wait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.

The medical costs alone should be an eye popping number.

Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.

What medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars.

They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year.

Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive.

The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.

I was thinking lifetime costs. Every future case of cancer is going to be looked at and traced back, whether it's known to be directly attributable to the event or not. This is just a huge (un)natural experiment.

Which animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.

Hearsay: in Germany if US vehicle kills a pig, uncle sam is on the line for 6 generations of what hat pig could produce ...

Well, yes. But there was also several tank cars of acrylic ester that were breached and whose contents are now on the way into the groundwater. Anyone whose water is from a private well is not to be envied.

Are you talking about Ethylhexyl acrylate? Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures.

> Not very toxic outside of high dose acute exposures

Such as when your well is contaminated...

Surely you would volunteer to drink low doses in all your drinking water for the rest of your life then?

If I drank private well water in east Palestine I would make sure that contamination was closely monitored and drink bottled water for a while. Drinking water from the tap? Yes I would do that.

I take you have never handled acrylic esters - the stuff smells distressing, it's likely a sensitizer, and from its reactivity it just can't be good for you.

I was a chemistry major and spent a lot of time handling vocs in lab