Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment | Hacker News Reader

Health concerns grow in East Palestine, Ohio, after train derailment

npr.org

611 pointsJimmc414559 comments

- "On Sunday, the EPA released a list, written by Norfolk Southern, of the toxic chemicals that were in the derailed cars. In addition to vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, it mentions ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it; as well as isobutylene, which can make people dizzy and drowsy."

This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded "list of toxic chemicals" was not public prior to Sunday.

Here's ABC's reporting by way of comparison: "There were more toxic chemicals on train that derailed in Ohio than originally reported, data shows"

https://abcnews.go.com/US/toxic-chemicals-train-derailed-ohi...

(Another notable diff is that ABC describes ethylhexyl acrylate as a "carcinogen", linking to a CDC page as a cite. NPR's exposition reads differently: "ethylhexyl acrylate, which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems in people exposed to it;").

> which can cause headaches, nausea, and respiratory problems.... can make people dizzy and drowsy

I also love this phrasing that talks about the immediate uncomfortable reactions, but makes no mention on the extremely serious long-term implications of exposure.

These chemicals won't just make you feel unpleasant in the moment, they'll kill you in the long run.

I mean, I guess "lung cancer" is technically a "respiratory problem" but damn...

This. That's like saying a radiation exposure can make you "see funny lights" — while being technically true, this is not the important thing to underline given a situation where such a danger is out there in the environment.

Makes you wonder.

The dose makes the poison

Unfortunately a single rail car can carry in excess of 30,000 gallons of dosing, and a single train can have several millions of gallons all together.

How many ppm is that?

Tongue in cheek, but assume it all got spread out over the city, I suppose.

This looks very difficult to calculate unless you're already familiar with the dynamics at play. Here's an extremely relevant paper from 2019 on the topic:

https://www.consiltant.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/201909...

> the speed [of evaporation] is determined by, among other things, the pressure in the system, temperature of the substance, substance properties such as boiling point, vapor pressure, molecular weight and density and of course the size of the hole.

Trying to do napkin math of dividing 30,000 gallons into the volume of air over a city under a certain altitude seems like a pointless exercise given the very long list of parameters that would highly influence its dispersion.

> can make people dizzy and drowsy

LMFAO vinyl chloride is a multi-organ carcinogen...its literally one of the quickest ways to stage 4 right up there with Benzene exposure.

phosgene was also part of the release when Ohio decided a "controlled burn" of the vinyl chloride was somehow a good idea. the plume could be seen from commercial flights.

honest to god the damage control media outlets are attempting in the midst of what by every definition is just under a massive environmental disaster is just ridiculous. If this happened in China it would be front page news.

> honest to god the damage control media outlets are attempting in the midst of what by every definition is just under a massive environmental disaster is just ridiculous. If this happened in China it would be front page news.

Is it damage control or just some strange calculation that it isn't a story that will attract page views?

Both rationales are concerning, but they suggest different pathologies in our media ecosystem.

It's honestly that there's not much story because it looks worse than it is.

Chemicals are counter-intuitive. People don't have a good match for looks-scary to is-scary.

I watch the Checmical Safety Board incident report videos from time-to-time. The most common killer in chemical plants? Carbon monoxide: odorless, colorless, tasteless, and simply displaces oxygen. You climb into an enclosed space, have just enough time to realize something's wrong (maybe) before you pass out, and never wake up. The methyl isocyanate that killed in Bhopal rolled along the ground creating a silent blanket of death.

A giant black plume climbing into the cloud layer is scary looking but in no way correlated, one way or another, with the actual risk to public safety. Made for great 6 o'clock news footage, but the followup story really is just "Clean the soot off your house and maybe check your basement for any chemical that rolled away before it burned."

> LMFAO vinyl chloride is a multi-organ carcinogen...its literally one of the quickest ways to stage 4 right up there with Benzene exposure.

No it’s not

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

> Vinyl chloride exposure is associated with an increased risk of a rare form of liver cancer (hepatic angiosarcoma), as well as primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia.

If there's some fact in the parent comment which is in dispute could you please be a bit more clear about what it is? This is a very unhelpful comment from you.

Don’t chide me. Parent comment is ridiculous and harmful fearmongering and hyperbole. Read your own link - there is no mention of carcinogenicity* from acute exposure and environmental a biological persistence is very low. I would be more concerned if I spent a career in a vinyl chloride production facility without proper ppe.

