You've been frantically telling everyone to calm down in every thread about this story for some reason. People are upset because it's another case of the government completely failing to do their jobs of keeping regular people safe, and before you claim that people on reddit are saying crazy things again, this isn't reddit and no one is saying those things here.
What makes you think this isn’t what normally happens? Trains aren’t just cruising around constantly on fire.
https://www.wric.com/news/u-s-world/how-often-do-trains-dera...
If they were, would you know? I wouldn't.
Unless you are proposing a conspiracy where the train companies run them on fire only in areas with no people and then shut the fire off as they approach towns/cities/crossings.
Even though this is a private company you only blamed the government?
https://www.timesunion.com/allnews/article/Railroad-union-sa...
People are drumming up hysteria for political capital, but its not fair to people who live in Ohio or Pennsylvania and now think they can't use their water, they're doomed to cancer at 45, and their kids will be mutants.
It's being blown way of of proportion to the reality of it. It also why expert testimony is so thin. You'd think by now all the experts would be pouring out to condemn the government. Meanwhile the best NPR could get was one sentence about potential indoor air quality issues going forward (which the EPA report addresses with "no concerning levels detected".
Can you show me a single comment on this website and not on reddit that is saying those things? Also, did you know that the EPA also said that all the dust in the air on 9/11 was perfectly safe? I am not implying malice here, but sometimes the authorities are just wrong, so it seems naive to just believe them.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro...
Ask and ye shall receive, from this very thread:
> This is a total disaster that will impact the health of people in the area for generations.[1]
I've seen a few people say this. I'm sympathetic to the rail workers but, what's the evidence that this derailment had anything to do with the attempted rail workers strike? AFAIK, the primary issue there was sick leave--and, generally, a more humane work schedule. While I'm very much in favor of these things, I don't see what it has to do with this accident, other than that it presents a superficial opportunity to score some points.
Perhaps some mistake was made that would have been more likely if the workers were better rested? But if that's the extent of the connection, without any evidence of a real causal relationship, the argument seems irresponsibly speculative.
The sick day thing is the only thing that gets talked about so that people come to the same conclusion you have. That was a big part of what they wanted, sure, but they also had plenty of demands on better safety precautions.
The workers had many other complaints, including companies forcing workers to drive dangerously long trains with a single person staffing it. That seems absolutely relevant when you have a train car burning and nobody notices.
The news articles about the rail workers complaining it was unsafe seems to show they are complicit as they continued operating in unsafe conditions anyway.
Say the worker refuses that order and their boss says "okay, you're fired". Would we also give that worker legal protection? Would we also hold accountable the higher ups who gave that order and set the policies for how trains are to be run? If not, then you now understand why the accident happened.
Yes I believe that's exactly what is to happen. See this explicitly spelled out https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16 .
I've worked in goods transport in interstate navigable waterways and we had the same thing, literally anyone can "stop work" for unaddressed imminent dangerous conditions and are protected against retaliation. Even if the protection fails it is better my own family starve to death than to poison an entire city; just following orders isn't an excuse (and in any case, such a company of such character company would fire you after the wreck).
Note: this is not individualized advice and I am not a lawyer.
So a strike then? You’re literally describing what they tried to do.
- Where possible, you have asked the employer to eliminate the danger, and the employer failed to do so; and
- You refused to work in "good faith." This means that you must genuinely believe that an imminent danger exists; and
- A reasonable person would agree that there is a real danger of death or serious injury; and
- There isn't enough time, due to the urgency of the hazard, to get it corrected through regular enforcement channels, such as requesting an OSHA inspection.
Note the MOA I cited above shows the railroad enforcement has an interlocking agreement with OSHA to this effect that explains this. [0]
You're also instructed to remain on the work site which is a key difference from a "strike." You may not be protected if you say ask for more pay or sick days, so if they weren't showing up to work or asked for that it would really muddy the waters. It's my understanding the "strike" was planned days in advance so it wasn't an immediate response to imminent danger (if it was, should have just been done immediately instead it looks premeditated) and the "strike" asked for stuff like better pay or days off which then made it non-protected.
