Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding(fastcompany.com) |
Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding(fastcompany.com) |
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.
And if it causes cancer for four generations? No big deal? We're 10 days out and they just poisoned a region that has a history of it, again: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...
It's weird to me that so many people in this thread are downplaying it. As someone with family niblings in Ohio and WV downstream from East Palestine, I'm very interested.
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.
False. I have heard about it.
But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster
It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river.
But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives. How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking. There is none. That generation simply has to die out, and I very truly hope that most of their children are able to make it out to greener pastures & receive some form of education that may lead them to stop voting for the absolute sociopaths that peddle policies making large-scale environmental disasters a possibility.
I unfortunately have the personal experience of knowing not very many people get the opportunities to GTFO this area into greener pastures. I don’t know what to feel other than deep & genuine sadness - there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help the fact, & now that I’m a couple thousand miles away, I just delusionally hope that things are getting better while I’m gone.
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
Spewing outright hatred & death threats to their fellow countrymen who try to tell them there may be a path to a better life, the ability to make meaningful change.
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.
Some of them, a few I’ve already personally seen, will have the realization. But it’s far too late. The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being. I can only hope they have the humility to tell the younger people they know that they were dead wrong, & 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
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)
/endddrunkrant
What would a legitimate cover up conspiracy actually look like?
I have zero problem living down wind of solar panels and wind turbines
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.
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.
I’m currently living the life of an absolute pauper on the West Coast - I could have magnitudes of a much nicer living back home
But, You can’t reason with unreasonable people, which is what the majority of rural Ohio is. So why would I want to continue to live amongst their unrelenting self-inflicted misery?
I can’t control the fault lines in the West, as the Indians whose remains were buried in mounds around my home property couldn’t control the invading & murderous Europeans.
But - my peers, to at least some degree, could control who they vote into representation that make decisions regarding these disastrous policies that lead to a near literal salting of our earth. And they’ve always chose the worst people, mostly for nefarious or hateful reasons (if you disagree with this statement, and you didn’t spend decades of your life growing up amongst these folk - you’re arguing something you’re ignorant of)
If I could vote, on the West Coast, to send aid for these environmental catastrophes in the MidWest from either our state funds in the form of $, or just in skilled recovery workers - I would. The majority of those I’ve found to be my peers would as well, as would many of the neighbors I don’t have much acquaintance with - their public voting records tell enough.
I can however tell you with near certainty those I grew up around would not vote to assist the West Coast when we eventually have our big quake.
If you want to speak of empathy, feel free to start there.
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.
Given the fact you’ve presumed I’m not able to make factual assertions about geographically bounded regions, I’m not going to give the effort to seriously read the rest of your reply.
Northern Ohio is not Appalachia, outside of one eastern most county.
Southern-Eastern Ohio mostly is.
Oh, yeah - if you’re right over the river, 20 years of my life is right next to you & I’ve had many a trip to the Parkersburg mall in my youth :)
Perhaps you know the route towards your river crossing I had to take that is a few strung out miles of completely crumbling mobile homes & the smell of natural gas/sulfur that stings your nostrils when rolling down your car windows.
IIRC there is even a small, many decades rusted over & tree vined carnival/amusement park type thing with a little rollercoaster that you pass on the way to the toll bridge. Can only imagine that was some day a fun place, now it stinks of gas & sulfur runoff.
Thankfully I was lucky enough to not grow up in that exact zone. Cannot imagine the cognitive deficits a childhood of breathing that in causes.
I do wonder if that's one reason the media isn't eager to cover this.
Total global electricity generation from coal has nearly doubled since year 2000. In absolute terms the amount of new coal based electricity from coal increased by almost 5TWh from 2000 to 2021, about twice as much as wind+solar combined. (Also natural gas based electricity grew by 3.5TWh in the same period).
As long as Russia is being sanctioned and Canada refuses to export their NG, I expect coal to continue to grow.
Maybe someday in the future, wind+solar can provide stable electricity supply without relying on fossil fuels for the non-windy cloudy days (and nights). Like nuclear has been able to since the 70s.
Nobody knows exactly when, though. But simply based on the mining capacity of critical minerals, it's really unlikely to happen within 20 years at a large scale. The world is simply not planning enough mines.
