Health concerns mounting as animals become sick after train derailment
wkbn.com
wkbn.com
I keep hearing this rhetoric around social media… Do people not realize that there is a cost to our retirement funds always having to increase in value?
Only 60 million Americans have a 401k.
Also, the idea that an American owning a portfolio of stocks in a 401k means that they are responsible for all the immoral actions taken by each company is absolutely and totally ridiculous.
A disproportionate amount of equity growth goes to the wealthy but the middle class has also hitched their futures to the stock market through 401ks. This means that "well, grandma's retirement also depends on record corporate profits" is a nearly invincible tactic against anything that diminishes corporate profits. The folks that own a disproportionate amount of equities get to untouchably balloon their wealth and there is nothing to stop them because stopping them would mean blowing up a generation's retirement plan.
I do agree that now it is an organized effort by capital and that efforts to move social security to a system similar to private 401k accounts (which has been pushed by the right since before W Bush) would absolutely do what you say - seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. I just think that this was an opportunity seized by capital rather than a change planned from the beginning.
They don't care. The costs are minimal compared to the profits, the bad PR can be massaged, etc.
Edit: also forgot that the president and both halves of congress have clearly telegraphed "full speed ahead" after the recent nonsense around the railroad union strikes. These workers aren't even getting time off for sick days or family emergencies (the latter of which is almost certainly a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act.)
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-signs-bill-block-us-r...
>“All the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal background, what you would find in almost any community operating outside,” said James Justice with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Somebody is lying.
She used every excuse she had: "We weren't going to let the terrorists win" "My son was in building 7 and almost died" "We needed to get the city back on its feet"
The Trump administration had replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and natural gas extraction bans, weakened the Coal Ash Rule, which regulates the disposal of toxic coal waste, and revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards–just to name a few
Here's a full list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...
And that doesn't count the extralegal strategies used by the administration to bring the department to a halt
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...
The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.
The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.
It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.
Although what they actually said is that all the readings they've recorded are normal.
The most disconcerting thing is that vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, so there may be many people who have been exposed to enough to give them cancer but who won't know about it for some years yet
Phosgene was a chemical weapon in WW1 and was especially problematic because, drumroll please, it's heavier than air and doesn't dissipate readily. That's one reason they roundabout mention checking air in people's homes.
Air readings could be manipulated simply by taking them from the tops of hills, or upwind, or even a relatively low altitude via plane. People who don't know phosgene is heavier than air would not realize what was going on.
The EPA claims they have a multi-stage containment system in place, and that the ground water and Ohio River are not at risk.
I don’t see how that is possible, but since this is HN, I’m hoping someone will point to an article explaining how modern spill containment works.
> Cars involved in the derailment contained vinyl chloride, combustible liquids, butyl acrylate, benzene residue cars (railroad cars that previously contained benzene,” the release stated, “and nonhazardous materials such as wheat, plastic pellets, malt liquors and lube oil.”
Affectionately known as Brutal Acrylate.
In scientific terminology, that's some nasty smelling shit. Toxic too.
If there's enough of it spilled you could smell minuscule amounts a mile away easier than an instrument could get a valid reading though.
It's one of those.
The odor threshold of volatile acrylates is orders of magnitude lower than other flammable toxic chemicals like methanol, but the instrumental detectability of acrylates is not really any more sensitive than regular low-odor chemicals by comparison.
IOW the instrument is better at detecting low-odor chemicals than your nose is, but your nose is more sensitive to things that have a very strong characteristic odor like acrylates.
https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2015/04/27/...
I think they also dropped the ball on lead in drinking water supplies across the USA. It's another 'regulatory capture' situation, most likely.
Like the history of cigarette health. Or how axon claims tazers are safe by hiring docs to publish they are safe and inventing things like “excited delirium”…
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.
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?
If you'd dug even a little you'd see that the classification of these trains at a lower hazard level than probably warranted dates back at least to the Obama administration and probably further. So again, what does this have to do with JD Vance other than the steel man argument I already gave?
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.
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.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/09/reporter-arrested-o...
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.
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...
https://architecturalafterlife.com/2020/07/city-view-center/
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. They've been running fewer and fewer people per train and longer and longer trains, and it's getting unsafe.
