https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-r...
I keep hearing this rhetoric around social media… Do people not realize that there is a cost to our retirement funds always having to increase in value?
They don't care. The costs are minimal compared to the profits, the bad PR can be massaged, etc.
Edit: also forgot that the president and both halves of congress have clearly telegraphed "full speed ahead" after the recent nonsense around the railroad union strikes. These workers aren't even getting time off for sick days or family emergencies (the latter of which is almost certainly a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act.)
>“All the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal background, what you would find in almost any community operating outside,” said James Justice with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Somebody is lying.
Although what they actually said is that all the readings they've recorded are normal.
The most disconcerting thing is that vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, so there may be many people who have been exposed to enough to give them cancer but who won't know about it for some years yet
Phosgene was a chemical weapon in WW1 and was especially problematic because, drumroll please, it's heavier than air and doesn't dissipate readily. That's one reason they roundabout mention checking air in people's homes.
Air readings could be manipulated simply by taking them from the tops of hills, or upwind, or even a relatively low altitude via plane. People who don't know phosgene is heavier than air would not realize what was going on.
The EPA claims they have a multi-stage containment system in place, and that the ground water and Ohio River are not at risk.
I don’t see how that is possible, but since this is HN, I’m hoping someone will point to an article explaining how modern spill containment works.
> Cars involved in the derailment contained vinyl chloride, combustible liquids, butyl acrylate, benzene residue cars (railroad cars that previously contained benzene,” the release stated, “and nonhazardous materials such as wheat, plastic pellets, malt liquors and lube oil.”
Might hinge on how bad the first impending acid rain ends up being.
I think Jackson Mississippi still doesn’t have clean water, & you haven’t seen that in any headlines for quite some time. Most things that actually matter don’t get very good news coverage, lest people become concerned about how hard they’re being swindled by corporations.
Ohio just got completely swindled by JD Vance, so nobody should be surprised when bad things continue to happen to the general populace with zero accountability from those causing it.
Also, keep in mind that this is the land of a river (Cuyahoga aka Cleveland) catching on fire at least 15 times. Environmental disasters with no accountability are our groove.
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".)
I mean, it's depressing, even devastating, but it's better to know the truth.
Vinyl chloride also known as vinyl monomer is used to make PVC.
Inhalation: Several minutes of exposure to high, but attainable concentrations (over 1000 ppm) may cause difficulty breathing, central nervous system depression and symptoms such as: ataxia or dizziness, drowsiness or fatigue, loss of consciousness, headache, euphoria and irritability, visual and or hearing disturbances, nausea, memory loss. Prolonged, high concentration exposures may cause unconsciousness or death. Cardiac: Acute intoxication may cause irregular heartbeats.
Chronic Effects: Chronic exposure to vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) may cause damage to the nervous system, respiratory system, musculoskeletal system, and lymphatic system. Occupational overexposure has produced a specific cancer. (angiosarcoma of the liver) and is associated with hepatocellular cancer. Repeated prolonged exposure may damage: skin (scleroderma), bones (acro-osteolysis), blood vessels in the hands (Raynaud's Syndrome). Suspected of causing genetic defects. Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child. Reproductive effects and testes damage occurred in rats exposed to vinyl chloride. These endpoints, however, were generally noted at concentrations greater than those necessary to cause liver damage.
Looks like a lot of cost-cutting (not shipping on trains with the most modern safe braking systems?) and regulatory shenanigans (not classified as highly hazardous material?) were involved in this... oh wait, it gets better...
> "Thousands in East Palestine, a town of about 5,000 people, evacuated, and officials warned the controlled burn would create a phosgene and hydrogen chloride plume across the region. Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble, and was used as a weapon in the first world war."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/ohio-train-d...
I'm a mathematician, not a chemist, but I do know about about phosgene.
The memorable thing about phosgene is not that is causes "breathing trouble" but that it will kill you dead, dead, dead, and once you have a lethal dose, there is no effective treatment, and that it's a "linear poison" - small concentrations over hours and days have exactly the same effect as large concentrations for minutes (many poisons don't work that way).
So sad to see another struggling Midwest town dealt a death blow.
It’s beautiful country even though it’s considered fly over and “blue collar” which is politically correct terminology for post-industrial poor.
The EPA has roots from the Cuyahoga River fires. There was great progress made cleaning up the river and even turning portions of Northeast Ohio into a national park.
Proud to be a Northeast Ohioan. There has been great steps forward since the industrial hay day.
This whole event makes me so sad. This community will most likely never recover and I’m hoping against hope there aren’t serious health consequences or birth defects from this. Though I highly doubt it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio
Took a while for me to figure out the connection with Midwest towns.
I've always understood it as a sort of historical anchoring bias. Compared to the areas that were settled during colonial times, Ohio was indeed "West" in people's minds, just less so than the Pacific coast.
But "midwest" is a term for a region, and terms last longer than the reason for the term. When the term was coined, the US essentially ended at Chicago, and Ohio was midwest.
Hmm. I must be in a mellow mood today. I've made the exact same complaint you did when others said Pittsburgh was "midwest".
https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
Related: Louis Rossmann - New York let tech companies WRITE THE LAW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujCQCVHukx0
https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/train-dera...
Final NTSB report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Which isn't to say nothing is going on either, this was a colossal regulatory failure letting these companies overwork train operators and not forcing rail operators to upgrade the braking systems. But let's also not jump to conclusions.
"White Noise" is a darkly comic novel that explores themes of death, consumerism, and technology. The story takes place in a small Midwestern town where a poisonous cloud, known as "The Nanny," is hanging over the area and threatening the lives of its residents. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler Studies who becomes obsessed with the cloud and its effects on the people around him. "White Noise" is widely regarded as one of DeLillo's best works and is considered a seminal work of postmodern fiction.”
We had a fertilizer plant go up in flames last year about this time in Winston-Salem, NC, which is 50 miles from us which was alarming even at this radius.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-...
Anyway, the poisonous cloud is perhaps metaphorically hanging over the town, but only during a short section of the novel is there actually a cloud. Though maybe in terms of pages the cloud isn’t over the town very long, but several weeks pass?
This summary is mostly right? I guess?
I had a girlfriend early in college who's grandmother lived deep in rural Ohio; we visited the area frequently and it involved driving past several.
A bit of obscure trivia I learned while down there, "Russia, Ohio" is pronounced like "Roo-She". I was told this was because of the Cold War but even in my late teens "I wasn't so sure". The dialect of Southern English spoken by Grandma and the local population was a cross between deep Appalachia, slowly spoken and ... I don't know ... English-like words[1].
[0] Nice to see Wikipedia had the goofy pronounciation. It did not explain "why", unfortunately.
[1] She had an English (only) speaking neighbor who had the most "articulated"/"exaggerated" variant -- I remember having "Tonne Cohwa" or "Tonne Cohs" (plural) translated for me after several attempts to figure out WTF that referred to... Yeah. It was the word Taco. We were talking about the cold weather, I thought.
I’m about 40 miles from Russia, OH. We’ve also got Versailles (pronounced like the “ver” in “verb” and “sales”), Houston (pronounced “house ton”), Lima (long I, like the bean), and Eldorado (long A) all in a 100 mile radius. We have some Native American names for cities and counties, too.
Turns out, it was named after the famous Algerian revolutionary, Abd El Kader, who was widely respected in the West, including France, who he fought against:
