If Northern Southern were to feel this incident in their pocket book, they might stop lobbying to gut safety regulations... However, it's very clear that neither legislative, judicial, executive or media positions give a flying fuck to stop this; in fact, they'll go to extreme lengths such as breaking strikes and media coordination to keep the status quo.
So it will happen again, and again, until one day it actually does fuck up a major city - and even then, the people responsible will probably be insulated from consequences.
Livestock is dying and getting sick in the area[1], including fish in rivers[2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinyl_chloride
[1] https://nypost.com/2023/02/10/animals-sick-dying-near-east-p...
[2] https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...
In this instance, the risks to be worried about is far more than just cancer. And it isn't exactly comparable to a career in a vinyl chloride factory because factories don't typically have these production chemicals ablaze and mixed with whatever else was in the train wreckage, seeping into the surrounding earth, water and air. Before even speculating on the undetermined adverse health effects of this event in the long term, the immediate impact of this environmental disaster should warrant a mandatory evacuation and corporate accountability.
Not rare in Ohio, anymore.
So immediately following the crash the area was dangerous, but it is already mostly safe again by now.
That amount of vinyl chloride can cause a lot of problems to the surrounding populace in several days.
Also, it doesn't break down just into HCl. It also breaks down into formaldehyde. Which is both acutely toxic and also a carcinogen, and is quite a bit more stable in the environment.
The amount that came from ten cars, spread into the atmosphere, is virtually nothing.
Erm, on what basis do you make that claim?
Ten train cars of dioxin spread over a square mile is a lot. Spread over 100 square miles? Probably still a lot, like the place in missouri that dumped it on all their roads to keep the dust down. That's probably that same order of "10 cars over 10x10 square miles", of a sufficiently nasty thing.
10 cars = safe is a number that needs context and validation and it will depend on the particular chemical.
Maybe 10 train cars of formaldehyde is fine, maybe not, but, this is something that should be assessed and not dismissed out of hand, even during discourse. Random internet commentators probably don't really know if it's fine. And despite the people on-site saying measurements are fine... animals are getting sick, which is the classic warning sign with chemical spills that things are not fine.
Although there is indeed dioxin formed during the combustion apparently. Bear in mind too that this isn't a controlled incinerator, there could be various things produced at different temps etc.
When left to break down in the environment, after several days vinyl chloride will break down into a combination of formaldehyde and hydrochloric acid. The latter of which won't be harmful, but the former will be.
It will also be destroyed in the soil by any number of mechanisms, with a half-life of about 14 days. [2]
[1] https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxfaqs/tfacts111.pdf
[2] https://webwiser.nlm.nih.gov/substance?substanceId=1&identif...
Let's say that two train cars worth sank into the ground before breaking down. Now there's two train cars worth of formaldehyde in the groundwater in a localized area.
It's not obvious to me that this is a safe situation. There are plenty of plausible scenarios that could be reality, that would be a very unsafe situation for local residents.
Thus is should be treated as though it is that worst-case bad scenario unless shown otherwise, rather than wand-waving "oh it's probably fine". These are people's lives that are at stake.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90848025/ohio-train-derailment-t...
Put your life where your mouth is and go live there.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://apnews.com/article/rail-accidents-evacuations-ohio-h...
...is the fact that nothing will change, and it is just a matter of time before this happens again, and again, and again.
Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness. It may as well not exist, except for all the harm that will continue for decades.
But the executives and shareholders have record profits, so everything is fantastic, absolutely no reason to change.
The lead story has been balloons and aliens since before the derailment.
It doesn’t help that there’s still a war in Ukraine, a earthquake in the Middle East and the Super Bowl just happened.
It’s for these reasons that a “small-town Ohio issue” is further down on the media list of priorities.
Apparently the rail operator lobbied against safety measures that could have mitigated the impact of this disaster. They probably have a decent PR budget... https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
The natural state of human affairs is crony corruption, plain and simple; currently we allow multiple corrupt states (local, county, state, each corporation's internal affairs, etc...). We should just admit our natural corruption and observe that only one can be king, and that king already exists: our federal government. The Federal government ought to make it their primary mission, as the ruling top dog in our corrupt society, do destroy all other corrupt operations stealing from them.
We are an immature, petty civilization. Let's admit our immaturity, and perhaps mature a bit as a result.
The national media isn't very good at representing issues outside of major cities. Events like this are largely unimportant to people living in the places they sell their stories to. In a way, you're not asking the media to change, you're asking Americans to care about those areas at all.
The media chases clicks and attention.
News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.
In this instance, the simplest explanation really does seem to be financial conflict of interest.
1. ”China conducts surveillance on US” gets plenty of clicks/attention. Just look at tiktok, and before that huawei/ZTE.
2. In this case specifically it's not just "China conducts surveillance on US", it's also arguably violating the territorial integrity of the US. For americans that's strikes much closer to home than shadowy hackers hacking from china.
Does it? As far as I can tell, the “TikTok spies on people” stories have all been met with “yeah, so does Facebook”. This is across pretty much the entire political spectrum. It seems to me that only the political/media class actually find it significant.
While it’s obviously too early to have non-anecdotal data on this, my instincts tell me very few people actually care or find it surprising that China “violated the territorial integrity of the U.S.” as if we’re not constantly flying drones over other world powers. It’s just standard operating procedure at this point.
Do we know that? We mainly just know they weren’t shot down over one.
It requires attention to detail combined with political will to improve safety.
You're joking right? This crash, and its potential consequences, has been covered by the NYT, WaPo, LAT, Chicago Tribune, NBC News, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, AP, USA Today, and WSJ multiple times.