On April 15, 2020, District Judge Brian Morris issued a suspension for the pipeline's construction after the plaintiffs, the Northern Plains Resource Council, alleged the project was improperly reauthorised back in 2017.[94][95] In the summary judgment, the judge agreed that the Endangered Species Act was violated, thereby voiding the permit.>Perhaps you know the route towards your river crossing I have to take that is a few strung out miles of completely crumbling mobile homes & the smell of natural gas/sulfur that stings your nostrils when rolling down your car windows.
Yes, it's called generational poverty. I escaped by going deeply into debt to pay for a degree from a good school. Many in the area have big stars on their house indicating a military enlistee. I'm not sure what point you're driving at here.
>Thankfully I was lucky enough to not grow up in that exact zone. Cannot imagine the cognitive deficits a childhood of breathing that in causes.
...
Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature.
Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.
Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet).
But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data.
But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(
We have 2 senators.
Please tell me the population of the entire MidWest & also how many senators they have.
Anyways, getting overtly political at this point- will excuse myself from further discussion.
California has 55 electoral votes in the presidential election and 52 seats in the house. That's something like 3x Ohio for each. The rail lines are overwhelmingly dictated by federal law and influence and not by relatively miniscule number of folks in rural Ohio. Your statements in that context are quite frankly absolutely baffling.
More recent tech makes it even easier to achieve safety, which would have made it even cheaper, had it not been for the excessive regulations (and other forms of red tape) that have been added since then.
Does that mean you believe there is too much regulations for nuclear power? That would also mean you would want to see less regulations?
Specifically, I would prefer if all energy types were regulated according to the same principles when it came to risk/harm tolerance, emission rates, etc.
If a coal plant is allowed to emit X Bq/GWh, every other plant types should have the same limit.
Or even better, if you add all polutants together, one should calculate total expected harm (in terms of X * deaths/GWh + Y * disease/GWh + Z * Global Warming contribution, or something) and either set a ceiling on total harm, or add a tax on each power plant based on total expected harm caused.
This wouldn't necessarily mean that the regulations would be written using fewer words, but it would/should lead to an optimal balance between cost of energy and the harm caused.
The current system seems to lead to both harm and price levels that are much higher than they need to be.
If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time).
I have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered. I'd wager they're getting something better than ratings out of this.
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.
Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.
The carrier will lose money. But a news company would make money, wouldn't they? Bad news is good news after all, and environmental disasters are bad news.
1. catalytic converter thefts
2. thieves steal a car, ram it into a store, loot the store, drive off in another stolen car
- 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.
I can't quibble with any of the rest of your argument, though.
It's just capitalism being capitalism in the end
For all of you who down vote:
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.
All in all, seems extremely concerning to me.
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?
First I've heard that, got a reference?
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.
Lots of discussion is occurring on Twitter, so people seem interested. The news coverage of it just seems superficial. Like, it's not zero, but they seem to be doing the bare minimum on a story where lots of people want answers. Give us the journalism so we can hold people accountable instead of spinning up conspiracies.
Even if that were true, which is debatable, it should be a huge scandal that this happened at all literally weeks after rail workers tried to strike over safety issues and were forced back to work, and that Obama required train brakes to be upgraded, then softened the requirements after corporate pushback, which Trump then repealed and Biden failed to reverse. There is a lot to say on this topic and no one in the mainstream is saying it.
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.
A lot of armchair experts on here wrote him off when it was posted to hn.
I worked with a former locomotive engineer at the time who echoed the concerns reported here. He left the industry after about 10 years because of the grueling schedule and conditions.
It is interesting and alarming how it is essentially an open secret among industry workers that trains are run such that they are always in an elevated risk of derailment and danger.
https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-pe...
It's not just purely length. A long train can easily have mountains in between the ends.
edit: please downvote my trash, the same as this article. Go find better reporting on this event to shove in front of everybody's eyeballs. (post title has since changed, see article for relevance)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965
There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a completely eyeball driven enterprise.
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9 hours ago - 291 comments
This event happened February 3rd.
11 DAYS AGO. Thanks for proving OPs point.
What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc.
But hey, those ominous black clouds sure make for good clickbait.