There is no language in that link that limits the risks to long term exposure. If you follow the OSHA link on that page, you'll see that the ERPG-3 is 20000 ppm; that's the level at which some people will start facing lethal complications after an hour of exposure.

If you're gonna argue that there are no consequences to acute exposure, you gonna have to provide some sources.

20,000 ppm! Do you understand how high that is??

"The levels required for acute exposure risk ate very high" is factually quite different from "there is no risk from acute exposure."

Additionally, an hour is also several orders of magnitude shorter than a week.

I'm not saying that the residents are facing concerning exposure levels, however your attempts to dismiss that concern have been either incorrect or factually lacking. If you are trying to correct misinformation, you need to raise the bar.

Parent comment referred to carcinogenicity.

Yes, it is classified as a carncinogen.

> Carcinogenic classifications: EPA-K;A, IARC-1, NIOSH-Ca, NTP-K, OSHA-Ca, TLV-A1

Not from acute exposure!

High enough you could start using percentages!

> Don’t chide me. Parent comment is ridiculous and harmful fearmongering and hyperbole. Read your own link - there is no mention of harm from acute exposure and environmental an biological persistence is very low.

Reading the Wikipedia link it's not so clear if only continuous exposure elevates cancer risk. However it also lists significant acute effects:

> Prior to 1974, workers were commonly exposed to 1,000 ppm vinyl chloride, causing "vinyl chloride illness" such as acroosteolysis and Raynaud's Phenomenon. The symptoms of vinyl chloride exposure are classified by ppm levels in ambient air with 4,000 ppm having a threshold effect.[17] The intensity of symptoms varies from acute (1,000–8,000 ppm), including dizziness, nausea, visual disturbances, headache, and ataxia, to chronic (above 12,000 ppm), including narcotic effect, cardiac arrhythmias, and fatal respiratory failure.[18] RADS (Reactive Airway Dysfunction Syndrome) may be caused by acute exposure to vinyl chloride.[19]

So I'm not sure if the previous post was harmful fearmongering.

There were no severe acute effects - there were no hospitalizations, the vast majority of the vinyl chloride was intentionally burned, and the little that remains has very low environmental or biological persistence.

As is so often the case, people who fearmonger about what could happen fail to notice that the medical establishment keeps quite good records on what is happening.

We'd know about the acute effects by now from hospitalization, and we generally know about the chronic effects in the environment because this isn't even the first vinyl chloride spill.

Is Paulsboro, NJ currently a cancer hotbed?

Exactly! Vinyl Chloride is an extremely common and high volume industrial use chemical. If acute exposure could give you cancer, we’d have known decades ago.

Yes, actually. Along with a ton of other medical irregularities. https://www.nj.gov/health/hcpnj/documents/county-reports/HCP...

Skimming over that, irregularities aren't immediately standing out to me.

What should we be looking for?

I wasn't chiding you, I am a layman and I genuinely had no idea what issue you saw in the parent comment. Read your own comment that I responded to again.

The parent comment had multiple assertions in it, so there's literally no way for me to know what you meant by "no it's not" until you told me.

> the damage control media outlets are attempting

That suggests intent. While I am as cynical as the next person I wouldn't make a claim like that without also citing evidence to back it up.

Time and time again, even media sources that we're told are trustworthy and rigorous show that they'll shill for corporate interests if given enough financial incentive and a promising enough narrative[0][1][2][3][4]. At what point do we just assume that financial conflict of interest is inherent in how media reports on issues?

[0] - https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/15/lets-talk-about-t...

[1] - https://theintercept.com/2022/08/17/new-york-times-dan-goldm...

[2] - https://theintercept.com/2016/01/29/nyt-outside-spending/

[3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/16/democrats...

[4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/tax-bezos-help-worke...

Our fearless US press is too scared to have on-site staff to cover the largest ecological land-based disaster since Three Mile Island. Or they've been told by the regime it's a non-issue? Not sure which is worse, but the outcome is what you see before you; back page coverage a week after the incident. Barely a blurb.

Yes, these things take time to fully investigate. Where are the daily updates from the EPA though? Why aren't the major news outlets syndicating these daily EPA updates?

This is relevant to more Americans than the war in Ukraine, which many news outlets have a dedicated section for in the header section (Business, World, Sports, etc.)

I just checked US News & World Report and CNN front pages - not even listed.

>Our fearless US press is too scared to have on-site staff to cover the largest ecological land-based disaster since Three Mile Island

According to whom? Looking at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_disaste..., it's not hard to find incidents that were arguably worse, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...