If you truly follow all of the bullets above then it's protected and the anti-strike order isn't really valid as it's considered protected stop-work activity rather than a strike.
Note: not legal advice
"The crew was able to uncouple the locomotives and move them to safety, preventing an even bigger tragedy. This would not have been possible under the various management schemes now being proposed to operate such trains with single person crews. Further, because Train 32N carried the standard crew of two or more workers, they were able to immediately take the necessary emergency measures to ensure a safe and effective response."
From a RWU email: https://myemail.constantcontact.com/Press-Release--Fiery-Ohi...
The average citizen's grasp of the medical risks of chemicals is basically negligible. But a smoke plume that reaches all the way to the cloud layer makes everyone ask questions about things they didn't care about 3 weeks ago.
Then, a safety issue that was mentioned by union leaders[0] contributes to a train derailment days later. These seem very related to me, can you enlighten me as to why they're not?
[0] - https://www.timesunion.com/allnews/article/Railroad-union-sa...
Turns out, people are right to question things that don't pass their smell test. Sometimes, there's a reasonable explanation, other times there's not
Follow-up on the question in Flint found both elevated lead levels in kids and a mechanism by which the changed purification process released previously-fixated lead in pipes.
In contrast, this is a big scary smoke cloud of a well-understood volatile compound that we've spilled into the ecosystem in the past and already tracked the effects of. We know what vinyl chloride, phosgene, and hydrochloric acid do.
In past events, vinyl chloride was not burned, and minimal amounts of it went unrecovered. We also know that hydrogen chloride is a byproduct of burning vinyl chloride, and when combined with water, makes hydrochloric acid, which is not good to come into contact with, and has killed many of the fish in East Palestine. We know vinyl chloride is a cancer-and-birth-defect-causing carcinogen. We also have seen some evidence that animals nearby are dropping dead and humans feeling sick.
We also know that the rail company, purposefully or not, did not accurately tell officials which chemicals were released. We also know in the past that corporations responsible for ecological disasters have repeatedly downplayed the incidents.
We also know that rail union leaders were talking about the exact safety concerns that led to this derailment, and were told to suck it up by strikebreaking federal officials.
The correct thing to do is not dismiss concerns, but to put in place measures to stop corner-cutting and provide guidance to residents of East Palestine that isn't just "don't worry about it". There are real concerns here and no one is providing real evidence that things are safe.
This is precisely the kind of decontextualized data that leads to inaccurate conclusions. Without data on normal animal die-off rates, there's no reason to believe finding dead animals is unusual in this part of town.
And of course people feel sick; they've been told they were exposed to a scary chemical. It's going to be very hard to separate psychosomatic effect from physiological effect.
(The dead fish are probably directly causal. Swimming in hydrochloric acid will do that. But they can also directly sample the water to figure out if the HCL levels are dangerous for human consumption or contact, and I've seen no reporting to suggest that is the case; fish are way more sensitive to water quality than humans).
> The correct thing to do is not dismiss concerns, but to put in place measures to stop corner-cutting
No argument there. Independent of this specific accident, we know there's a pattern of accident rate increase that indicates a culture of lax safety standsrds (and I completely believe the rail workers who have told us they are heavily incentivized to cut those corners). That should stop.
> and provide guidance to residents of East Palestine that isn't just "don't worry about it".
Unfortunately, that is the only guidance in the absence of other data. Otherwise, proving "everything is fine" is proving a negative. Is the question "is their risk higher than last month?" Yes. "How much higher?" Pretty much not very much if they didn't get sick by now. "What should we do?" They're doing it in the form of burning off the carcinogen and checking low-lying areas for any escaped volatiles.
What else is there? For an average citizen, they may as well go pray to whatever god they believe in; it's as useful a preventative as anything else they could do.
But they have not yet done this, and tests are a week out. FEMA hasn't provided food or resources to residents of East Palestine. Churches in Youngstown are traveling en masse to provide any kind of support. There's videos of entire coops of chickens dying out. But oh, this is all just a misunderstanding? Sorry, but are you f***ing kidding me? When are you gonna start looking with your eyes rather than listening to what people with clear conflicts-of-interest are telling you? I bet you thought there was nothing to be done about Uvalde too, huh?
There is currently a rampant bird flu ripping through the US shared between wildlife and farm chickens with a 90%-100% mortality over 48 hours. This is exactly the kind of situation human threat-assessment is bad at.
I know experts make mistakes, but replacing expert wisdom with "the guesses of the masses" is a bad idea in general. I don't trust Norfolk Southern, but I trust a mob a darn sight less.
This is where you're wrong. Experts don't make mistakes in situations like this. They consistently [0] downplay [1] every [2] environmental [3] disaster [4] and withhold information from neutral parties until it loses the public's attention. When are we going to stop acting like this isn't standard operating procedure? When are we going to assume that this is default behavior of people responsible for disasters?
[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-toxic-cover-up/
[1] - https://www.history.com/news/chernobyl-disaster-coverup
[2] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-oil-rig-leak-idUSTRE6430A...
[3] - https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/flint-water-crisis/six-mor...
[4] - https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/california-finds-pge-equipme...
"We don't really know" is simply false. This isn't a mystery chemical; we've been working with the stuff since 1835, we've spilled it into the environment numerous times, and we are decently familiar with it enough that even given experts with vested interests will downplay the risks, I have no reason to believe panic is in order. It's not safe to swim in, I wouldn't spread it on toast, but it's a well-known HAZMAT story with a well-understood mitigation.
While NPR reported there were concerns from citizens, they also went looking for people who would provide causes for concern in their reporting and found none: not only from the rail company (where you wouldn't expect to find them), but from anywhere. The largest concerns expressed were from an OSU professor that said to wash surfaces and look out for low-lying areas. Plenty of chemical experts would have plenty to gain contradicting the party line if the party line were untrue; the fact we don't see them really should indicate in this case that there's (no pun intended) no fire here.
What is your goal in this exchange?
> It has never been burned at anywhere near this quantity
I'm curious your source for that assertion.
https://www.csb.gov/formosa-plastics-vinyl-chloride-explosio...
Either way, boring. Move on elsewhere. Maybe Reddit will be more susceptible to your lying rhetoric.
This feels like a motte and bailey. A quick skim of the comments in this thread that people are equally worried about the health impacts from the accident specifically, as about the general plight of railway workers and/or the state of safety on railways. The NPR article also largely talks about health impacts from the specific accident rather than systemic safety issues. I'm not saying that people aren't outraged about the systemic safety issues on railways, but it's pretty clear that the main thing on people's mind is the immediate environmental impacts.
Railroads were a sleepy corner of the world for a long time, until business types realized that trucking had peaked out from a capacity perspective. These companies are all chasing higher return on assets at all costs.
Motor carriers are much better regulated than rails because the railroads are all consolidated and they can hook themselves to politically powerful industries like coal and oil.
As the parent stated, roads are regulated more effectively and strictly. If you are a CDL driver with a carrier with lots of violations, you can lose your license for a minor brake violation or even a torn seat. That creates a market dynamic where drivers refuse to drive for shitty carriers.
Do you have a link talking about this? Any timeline I read online just mentions the derailment around 9p, nothing about a car fire prior to derailment. Thanks.
Also DemocracyNow! has been covering the disaster the last two days featuring interviews with both local residents and railway workers.
Ifwe did the same shit they get away with, we'd be in jail real fast
Unfortunately, a wheel/bearing running hot for ~20 miles could be well inside the usual spacing for defect detector stations[1] in the US. Can't speak for this specific rail line but they're often as far as 30 miles apart, and not every detector will have the sensor package to identify wheel/bearing issues (though most will).
