Intel wants you to move to Ohio for those new fabs. You're moving to an industrial hellscape and nobody's gonna care if your wife's shopping mall is built on a superfund site or an unsafe train running on a skeleton crew crashes and explodes and dumps a cloud of poison gas into the air. It's Ohio. Let alone any sort of fun genotoxic effect or pregnancy problems in the middle of abortion-war central. And it's not just this one place either, Ohio is a mess of all kinds of industrial shit. Ohio DGAF, is Intel worth your family getting cancer over?

Economists have this idea called "revealed preference". The revealed preference here is that winning the War On Egghead Intellectuals, this year's installment of the War On LGBTQ, and the War On Climate Science is more important than not having dead kids. This has been repeatedly been made clear for 3 decades now. And Biden is just past the point where he cares about forcing angry toddlers to do the right thing, he's not gonna deathmatch SCOTUS over this of all things for people who don't even want him to and will frame him as just doing it for the union. People want their fucking amazon packages, they want Dow-Corning and 3M and Duke Coal jobs, if you wanna kill your kids or give them turbocancer so that parcel delivery line-costs go down 5% then nobody's gonna stop you, Amazon thanks you for your service to America's profit margins. Uncle Joe has always been a lot better at politics than people give him credit for, why make drama where none exists?

Everyone just metaphorically wants to go have dinner, can we please just not fight about this for once? That's why nobody is talking about it.

(Michigan also had that same plating company dump a bunch more hexavalent chromium into the Huron River again, so to be fair Ohio is not alone in midwest toxic spill stories flying under the radar! But it seems likely Whitmer/Nessel will put the hammer down, I am guessing the remediation is going to get a lot quicker and a lot less "voluntary"/"self-reported".)