"...the outcome is what you see before you; back page/hardly any coverage a week after the incident. Nothing on the front pages a week after the incident. Barely a blurb."

If they're there, whatever work they're doing is not making it onto front pages. The alternative explanation (subtext from the description above) is more likely - most major news outlets have not sent a journalist to cover this, neither are they covering EPA updates. If they were, why is their work not receiving daily updates on the news outlet front pages?

Before you mock the press maybe take a look at how they are being treated in Ohio. This is from a press conference given by the governor last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQMLxBpiSu8

If true, thia should be even bigger news - instead front pages are covered with chinese baloons

I would like to see Ohio law enforcement try that against ABC News, CNN, etc. (they won't)

That's what makes this scary - the few independent journalists that are trying to cover this are being locked out, and the national journalists are nowhere to be found.

Sounds just like Russia!

Hard to tell what's going on when the "before" isn't shown in the video, and very large sections of what is there has talking heads but no audio / silence.

Prove there's a conspiracy to reduce coverage of this event.

Also

https://www.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/14/us/ohio-train-derailment-...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-officials-s...

I can't believe how much bullshit you spew when it's so easy to disprove. Google the disaster and any news network and you'll find news about it. Why do you lie? Seriously is it because you want to push your immature cynical "all the government and media is bad" crap?

No need for a conspiracy when the spy balloons (Jan 28th) and Turkish earthquake (Jan 6) happened concurrently (Feb 3 initial derailment, Feb 6 for giant black smoke from controlled release).

Do you know how much phosgene, though?

It's trace amounts. Barely enough to detect.

I'm a bit torn on this one because the immediate symptoms are the ones that might indicate exposure and prompt someone to get medical treatment. If you're reading a newspaper or watching mainstream reporting then that's easily the most critical information to have communicated to you.

Once you've got a medical record of exposure that also makes it possible to go after these companies for the long term effects, which should be communicated to you by medical professionals based on your exposure time and estimated dosage. I don't like that that's the requirement for our legal system, but it's the reality.

>Another notable diff is that ABC describes ethylhexyl acrylate as a "carcinogen", linking to a CDC page as a cite

The linked CDC source doesn't really definitively say it's a carcinogen. The exact quote is "potential occupational carcinogen as defined by the OSHA carcinogen policy [29 CFR 1990]". Also, it's worth noting that the page is for "Ethyl acrylate", not "ethylhexyl acrylate". A google search for "ethylhexyl acrylate" turns up results for 2-ETHYLHEXYL ACRYLATE, which has a different CAS number, so it's unknown whether ABC is even referring to the correct chemical.

[1] https://www.chempoint.com/products/download?grade=2716&docty...

That's an egregious error. Good catch!

At any rate, 2-ethylhexyl acrylate is *also* a "Group 2B: possibly carcinogenic". (I'd assume it's just the functional group that's interesting here, and the whole class is carcinogenic).

- "Methyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, 2-ethylhexyl acrylate, technical-grade TMPTA, and isobutyl nitrite were classified as “possibly carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2B), based on “sufficient evidence” of carcinogenicity in experimental animals and no data or inadequate evidence in humans."

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1016/s1470-2045(18)30491-1 ("Carcinogenicity of isobutyl nitrite, β-picoline, and some acrylates." The Lancet Oncology 19.8 (2018): 1020-1022.")

Presumably we will have positive data on whether it is carcinogenic or not in a few years/decades as we watch what happens to the people In Ohio.

In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labels indicating the nature of the chemical threat and what firefighters need to do to address it; otherwise, it's as important to people as what's in the tractor-trailer in front of them on the highway.

It might be worth having a discussion about the fact that the way train right-of-ways came into being give municipalities little recourse if they feel the trains shouldn't be cutting through their towns in general, but given that they do, they're basically privately-owned highways and it's up to the owner what's on them.

> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labels indicating the nature of the chemical threat and what firefighters need to do to address it

What part of the hazard warning indicates what's required for environmental remediation? In order to properly remediate, you need to know what you're dealing with.

In general, no environmental remediation is necessary because the chemical doesn't spill. If it spills, of course there should be disclosure. Parent appeared to be expressing surprise there was no disclosure until an incident occurred; of course there wasn't.

(Disclosure takes more time than we assume it should because freight is actually kinda disorganized relative to what most of us would expect given our information-saturated jobs; when a shipment leaves the depot and arrives, you can just check the contents of the train, but when it fails to arrive, you have to piece together the contents from multiple manifest sources and cross-check to make sure there weren't errors in that data).