If you ever ride Amtrak, you'll occasionally hear trackside detector units radio in a diagnostic report over the conductors' radios. They have automated voice systems that announce their position, sensor reading states, etc.
Seems too early to tell doesn't it? I don't think you can safely say "it would hardly register" without knowing the results from the contaminated regions...
--
Water Runoff
Responding crews discovered contaminated runoff on two surface water streams: Sulphur Run and Leslie Run. Under Ohio EPA oversight, Norfolk Southern emergency response contractors installed booms and underflow dams to restrict the flow of contaminated water as well as contain and collect floating product.
U.S. EPA took water samples at the streams and has sent them to a laboratory for analysis. Emergency response staff noticed impacted aquatic life and notified the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Department of Interior. Ohio DNR is on site and is assessing the situation and the impacts to aquatic life. Downstream water utilities were also notified.
Unless you were onsite testing what was in the runoff and have the results, you're speculating.
Clearing the first hurdle is hard, clearing the second is even harder.
The whistle has been blown on the rails and the rail companies for some time, and now a catastrophe has occurred.
We should be severely punishing the rail companies if not nationalizing them. We should make sure every citizen is taken care of and their homes are safe to live in.
I don't have to believe in a conspiracy theory to be angry at negligence causing an environmental disaster in a city.
Meanwhile the chemical industry kill the gods only know how many thousands of people over the course of decades with a steady trickle of statistically correlated illnesses, but the media doesn't cover it and the consumers of chemical goods feel insulated from harm which seems very abstract and indirect to them. A consumer buying a chemical good is not directly imperiled by the chemical industry in the same way as an airline flier is threatened by airline crashes.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out why the airline industry is better at safety than the chemical industry.
Nationalizing trains will not help. Nationalizing chemical transfers won't help either if it's the same EPA in charge that said 9/11 debris was safe or this spill was okay.
Heavier regulations on trains may be needed, especially when transferring hazardous loads, but nationalization would be horrendous.
All that be said, investing in pipelines is a much safer form of transfer for these chemicals. Trains are too risky.
I'll let the citizens of East Palestine know they need to stay calm lest someone propose a policy solution you don't like.
Is this a joke?
Responsibility is a quaint tradition of a lost America.
The main character in the book is a railroad executive struggling to keep her company afloat in the face of ruinous regulations that were designed to drive the rail systems towards nationalization.
The flip side of course, that she fails to address completely in that book, is unethical behavior by private industry, such as super trains with one engineer, unsafe working conditions, etc...
It also doesn't have corporations.
(though I agree that smacking down these workers was some real bullshit)
Mmph.
Hm.
I guess if Dianetics is a work on metaphysics, sure.
There are many philosophers that I disagree with, but I wouldn't challenge whether they or their works are philosophical in nature.
Atlas Shrugged used trains and science fiction as a literary device to illustrate her philosophy.
I found it to be more engaging than her non-fiction works, which was the point, I suppose.
But everyone wants to cover how it smells in East Palestine and not what the options were.
(And to everyone replying with "But it's ACTUALLY about the train safety issue": no it isn't. This train was sitting in a pile for more than a week and no one cared. People only cared once they could see the plume.)
No one cared because it wasn't reported in the media, even today it barely is. I've seen locals talk about it since day 1 on reddit and twitter. The fact that it didn't make much noise in the media until now is a good indicator of authorities trying to minimise the issue.
As far as the actual technicals, your assertion that "the combustion products are simply much safer than the products that were leaking" would seem to just be the opposing take in a fact-free debate. First, combustion products have been dispersed in the air. And second, with large quantities of anything, trace amounts of impurities or other combustion products become significant.
I don't think that's correct. It was leaking. No recovery was feasible. The options at hand were "let it leak" or "burn it", and burning it was the right choice.
Now, maybe you don't believe that. And of course I believe it on faith. But real chemical engineers are making these decisions, not yahoos on HN. And the fact that you perceive a "breakdown in trust" of those engineers doesn't make them wrong. If you want them to be wrong you need to provide evidence yourself.
Are they? What proof do you have?
Personally, I've seen management and bean counters override engineers constantly, so I tend to assume that's standard.
I do not see how leaking would preclude recovery. Perhaps recovery wasn't economically feasible. And from the manifest linked elsewhere in the thread, all but one vinyl chloride cars are listed as "car did not leak".
> the fact that you perceive a "breakdown in trust" of those engineers doesn't make them wrong
No, what makes them wrong (as in, not doing everything they can to minimize harm) is the orders/incentives coming down from management. Boss says to do the cheapest option possible, they look at the top-line combustion products and regulations regarding releasing them, and sign off on the cheaper burn plan. We get the same thing in software with the zeitgeist of working for surveillance companies. It's a massive ethical violation, but everyone's gotta eat, and if you rock the boat it costs you personally.
> If you want them to be wrong you need to provide evidence yourself
I'm not responsible for releasing chemicals into residential areas, nor for lighting them on fire. It's incumbent upon the railway and responders to prove that their actions were justified and correct in minimizing the damage to bystanders.
People are rightfully worried and angered. Your dismissal of them as "losing their mind" or "hysterical" is at best tone deaf, and at worst an intentional tactic to downplay the event. Appeals to governmental authority falls flat when the trust of the people no longer exists for their governmental institutions.
From the article: U.S. EPA continues to assist Norfolk Southern and Columbiana Emergency Management Agency with voluntary residential air screening. ... To increase the rate of screening, Norfolk Southern—with U.S. EPA assistance—is bringing more teams and equipment to East Palestine.
You expect Norfolk Southern to perform honest screening which would result in millions upon millions in damages to be paid out? Why isnt the EPA in charge of this rather than following the lead of Norfolk?
> Since January 2016, EPA has been monitoring compliance with its emergency administrative order (as amended) to ensure that Flint’s drinking water system continues to improve. Flint’s system currently meets regulatory criteria for lead and copper. EPA will continue to oversee the City’s efforts to transition to a long-term drinking water source and also monitor its replacement of lead (and galvanized) service lines throughout Flint
Do you know if they recommended it right away or after a few days?
The amount of blame that got pinned on them after the fact was probably pretty unfair.
If I can remember later, I'll come back and post a NASA satellite image showing the particle density that I saved from that morning
These are guys on a side of a track ostensibly just winging it. I think it's reasonable to assume the "under laboratory conditions" assessment might not completely apply to this scenario.
250,000 gallons (if it was 10 cars and all 10 converted perfectly to HCl, and all of it went into the water supply) into a water table of, lets be conservative with 10 billion gallons, is 0.00002% concentration or .02ppm
Compare this to your stomach, which has an hydrochloric acid concentration of 5000ppm.
So yes, I would have no issue with it. All the water you drink mixes with a much higher concentration of HCl every time you drink it.
Like I said, their is a hysteria building around this and a total lack of nuance and understanding.
For reference 1 inch of rain over 1 sq. mile is approximately 18 million gallons.
So even if we concentrated the full 250k gallons (remember that HCl is just one byproduct too, so we are being very generous with 250k gallons, most of the byproducts are carbon monoxide/dioxide), but 250k gallons into 1 sq mile of rain fall....138ppm
In reality this will fall over thousands of square miles too.
Problem is the only way you know if this is occurring is constant sampling and testing over the affected region by a competent and trustworthy set of testing groups.
VC is a gas a room temperature. None of the VC cars were ruptured in the crash. They were vented and ignited by workers to avoid explosion. Burning VC produces carbon oxides, HCl, phosgene, and formaldehyde. HCl, Phosgene become hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere. The total amount of hydrochloric acid this could possibly produce would hardly register in the water table. Formaldehyde would be trace too, similar to fruits and vegetables.
EPA site details without the hysteria:
https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593...
List of cars in the accident:
https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%2...