(it's the same reason freight trains no longer yield to passenger in america despite being statutorily required to - the freight trains are too long for the sidings, oops, guess we can't pull over, you'll have to! Trains have just gotten longer and less staffed and much closer to the safety capacity of the equipment as they get longer and heavier, and this is just one of many exciting ways this is playing out!)
There is no way out of this without getting more people into train crews and reducing the size of the trains. The brakes on these trains can't safely stop a train of this length, and the derailleur equipment currently installed can't even safely derail trains of these lengths if they break loose, so when they go they go into a big pile of other cars and you get a massive industrial accident. 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 20 years and become a critical issue in the last 5 years.
But pushing back on industry is a big no in America these days, Republicans aren't going to do back a union let alone go against industry (name a single ohio republican that would not have leapt on the framing of "Biden picks unions over rail jobs and christmas") 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. Open for business, right?
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 wife's shopping mall 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. Let alone any sort of fun genotoxic effect or pregnancy problems in the middle of abortion-war central. And it's not just this one place either, Ohio is a mess of all kinds of industrial shit. Ohio DGAF, is Intel worth your family getting cancer over?
Economists have this idea called "revealed preference". The revealed preference here is that winning the War On Egghead Intellectuals, this year's installment of the War On LGBTQ, and the War On Climate Science is more important than not having dead kids. This has been repeatedly been made clear for 3 decades now. And Biden is just past the point where he cares about forcing angry toddlers to do the right thing, he's not gonna deathmatch SCOTUS over this of all things for people who don't even want him to and will frame him as just doing it for the union. People want their fucking amazon packages, they want Dow-Corning and 3M and Duke Coal jobs, if you wanna kill your kids or give them turbocancer so that parcel delivery line-costs go down 5% then nobody's gonna stop you, Amazon thanks you for your service to America's profit margins. Uncle Joe has always been a lot better at politics than people give him credit for, why make drama where none exists?
Everyone just metaphorically wants to go have dinner, can we please just not fight about this for once? That's why nobody is talking about it.
(Michigan also had that same plating company dump a bunch more hexavalent chromium into the Huron River again, so to be fair Ohio is not alone in midwest toxic spill stories flying under the radar! But it seems likely Whitmer/Nessel will put the hammer down, I am guessing the remediation is going to get a lot quicker and a lot less "voluntary"/"self-reported".)
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, or gotten super cool lead poisoning from an emergency manager after being stripped of their democratic process. We shrugged about helping 9/11 first responders, you think people really care about some dead kids?
People don't care, not really, they say they do but they don't vote like it. The whole "thoughts and prayers" meme is a nod to just how little we really care. 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, people will line up and vote on that shit. 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.
The revealed preference of american society is stability above morality or dead kids. And we're willing to go pretty authoritarian too to get that stability, if it comes down to it, like the emergency manager shit. Biden's doing a great job catering to what americans really want and vote on, which is making the damn amazon packages show up.
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. Not unless an awful lot of people suddenly start being cool about an awful lot of stuff.
Inhalation: Several minutes of exposure to high, but attainable concentrations (over 1000 ppm) may cause difficulty breathing, central nervous system depression and symptoms such as: ataxia or dizziness, drowsiness or fatigue, loss of consciousness, headache, euphoria and irritability, visual and or hearing disturbances, nausea, memory loss. Prolonged, high concentration exposures may cause unconsciousness or death. Cardiac: Acute intoxication may cause irregular heartbeats.
Chronic Effects: Chronic exposure to vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) may cause damage to the nervous system, respiratory system, musculoskeletal system, and lymphatic system. Occupational overexposure has produced a specific cancer. (angiosarcoma of the liver) and is associated with hepatocellular cancer. Repeated prolonged exposure may damage: skin (scleroderma), bones (acro-osteolysis), blood vessels in the hands (Raynaud's Syndrome). Suspected of causing genetic defects. Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child. Reproductive effects and testes damage occurred in rats exposed to vinyl chloride. These endpoints, however, were generally noted at concentrations greater than those necessary to cause liver damage.
Looks like a lot of cost-cutting (not shipping on trains with the most modern safe braking systems?) and regulatory shenanigans (not classified as highly hazardous material?) were involved in this... oh wait, it gets better...