That's not how I read the original comment:

> This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded "list of toxic chemicals" was not public prior to Sunday.

The accident happened on February 3rd. And the chemicals started being released on the 6th. Sunday was the 12th. That's a long time to wait to disclose the types of chemicals you're releasing in a town.

> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public

Fitting username, I didn't realize you were a novelty account.

The username actually refers to an old They Might Be Giants song.

They lyrics of the song tell the tale of a man who goes through life being paranoid about a massive, organized government operation spying on him personally.

In the end, he's murdered and disappeared by his town's local mayor because he's inconvenient, the mayor's just a thug, and there is no shadowy overarching organization watching over him.

People believe in conspiracies because they feel the alternative (disorder, ad-hoc metastability, and a world full of people with short-term views making short-term moves to benefit their short-term ends impacting other folks with no particular plan, just simple, stupid apathy) is scarier. But most evil (and good) in the world is done by regular folks with partial knowledge doing their damnedest to survive, and we perceive patterns because we're pattern-perceiving creatures.

It's certainty a fitting username for somebody who thinks the government should keep people in the dark.

> "In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public."

The government doesn't generally know the list of chemicals, so it's not keeping people in the dark because it has no information to divulge.

We could certainly make it a rule that chemical manifests be lodged with such-and-such organization (the FRA, I'd assume), but we don't because that's not the history of how rail happened in this country. And in general, the US government tends to operate under a rule of "Ain't no problem, ain't no problem" regarding data collection, with rare exception (Americans get very jumpy about over-collection of data by the government, after all; "Why do you need to know how many firearms I own? It's my right to own them", etc.).

... I could certainly see an argument for changing this rule, but I can also see an argument for not; much as Americans are, broadly speaking, comfortable living in homes where lines of toxic volatile chemicals are plumbed directly into those homes (50,000 hospitalizations and 430 deaths due to CO poisoning annually; in 2020, 10 natural gas explosions and 0 train chemical spills) and comfortable operating private individual vehicles on roadways (38,000+ deaths in crashes in 2020) and comfortable with non-licensed ownership of firearms (carrying requires a license, ownership does not; 24,000+ suicides by gun in 2020), most people are most of the time comfortable with train loads of God-knows-what rattling down the old main street. And they're comfortable with it because accidents like this, while not nearly as rare as they should be, are far rarer than other risks Americans tolerate every single day. Risk-tolerance for convenience is just kind of an American tradition.

... like I said else-thread, I'm likelier to suffer from the lead in my pipes living in this part of the country than the train fire.

Just because there’s nobody out to get you, the person, doesn’t mean there isn’t anybody out to get you, the people.

One may or may not be true. One is demonstratively false.

Finally, what can these chemicals react into when in a blaze.

That's extremely well known, which is why the remediation strategy was to intentionally set them on fire.

There's a small amount of phosgene, but mostly nothing worse than when they started (which are fairly nasty). Lot's of CO and CO2, but it's the liquid runoff that's more concerning. It'll be a haz-waste site for decades.

And hydrogen chloride.

Vinyl chloride degrades in air 99% in 100 days and doesn't bio-accumulate.

It'll be a source of 14-CO2 for about a year, tops.

It's the stuff that's subsurface (ground water?) that'll last.

Agree, that if it's exposed to air and sunlight it won't last long... too reactive.

It doesn't appear vinyl chloride wants to stay in water, based on the numbers I'm seeing (https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf). The instances of vinyl chloride contamination tend to be from an actively-producing source, like a plant with a leak.

Spilled on the ground and absorbed into water, it should evaporate into gaseous form in a matter of hours.

I've researched this recently.

Thermal decomposition of Vinyl Chloride Monomer forms HCl, CO, CO2, and trace phosgene.

Thermal decomposition of literally all the other chemicals listed produces CO and CO2.

It's likely that a certain number of animal deaths in the area have been caused by HCl being absorbed by water (in lungs) and forming acid, or CO/CO2 displacing oxygen and suffocating them.

As far as I have found, none of the chemicals spilled is toxic to marine life. Dead fish could be coming from soot or other pollutants from the fire rather than from the chemicals.... hard to say.

By the way, VCM has a half life of about 20 hours in the atmosphere.

Thermal decomposition can be incomplete, and it appears to be the case. Also, thermal decomposition is different from burning. And HCl is already an acid, most probably you meant a water solution of HCl.

It's listed as a "possible carcinogen". Which would put it in the same category as caffeine.