As of now:
https://www.cnn.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 2 results)
https://www.foxnews.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 1 result / 'trump' 2 results)
https://www.nytimes.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 4 results)
https://www.msnbc.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 2 results / 'trump' 9 results!)
Looks like media has been told to drop this story... Or even worse to self censor anything outside it's allowed news topic criteria
https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593... ("East Palestine Train Derailment")
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.
The footage has a lot of NSFW language, so just watch out for that. Within that thread there's some good discussion about some of the compounds that are being released into the air, and it is indeed very grim.
Interestingly here in Australia, I've heard about it a lot more in traditional media than my American friends seem to be hearing.
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://www.wfmj.com/story/48362031/fifth-negligence-suit-wo...
https://twitter.com/Justice314Lady/status/162347826755341107...
All companies will do that. The reason rail companies can do this so ruthlessly and recklessly is complete lack of competition and exceedingly generous industry deregulation.
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.
https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrest...
https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-du...
etc.
I'm sure, of course, that the police reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity. /s
(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...
What a shitty thing to say given that the public has no direct way to deny them what they do if they don't deem it safe.
If there has to be news coverage nonstop to get said investigation, go for it.
This should never have happened and tens of thousands will die from the after effects. It’s disgusting.
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.
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?
Apparently CNN reported on this 8 days ago[0] (when it happened). Fox is running coverage live as we speak[1]. If there is any evidence of a cover-up, it has yet to be presented.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/05/us/east-palestine-ohio-train-...
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-prompts-wat...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...
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.
I totally believe that our civilian federal government and executive agencies have no capacity to deal with massive environmental crises like the one in Ohio, or Flint, or in CA with PG&E or many other places. Our system is too weak, and the companies too powerful, the problems too costly to be dealt with without significant pushback.
People 1.5 miles away from the wreck are having their dogs die in their yard while letting them out to pee.
The balloon is just bullshit, but this isn't.
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)
> last hour
It happened a week and a half ago, so...
Huh? https://www.reddit.com/r/news/search/?q=ohio&include_over_18...
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.
In my personal sense of current importance, balloons over North American, maybe all from China, get my news and political attention since it could have both personal and global impact.
So at this point, I don't blame the Democratic Party or capitalism or various media although I recognize they aren't my friends either.
I may change my mind in a month, course, if events prove catastrophic. Or if I eventually develop cancer because semiconductors.
Apologies to the fine citizens of Ohio. And thanks ChickenNugger for the opportunity to think about the situation.
The coverage isn't the issue. It's the lack of accountability being talked about.
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...
https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi... (There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows)
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.
https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=10699...
Newsrooms have been hemorrhaging beat reporters with in-depth knowledge of esoterica in a given field since the World Wide Web first began its thorough disruption of one of its first victim industries. It’s been decades since local news outlets have had the sort of manpower and institutional knowledge and connections to report effectively on things like criminal justice, local government oversight, environmental protection, or healthcare (among others). All of the talent either seeks positions with national outlets, or otherwise becomes stretched thin covering too many assignments, across too many areas, plus they’re probably now responsible for getting their own art (photos/video/audio/literature/brand packs/etc.) and deadlines have only become tighter with the importance of getting the story out first exacerbating an already stuffed and horribly problematic editorial calendar.
So you’re right on all counts, and it’s sadly by design as local news increasingly falls into the hands of a precious few companies and investment firms, all of whom are eager to thoroughly wring out what little value remains in these hollowed and brittle organizations.
Supposedly we shot it down after it lost elevation on the coast.
To a news cycle it is. There will surely be longform thinkpieces, investigative journalism, and maybe a Peabody or two to come out of this in a year. But as far as national headlines, simply nobody cares about a train wreck with zero casualties somewhere in the midwest.
Mmm… I love sociopaths…
Let’s pump more CO2 into the air because simply nobody cares about the global South & it will make me a bit of money I can take a vacation with.
https://twitter.com/SawyerHackett/status/1625295841769431046
Wp starts its `background` analysis <https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...> with `The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue.` The bulk of the argument is supported by this vice article <https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...> which is frankly horrifying. It's a bunch of quotes from train conductors talking about falling asleep, being tired, taking caffeine pills, etc. It ends with a 2020 derailment. "A BNSF TRAIN CARRYING OIL TANKERS DERAILED IN WASHINGTON STATE IN 2020. WORKERS ARE WORRIED MORE CRASHES LIKE THIS WILL OCCUR UNDER THE NEW ATTENDANCE POLICY."