> "Thousands in East Palestine, a town of about 5,000 people, evacuated, and officials warned the controlled burn would create a phosgene and hydrogen chloride plume across the region. Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble, and was used as a weapon in the first world war."
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/ohio-train-d...
I'm a mathematician, not a chemist, but I do know about about phosgene.
The memorable thing about phosgene is not that is causes "breathing trouble" but that it will kill you dead, dead, dead, and once you have a lethal dose, there is no effective treatment, and that it's a "linear poison" - small concentrations over hours and days have exactly the same effect as large concentrations for minutes (many poisons don't work that way).
So sad to see another struggling Midwest town dealt a death blow.
It’s beautiful country even though it’s considered fly over and “blue collar” which is politically correct terminology for post-industrial poor.
The EPA has roots from the Cuyahoga River fires. There was great progress made cleaning up the river and even turning portions of Northeast Ohio into a national park.
Proud to be a Northeast Ohioan. There has been great steps forward since the industrial hay day.
This whole event makes me so sad. This community will most likely never recover and I’m hoping against hope there aren’t serious health consequences or birth defects from this. Though I highly doubt it.
But "midwest" is a term for a region, and terms last longer than the reason for the term. When the term was coined, the US essentially ended at Chicago, and Ohio was midwest.
Hmm. I must be in a mellow mood today. I've made the exact same complaint you did when others said Pittsburgh was "midwest".
I've always understood it as a sort of historical anchoring bias. Compared to the areas that were settled during colonial times, Ohio was indeed "West" in people's minds, just less so than the Pacific coast.
In places like Ohio, you were midway there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Palestine,_Ohio
Took a while for me to figure out the connection with Midwest towns.
https://www.levernews.com/rail-companies-blocked-safety-rule...
Related: Louis Rossmann - New York let tech companies WRITE THE LAW! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujCQCVHukx0
https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/about/media/train-dera...
Final NTSB report: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/...
Which isn't to say nothing is going on either, this was a colossal regulatory failure letting these companies overwork train operators and not forcing rail operators to upgrade the braking systems. But let's also not jump to conclusions.
"White Noise" is a darkly comic novel that explores themes of death, consumerism, and technology. The story takes place in a small Midwestern town where a poisonous cloud, known as "The Nanny," is hanging over the area and threatening the lives of its residents. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler Studies who becomes obsessed with the cloud and its effects on the people around him. "White Noise" is widely regarded as one of DeLillo's best works and is considered a seminal work of postmodern fiction.”
We had a fertilizer plant go up in flames last year about this time in Winston-Salem, NC, which is 50 miles from us which was alarming even at this radius.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-...
Anyway, the poisonous cloud is perhaps metaphorically hanging over the town, but only during a short section of the novel is there actually a cloud. Though maybe in terms of pages the cloud isn’t over the town very long, but several weeks pass?
This summary is mostly right? I guess?
I had a girlfriend early in college who's grandmother lived deep in rural Ohio; we visited the area frequently and it involved driving past several.
A bit of obscure trivia I learned while down there, "Russia, Ohio" is pronounced like "Roo-She". I was told this was because of the Cold War but even in my late teens "I wasn't so sure". The dialect of Southern English spoken by Grandma and the local population was a cross between deep Appalachia, slowly spoken and ... I don't know ... English-like words[1].
[0] Nice to see Wikipedia had the goofy pronounciation. It did not explain "why", unfortunately.
[1] She had an English (only) speaking neighbor who had the most "articulated"/"exaggerated" variant -- I remember having "Tonne Cohwa" or "Tonne Cohs" (plural) translated for me after several attempts to figure out WTF that referred to... Yeah. It was the word Taco. We were talking about the cold weather, I thought.
I’m about 40 miles from Russia, OH. We’ve also got Versailles (pronounced like the “ver” in “verb” and “sales”), Houston (pronounced “house ton”), Lima (long I, like the bean), and Eldorado (long A) all in a 100 mile radius. We have some Native American names for cities and counties, too.
Turns out, it was named after the famous Algerian revolutionary, Abd El Kader, who was widely respected in the West, including France, who he fought against: