Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding (opens in new tab)

It's not like it's subtle. There have been hundreds of Chinese weather balloon stories in the past week. Have there been hundreds of stories about this? US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen.

There is a man who was shot twice (and grievously injured) in a robbery who is filing suit against the city of Chicago for its policy of breaking off high-speed chases (which have killed plenty of innocents in Chicago), arguing that they would have captured the perpetrator before they shot him if they had chased him during another incident. Local Chicago news is so determined to roll back recent reforms like ending cash bail and high speed chases in the city that we not only get multiple stories every day about the suit, we got multiple stories before the suit was filed about rumors and announcements that the suit was being filed.

- rail fired a ton of employees a while ago and is now seeing serious issues due to mismanagement

- government oversight is a moderate Republican masquerading as a liberal democrat and just wants the clout from successful negotiations but the concep of most government oversight in the US is hold music at best.

- this city does not threaten harm or inconvenience elites.

- reporting this issue harms and threatens elites and could see a ripple effect during a recession. Rail is a primium mobile for most of wealths investments at some level.

There have been regions of West Virginia that have had problems with potable tap water for years and it gets no press at all.

If Aspen, CO or East Hampton, NY had this kind of event there would be a national state of emergency and possibly a holiday added to the calendar. Never forget.

Where those two things intersect is coincidental. Reducing greenhouse gas pollution might be a great thing, but the ruling class sure isn't counting on that effort costing them any money. So if they can't see a way to make money or win votes by pushing this train derailment story they won't.

It would be their job to rank things. Things like media coverage. We could turn to the MoI and see that this chemical spill got a 4 and then compare with other events.

Sure, it's subjective all the way down. People will always quibble about the outputs of services like that. But having a number that some expert (statistician?) or organization thereof came up--even if you disagree with them--with would make for more nuanced conversation and decision making around that thing.

Probably because the most current, most related story is about how Biden + Congress just recently killed a rail worker strike. And the complicit media isn't going anywhere near that: https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

They're covering it as "averting a strike" as if that's a good thing to make striking illegal.

If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago.

But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?

I just don't think there's a good hook here. The topic is complicated, the people impacted aren't a minority, so there just isn't a good single-sentence headline to drive outrage.

It's because it's being handled fairly well. There is a cloud of smoke that's scaring people, but it's "ordinary" smoke. There's no environmental apocalypse that's going to make that town "uninhabitable". There will be after effects from everything associated with an industrial accident, including economic and legal repercussions, but the actual accident is being managed.

People seem very ignorant of the science involved with the situation and very accepting of conspiracy narratives, which is unfortunately no surprise given the last 6 years in this country.

So far we have not heard from the secretary of transportation/

Biden has not bothered to shuffle himself over there to appease the population with platitudes about his deep interest in the safety of the population and worry for the environment and how he's going to hold those at fault "accountable" -che sera sera, as they say.

So far, crickets... but quite disconcerting is the apparent disinterest in the story by environmentalists.

Trains crash. Accidents happen. It's about as newsworthy as a severe thunderstorm. Sad for the people involved, but true nonetheless.

It's not just purely length. A long train can easily have mountains in between the ends.

The problems that underly these kinds of PSR accidents aren't lost on people either. PSR trains were a way of scaling down an industry of people. That's to say, it's a labor movement problem; more cynically put, mutli-billion dollar companies are passing their error rates off on ecosystems and relatively unwealthy areas. It's not some tin-foil hat secret that American media generally does not cover these kinds of areas or things.

Instead of responding in rage, respond in empathy, or you could use the old tactic of just ignoring it until it goes away. It's not like you'll suffer social penalties for any of those options; after all, you just did the ASCII version of dropping trou in response to outrage over a social and ecological crisis and suffered zero penalties.

How are the mainstream media dealing with it?

The general population pays closer attention to the derailment story because a cover-up is intimated by a “grassroots” perspective, and the balloon story floats away into thin air.

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This event happened February 3rd.

11 DAYS AGO. Thanks for proving OPs point.

https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...

> “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation to determine if the level of vinyl chloride that was present in the soil was going to create a potential contamination threat to surface or groundwater,” said Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice who has a Ph.D. in soil science and has been working for Bennett & Williams Environmental Consultants since 1986.

> Weatherington-Rice said it’s possible vinyl chloride can travel through the ground as rain and precipitation move through the soil. It then has the potential to reach groundwater and eventually hit well fields.

> “It’s not a question of whether it’s going to be an issue, it will be an issue, the question is how bad of an issue is it gonna be, where is it gonna go, and how long is it gonna take to get there, and what’s gonna happen when it gets there,” Weatherington-Rice said.

https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...

> “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist.

> Caggiano says ethylhexyl acrylate is especially worrisome. He says it’s a carcinogen and contact with it can cause burning and irritation in the skin and eyes. Breathing it in can irritate the nose and throat and cause coughing and shortness of breath.

> Isobutylene is also known to cause dizziness and drowsiness when inhaled.

> “I was surprised when they quickly told the people they can go back home, but then said if they feel like they want their homes tested they can have them tested. I would’ve far rather they did all the testing,” Caggiano said.

> Caggiano says it’s possible some of these chemicals could still be present in homes and on objects until you clean them thoroughly.

> “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Caggiano said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-tr...

> Andrew Whelton, a professor of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, said it's possible the burn created additional compounds the EPA might not be testing for.

> "When they combusted the materials, they created other chemicals. The question is what did they create?" he said.

The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)

It's going to dump into the Ohio river and spread this over the planet, just like C-8.

Less than a month after Biden made it illegal for rail workers to strike.

No political party taking corporate money is your friend.

Lost in the profoundly unhelpful debate between "no one has heard of this" and "well I have" are the actual conditions in the community and whether the concentrations of either the initially released compound or the byproducts of the "controlled burn" are high enough to cause effects in humans. From the EPA link:

> Feb. 13, 2023 Update

Re-Entry air screenings are underway. Community air monitoring will continue operating 24 hours a day. As of yesterday evening, 291 homes have been screened. To date, no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride were identified for the completed screened homes. There are 181 homes that remain to be screened.

Good news, to be sure, though this is only the very beginning of the process.

https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%...

Why is almost every number in sample column #2 and #3 exactly 100 times greater than in column #1? Aren't they all [μg/L]?

There's a section on page 3 ("petroleum products") that's labelled as being both μg/L and mg/L.

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/...

The derailment is, no doubt, a serious public health crisis. However, it helps no-one to spread misleading videos and commentary.

The wave of panic in the thread you posted is a stark example of "fake news" in action. A sign of the times, I suppose.

https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-to...

> Last week, in an instance of life imitating art (or vice-versa), a train carrying harmful chemicals derailed in the very same town used as filming location for White Noise‘s on-screen crash.

> One resident, Ben Ratner, had the crazy experience of not only having to evacuate his own home this week, but also acted out the scenario earlier as an extra in White Noise.

Unless this poster can supply some corroborating information, or perhaps a scientific definition of "megatoxin," this is more noise than signal.

This is simply a set of lies.

Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]).

High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box

[3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...

There are a lot of alarmist people posting about how they're sure the town is "uninhabitable" and that it's being "covered up".

The truth is that the people handling the derailment and fire made some very tough calls to avoid an explosion that might have leveled half that town or exposed hundreds to thousands of people to a carcinogenic chemical.

They chose to burn off the chemicals to avoid the explosion. People are scared by the dark cloud and by the smells, and that's understandable.

But the burning does seem to have eliminated much of the chemicals on site, and none of the air testing that's being done to look for combustion products or gaseous Vinyl Chloride is finding any. There are pictures of people walking near the destroyed railroad cars now, with no hazmat suits.

Vinyl Chloride has a half life in the atmosphere of about 20 hours. It decomposes into CO, CO2, HCl and trace Phosgene (a tiny fraction of a percent). Any Vinyl Chloride Monomer released into the air or soil will be decomposing into acid (once the HCl mixes with atmospheric water) and that acid will have a somewhat higher (weaker) pH than household vinegar.

At least with regard to the Vinyl Chloride monomer tanks, the authorities seem to have done the right thing. If they managed to burn off the other tanks, those chemicals create even fewer toxic combustion products - carbon monoxide is basically it.

The dark cloud is probably coming from all the other stuff that burned or partly combusted due to that very hot fire... paint on the rail cars, plastics in the box cars, whatever else was in the box cars, railroad ties that caught on fire, and chemicals outgassed from nearby objects exposed to that amount of heat. It's probably not something you'd want to breathe, but it's also not the "cloud of death" that's being clamored about by the conspiritards.

Both the air test reports and the pictures of people without masks walking on the site now show that it's likely the burn off achieved the desired effect. Within a few days the dark clouds will dissipate like any other smoke, and people will finally calm down.

It's still an awful situation for anyone whose home got covered in smoke or whose animals died due to the derailment or fire, but it's not an apocalypse.

Right now, I see the EPA saying ‘it’s okay to return to the area’ (not ‘everything is fine’), and alarmist commentators listing chemical names and saying ‘this is bad’ and ‘Bhopal’ with no actual explanation of the mechanisms of ‘bad’.

I don’t know what the truth is. I’d _like_ to be able to believe the EPA rather than random internet commentators.

(this is what they were telling me in the 90s.... and 2000s... and 2010s... and are still telling me now...)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_...

And fun fact, this is also where the worlds first civilian nuclear power plant was built.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_St...

People said it was unsafe.

Officials disagreed.

Proof is provided.

Nobody has pie on their face.

The story is about a lack of pie.

I'm guessing they didn't.

Bhopal: 2000-8000 estimated deaths within 2 weeks of disaster

2023 Ohio train derailment: 0 estimated deaths within 10 days of disaster

I definitely see why it's appealing to exaggerate something that has been under-reported, and it's popular to do, but I don't think it's a winning strategy.

I think the max number of people will listen if the severity of events is portrayed in context. People mistrust the media for sensationalism and are looking for better ways to understand the world more accurately.

Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.

Here is my reasoning:

Poly Vinyl Chloride is exceptionally toxic, the plume from this event is east of New Palestine into Pennsylvania based on radar data from both news stations and the National weather service.

Health effects of exposure are dramatic at high levels (death), and delayed at low levels (cancers) (so there is both initial health impact and "long tail" impact).

Between East Palestine and Enor Valley are a bunch of farms.

That suggests to me a number of ways for the PVC to impact the people in that area. Presumably the EPA will establish some monitoring but I haven't been able to find anything from the EPA yet that discusses that.

And FWIW I hope I'm incorrect and we don't see a serious public health crisis associated with this event.

Myself, I'll try not to laugh when millions of people stupid enough to live on the San Andreas fault line relocate into the ocean overnight. Out of a misplaced sense of unrequited empathy.

You’re living in what sounds like it’s one of the highest cost of living regions in the world laughing at the misfortune of innocent people who don’t have the option to just pickup and move.

If you’ve lived in this area, you would know how “stuck” most people are. The cost of living and wages don’t provide most people the option to do a whole lot more than make a living. Even if they can leave, they have families/friends/communities.

This is also not too far from where individuals have been fighting very hard for worker’s rights for a long time. The UAW against the auto factories. A generation of coal miners who migrated from KY and WV.

You claim you’re from one of the poorest areas in Ohio but are laughing from the West Coast. I signed in just to respond to you because this is one of the most sociopathic things I’ve heard. Have some sympathy.

>from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river.

As someone who grew up in the town both The Devil We Know (Documentary on Netflix) and Dark Waters (loosely based on real events) are about - and the bizarre fillings to prove it - when it was happening to the people living there, this is sadly normal.

>But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives.

This is such a patronizing thing to say. Especially given this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635291

>How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking.

The other side would accuse their opponents of...exactly the same things. The boots are just Big Tech flavored. And the hatred is based on ignorance, as it usually is.

>They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.

Which political party is that? The recent strikebreaking was led by Biden, which would make the party you're talking about the Democrats:

>So on Friday morning, after three years of failed negotiations, President Biden instead signed into law a measure that imposes the contract agreement brokered by his administration back in September

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

>But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen

Again, the recent strikebreaking wasn't the party you're obviously implying.

>The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being.

Outside of Bernie, and maybe the Pauls, I'm not sure those exist.

>They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago.

And you accuse them of hatred? You should re-read what you've written when you've sobered up, methinks.

>Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD)

Appalachia goes all the way up into NY state, homie. Much of Ohio along the eponymous river is just Appalachia with a big river in it. And the mountains are older than Saturn's rings(!).

>that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD

So we've correctly identified the problem as politicians that don't serve their constituents interests. What do we do about it? I suggest uncapping the number of members of the House. Let's see a country where people actually know their Congrescritter. Like it was supposed to be.

Being afraid of a nuclear plant is like being afraid of flying.

In fact, flying is way, way more dangerous. Even if you ONLY consider radiation exposure, a few hours in a plane per year will eclipse the increase in exposure the average person living next to a nuclear plant will receive.