Wp again "Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking. The Railway Labor Act grants Congress the authority to intervene in any railway or airline strike. Under this authority, the National Mediation Board has mediated negotiations between multiple freight railroads and unions starting in June 2021." and there's your crux.
then a bunch of back and forth happens, and then it ends with biden/congress/senate doing their thing. it seems like the gist of the forced solution was to raise salaries and some sick leave, but no other mitigations.
wp again, "Writing for Jacobin, Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said the message sent to the rail workers by the president and Congress was "shut up and get back to work." The Biden administration's intervention in the dispute was condemned by over 500 labor historians in an open letter to Joe Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh."
Forcing it like that is not capitalism.
Sure be a pity if you couldn't find enough people to hire to do all that train work needing to be done. Not a strike if everyone just says "Fuck it" and leaves.
Public school teacher can’t afford treatment for their cancer? Go Fund Them! Favorite politician indicted for criminal fraud and campaign finance violations for paying for their previous indictment’s legal fees using campaign donations? Go Fund Them! Local dive bar threatened with closure unless they install flushable toilets in the restrooms? Go Fund Them! Single mother of three facing another night in the cold without enough to eat? Our thoughts go out to them, maybe if their mother can pass a urine screen and remain at a single address long enough to fill out the requisite forms and has successfully completed their probation on that loitering charge then they might get a few bucks from Uncle Sam…you never know, because with Go Fund Me anything is possible!
It's another https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...
The story seems to be blowing up now, after people were saying last week it wasn't getting much attention.
Do both of these competing theories have traction? If so, why?
First had one brand new account uttering psyop nonstop with zero evidence. All their posts were flagged before the story went from front page to gone in 2secs.
The second one had several accounts saying the exact same message, in the exact format and wording as the first. And a few extras with similar but clearly different people. Also went from front page to nowhere in 2secs.
This being the third I noticed is absolutely full of these opinions. Which are entirely conspiracy theories.
If a group of activists choose this story as their attack vector, so be it. Clearly it is interesting enough to keep on fire. There's also a lot of unanswered questions and nobody has been held to any sort of account.
Maybe if we jail an executive for this we will stop seeing it.
It's just one executive, who cares.
It's more likely that nobody really cared about this until it went viral on Twitter and TikTok, when people felt a social obligation to show support. It's not bad to recognize the issue, but our willingness to shoot the messenger has prevented us from being able to learn anything in the first place. How many people would have learned about this sooner if they watched the "mainstream media" they so vehemently claim is covering it up?
I don't really care either way, it's just food for thought.
May I ask why "you don't care", though?
There is no contradiction in your two understandings, but a possible small misunderstanding in your second one.
What seems to have happened was, media was slow on the uptake (there were some stories last week, but nothing like there is now), and also it is/was getting suppressed or the severity downplayed due to external factors (for example that reporter who was arrested).
To me, you're describing the incompetence of your police forces.
> thieves steal a car, ram it into a store,
This is really considered a non-violent crime in the US?
I live in a city where car chases would be impossible. And yet there are criminals here, and they have a higher apprehension rate than in the US.
If this crime happened here, they would use drones, helicopters and roadblocks. They get way ahead of the escaping criminal. The different police departments cooperate well here, so you can't just drive to another area.
Which is why, generally, criminals dump their car almost immediately and try to escape on foot.
Definition. In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses that involve force or threat of force.
Or maybe there are other reasons, like their high value and relative ease to steal.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-64057742
https://www.tf1info.fr/justice-faits-divers/video-vols-votre...
Thanks phonetical memory of television’s “The West Wing”!
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-...
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic...
https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutter reviews for kettles, "The Man Who Caught Marilyn Monroe’s Skirt on Film," "Where #VanLife meets #SkiBum," the size of the surf waves, etc etc etc, but nothing on the train derailment.
Have these articles been showing up on the main page and I keep missing them? Or are they permanently buried in the "US News" section where I'm sure only a small fraction of Times digital readers ever turn to?
Most of it gets surfaced largely by algorithm. And it’s evident the algorithm is not tracking any interest from readers.
That's the point.
Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly.
Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal.
Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like.
Alas, I haven't heard much about them from those knowledgeable enough to chime in on the subjects and I'd love to.
As for balloons, they got boring last week, other than some airspace closures that only pilots need worry about. China has always been spying on us, the methods might be new, but not the fact of it.
It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not.
Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming—that’s the drama one story has that the other lacks.
It's not like we can't point to a time when things were majorly screwed up in a way that didn't just go away quickly despite the news moving on (Flint says hello).
Is it? Sounds like an environmental crisis with serious ramifications
> The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep coming
The balloons may keep coming - the environmental disasters are certain to keep coming.
I think the coverage tells quite a different story though, namely distractions on external "enemies", like Chinese balloons, providing cover for corporate sponsors that fund the political parties and buy ads on the major networks. Unregulated capitalism at its finest.
No, it's not. Over a thousand trains derail every year [1][2]. We have superfund sites under millions of Americans [3] that even locals can sometimes barely muster a bother with.
We also have no evidence this derailment was caused by an issue the recent deal forced, e.g. unpaid sick time. (It could have been. That would be a story.) But in the meantime it's not novel unless you're into trains or from that region. Exhibit A of that is the most interesting thing we, on Hacker News, can find to discuss about it being the meta debate.
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3539221-how-often-do-trains-der...
[2] https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/Que...
How many of them require a controlled burn of its content that forces nearby citizens to evacuate?
> We have superfund sites under millions of Americans
How many of them are a result of a derailed train?
Yes, separately those events aren't novel. Their intersection is.
> Over a thousand trains derail every year
How many of them are filled with toxic chemical substances that force the evacuation of a town?
With the balloons you have someone to point to and pin the blame who is not you.
With derailments and the recent acrimonious railworker labor agreement still in the rearview, the blame can't be cast far away; so the play is to ignore it and hope it fades.
From whom? The implicit assumption in this is that the powers that ended the railroad strike are perfectly aligned with the media. Or that bipartisan Congressional idiocy doesn’t get called out in the press. There are loads of powerful people who would benefit if this became a story. They’re not because it’s a bad story for national interest. Nobody died. It’s getting cleaned up. It happened in Ohio.
Progressives don't want to stir up anti-railroad sentiments.
The closest in the top 200 is Berkshire Hathaway [1], because they train. Also, this media hypothesis predicts Google, Pfizer, Amazon and Walmart are media darlings. (And that Apple is not.)
[1] https://advertisers.mediaradar.com/Top_Print_Advertisers
They did it in the 1970s and aside from brilliant Hollywood movies it wasn't a good decade for America. The less introspection the better as far as the media and political interests are concerned.
Absolutely. But the problem is slow, silent and lurking in the dark. (It's also safely localized.)
I'm not saying this issue deserve eyeballs. Just that there is no evidence of a scheme to suppress. The cold, dark reality is most Americans aren't interested in the long-term health of a 5,000-strong Ohio town from an accident in which nobody died, for which there is no partisan bogeyman to blame.
I'd still be more than a little concerned if I were nearby, though. And it doesn't usually take a partisan boogeyman to talk about better safety and prospects of environmental damage.
Part of the problem with that is usually exactly what you say: it really is too easy to ignore and it really shouldn't be.
... It sure as fuck isn't. You need to get more news sources than CNN and the EPA.
Instead, I orient myself to my local circle, strata, whatever you want to call it to something I can care for and manage. I recently funded a few tickets for my local highschool for a science trip for instance. I give money to a local shelter I like to stop by and say hey to. I do a lot of things for a circle I've deemed mine to care about.
So it sounds mean or rude not to care, but it's what everyone is doing. No one just wants to admit it. Champion a few causes that you can handle and let your taxes take care of what you can't.
https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr...
The exception here in Barcelona is Line 1 which is a wider gauge than all the other lines, for historical reasons though it doesn't share any tracks (but lays right beside the train ones at some stations)
In many industries, commercial competitors discover when regulators have shirked their duties. In the rail industry, with no effective competition, many theoretical regulations are not actually enforced. This problem has gotten worse over time.
Your concerns about Amtrak may be valid, but they are orthogonal to the topic at hand.
PS I didn't know the NYC metro was so big compared to the rest. Wow.