What sort of bubble do people live in that they have somehow managed to avoid all of the media coverage of this accident?
"Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents who were ordered to evacuate their homes, or face death"
Serious financial implications are the only thing that will cause behavior shift in large organizations.
[1] https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424
I read this as $25,000 in total not per person.
Yet that's what they did.
I have an idea how to pay for cleanup.
They should still absolutely pay for everything, using a very liberal assessment of a model used to predict any plausible expenses for the next 1000 years converted to 2023 dollars.
Today. Because it has to stop being the next person's problem.
The employees are reported to have received a 14% raise recently. The record profits were 7% higher than 2021 with inflation for the same period at 6.5%. All of this is in the linked article.
I am not defending the actions. I have noted a problem with the term "record profits" and engage where possible to limit what I see as a problem with that language.
I'm not arguing any of your points outside of the use of the term record profits without any hard numbers. The reasoning being that record profits is the goal and normal as far as I'm concerned. A 0.5% increases should be clearly labeled due to the loaded nature of the term( In my opinion.)
These are relatively recent changes, not something that's been this way for a long time. It's part of the changeover to "precision scheduled railroad" as the rail lines like to call it.
Rail workers being overworked is just another aspect of the this change. The rail companies don't want to maintain FTEs and have cut that to the point where people can't even get unpaid days off scheduled, and are being asked to run schedules without concern to sleep etc. And that has led to some other accidents already.
But the core of the issue is this change to precision-scheduled-railroad, and the longer trains / reduced staffing that go along with it.
Yup.
What is worse is that, from what I've read, this could have been prevented by simply observing the train earlier in its journey. The cause is initially thought to be a problem with one of the wheelsets, and there was apparently a video of it going through a town 20 miles earlier shedding a shower of sparks. Simply rigging up a series of cameras on the train for the engineer/driver to observe, and they could have stopped in time to drop the failing car for repair.
Instead, they drove on blindly, straight to the inevitable wreck.
Of course, what will then happen is that rail crews will be pressured to ignore "minor" problems seen on the videos, and then get blamed when the inevitable happens.
Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s
Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution?
Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office, they aren't actually motivated by the dead kids.
Anyway, we have to get back to coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers. Dead kids is what america is built on these days.
In the US, there is no pro-workers, pro-union, fight against big corporations party in the US. There is no trustbusting party, there is no worker collectives party, there is no 35 hour workweek party. So maybe republicans can shut the fuck up about "Demoncrats are socialism" for like a minute.
But that won't happen because these are the same people who blame Biden for a 10 cent increase in gas prices that he had no control over, as made obvious when it dropped immediately after the election despite Biden still being the president. Also, if gas going up by 10 cents is enough for you to throw away any principle, or friendliness, or anything just to vote for the same guys you've always voted for, maybe consider that you are not doing very well in the world and the people you've been voting for this whole time and are largely the ones who have held power over the past fifty years have MAYBE been fucking you over?
Imagine what would have happened with a rail strike during midterms. Like just imagine. That slight-republican-lean in the house would have been more like 60-70% and who knows about keeping the senate.
Again, like, people just want their fucking amazon packages to show up, and any sort of a sense that we're backsliding into further supply chain issues (and what if a rail strike does cause that supply chain whiplash to resume, while inflation is already high etc?) is going to turn people out like crazy, and up until it affected them personally nobody really cared about this issue as an abstract point, not enough to vote on.
Now, of course, diving into further loosening of brakes/safety requirements is incredibly tone-deaf at this moment, and I think perhaps that was a case of Biden/Buttigieg not understanding that the ground shifted out from underneath them... but they were gonna!
Biden is a very keen politician in many ways, and rule #1 is don't create drama where none exists. People want deregulation, people want rail jobs, people don't like the unions, they don't want transportation disruptions to resume. Biden read that room correctly. The revealed preference of the american public is that reliable amazon packages are more important than dead kids.
And it could very well all still blow over too. America shrugs its shoulders about dead kids all the time, we run on dunkin and dead kids here.
But there's just not enough political capital to have a knock-down drag-out deathmatch over every single Right Thing To Do for people who don't even want him to do it. Every single thing Biden does goes to SCOTUS and every time it's a question of whether the court is just going to nuke that regulatory power entirely. Like the EPA. Two months ago was this the fight that the american voter in ohio thought was worth having? If anything two months ago they would have been behind him busting the union's balls on this - go back and look at some polling and I bet they are.
This is what people keep voting for, they can say whatever they want but this is the revealed preference, fighting the War On LGBT is just a lot more important than some dead kids you don't even know. You can't drag people kicking and screaming on every single issue. Biden's got things he needs to do too.
The fact that someone could say this was unforeseen with a straight face should immediately put them in the nominees for whatever acting award show of your choice.
Yes...? A wake up call is for people who don't realize something is a big deal. In quite literally every wake up call situation, someone thinks it's obvious. "Wake up" meaning "it's been in front of you this whole time, and you can't see it". The article is not targeting railroad workers, its for lawmakers, constituents, or anyone who will listen and Isn't thinking about it
It is all too clear to those who were paying attention during the strike how hard the Biden admin tried to suppress any public understanding about the actual concerns of the rail workers.
This is the most obvious outcome of the US government stepping in to break the railroad worker's strike, it was just a matter of when - not if. We're lucky it didn't happen in downtown Pittsburgh.
The worst part is that the costs of these entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophes will be nationalized. Meanwhile the railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year. Mission accomplished.