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.
Surely you can understand the correlation between policies that take away safety measures for (marginal) profit increase & catastrophic disasters happening because of a lack of safety measures.
https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
Nothing is going to change (in this case railway/environmental disasters) until lawmakers that care about implementing proper safety measures are elected. Or any sort of accountability at all.
I’m aware that sounds like a pretty poor alloy, but it’s internally consistent, matches the observables, and I can’t really honestly do better.
Edit: The point of this is to explain what this derailment has to do with JD Vance. Any reply that fails to explain why JD Vance is somehow personally involved is failing to do better than the offered steel man. Just generally supporting policies you disagree with merely makes him a bad guy. You do think he’s bad for supporting these policies you believe are bad right? Next you have to show that a freshman senator in the minority who’s been in office for a month is somehow responsible even indirectly. I’d like to see a better effort to steel man that than mine.
Incidentally, in the USA Congress has delegated the power to regulate rail safety to the Executive branch which last I knew was controlled by the Good Guys. So I’m really at a loss how to show that this has anything to do with a freshman senator in the minority. I begin to think nobody else knows how to either. The miasma theory of Vance’s affiliation with the Bad Guys somehow making bad things happen in his state really is the best argument anyone has presented here.
What do you know, slashing a bunch of environmental regulations.
Did you come across this in your efforts to figure out how someone could possibly believe Vance would support deregulation on the environment?
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...
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.
There is no way out of this without getting more people into train crews and reducing the size of the trains. The derailleur equipment currently installed can't even safely derail trains of these lengths. 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 10 years and it's going to continue until something changes.
But pushing back on industry is a big no in America these days, Republicans aren't going to do it 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.
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 kids' playground 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.
I mean, it's depressing, even devastating, but it's better to know the truth.
It's just, it's the same dead kids every week. This week they died in a super cool explosion or got super cool cancer instead of dying in a super cool school shooting or choked to death by a couple super cool cops or died of a super cool preventable illness because their medication costs $2k a month.
People don't care, not really, they say they do but the way they vote says they don't. You wanna see people get real unhappy and start voting some fuckers out, make the flow of amazon packages stop. The dead kids don't matter, not like the packages do. If there is the perception of things going back to the way they were in 2020 with the supply chain people are gonna lose their fucking shit and vote in some really despicable motherfuckers (oh, it can always get worse). The trains gotta run.
America just wants to have a normal dinner for once. Yep, some kids died, that happens every week here and we just move on. More kids are gonna die next week, and the week after that too. Open for business, buddy, did I fucking stutter?
Shikata ga nai. There just isn't.
https://apnews.com/article/law-enforcement-pennsylvania-mike...
But within the article:
> At the end of his news conference, [Gov. Mike] DeWine said he didn’t authorize the arrest and reporters have “every right” to report during briefings.
> “If someone was stopped from doing that, or told they could not do that, that was wrong,” DeWine said.
Seems OP's statement is a bit generally misleading statement for a single incident, without also knowing the full details that prompted the arrest in the first place.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/09/reporter-arrested-o...
Vinyl chloride also known as vinyl monomer is used to make PVC.
It is a gas which is liquefied under pressure in a similar way to propane, so tanks and rail cars must be completely airtight at all times.
Otherwise the entire liquid cargo will rapidly be expelled under pressure as a liquid from any opening on the bottom of the vessel, or the entire liquid cargo will still evaporate quite rapidly and eventually all escape as a gas stream through defects or open valves on the top part of the vessel.
Any VCM liquid spilled will act like propane and rapidly turn into a gas which will disperse much wider through the air much more rapidly.
Not much is going to soak into the soil or be carried away by water drainage channels.
If it was an acetone spill or something like that it wouldn't evaporate nearly as fast, nor present as widespread an atmospheric content downwind, and you would have to get a lot closer to the spill to detect the vapors or smell it yourself even for a briskly evaporating liquid like acetone.
But the VCM is not only flammable, it is actually a highly toxic gas.
VCM smells exactly like most brand-new PVC shower curtains, because VCM's exactly what you're smelling in very small concentrations, as any residual monomer often outgasses strongly the first few days after hanging the curtain.
In an unventilated bathroom I would think that's often beyond the recognized working VCM levels allowed in industrial facilities.