Although it's worth noting that while caffeine would obviously not be that dangerous of a chemical, a giant spill of it would still be an environmental issue.

Caffeine is absolutely deadly toxic to many organisms, including humans. Five grams and you’re very likely to end up dead.

Isn't 5g around 60 cups of coffee? Over what span of time would those need to be ingested?

https://purewellness.com.au/product/pure-usp-pharma-grade-ca...

Depends heavily on the type of coffee. The monoamine oxidase inhibitors in coffee could kill you first by causing serotonin syndrome.

Before everyone loses there mind, because this story has oddly been on blast 2 weeks after the incident:

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...

Agreed on not losing your mind, that's never good to do, but downplaying it is too far on the other scale.

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.

It's seems most likely the run off is from the ruptured tanks, petroleum lube oil, diethylene glycol, polypropyl glycol, and butyl acrylates. And likely primarily the non flammable ones, the oil and the glycols.

Interesting, do you have details on that, or is that a guess?

Generally flammable things burn in a fire.

So a guess then, that's disappointing. Generally things don't burn 100% perfectly.

Unless you were onsite testing what was in the runoff and have the results, you're speculating.

There is certainly runoff, the question is there enough to perpetually poison hundreds of billions of gallons of water and make it through water treatment.

Clearing the first hurdle is hard, clearing the second is even harder.

I think this is more evidence of the effectiveness of our safeguards and procedures than anything else.

You didn't read the article, in the particular the new list of chemicals they released that were previously undisclosed. (It's not just the same story on repeat). I don't think organic acrylates conveniently break down in water; I suspect they'd be persistent environmental pollutants, in addition to being carcinogens.

The list in the article is the same one I linked to.

I'm responding to the substance of your comment: "The total amount of hydrochloric acid this could possibly produce would hardly register in the water table." The other stuff will certainly register, and if you didn't mention it, then it can read to imply a negative.

You're assuming that the vinyl chloride burns perfectly and all of it will be converted without residue, which I don't think is a safe assumption. The products of burning it are less problematic than the original, but setting it on fire doesn't simply solve all problems here.

The reason people are so upset isn't necessarily because of the environmental impact, it's because the people who work on these trains have been warning things like this could happen for years, and when they tried to strike over it, the federal government stepped in and crushed them into submission. There was a car on that train that was on fire for at least 20 miles before the derailment. If I can get pulled over for having a busted tail light, a train full of toxic chemicals should get stopped for being on fire.

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.

>If I can get pulled over for having a busted tail light, a train full of toxic chemicals should get stopped for being on fire.

What makes you think this isn’t what normally happens? Trains aren’t just cruising around constantly on fire.

I think you deeply underestimate how many derailments happen each year in the US

https://www.wric.com/news/u-s-world/how-often-do-trains-dera...

If you think “derailment” means “on fire”, we have bigger issues.

You've missed the forest for the trees, friend.

You think there is a forest because you don’t understand what a derailment is. The vast majority of them are benign. They rarely result in cars even tipping over, let alone spilling.

Trains aren’t just cruising around constantly on fire.

If they were, would you know? I wouldn't.

Yes, there is quite an enthusiastic crowd of people making videos of trains. A video of a train on fire just cruising along is gold and there aren’t that many.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784255

"People are upset because it's another case of the government completely failing to do their jobs of keeping regular people safe, "

Even though this is a private company you only blamed the government?

Part of the government's responsibility is to regulate

Not according to republicans

I think this comment is referring to the govt blocking the rail workers from taking collective action against the private companies.

and what does that have to do with the crash?

Part of the rail workers' demands included safety concerns.

The demands of the union included a lot of increased safety precautions.

Including the fact that trains are too long, which directly contributed to this incident.

https://www.timesunion.com/allnews/article/Railroad-union-sa...

And was that part of the deal?

I'm not denying the accident was bad, I'm tempering an unwarranted level of hysteria for what is another small scale industrial accident.

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".

Because people don't trust the government and the companies on stuff like this. "BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!", isn't exactly what people want to hear years after many of these sorts of accidents. Which has happened in the past. I mean, it took 2 weeks just to disclose additional chemicals in this incident.

> 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.

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...

How about this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773513#34774984

This website is not the only place discussing this matter, and it is a strawman to continue requiring any evidence of public outcry be limited to specifically this website. Moreover, reddit is not the only other place discussing this. There are hundreds of videos on TikTok from people in Ohio that are saying this is a horrible disaster on par with Chernobyl.

>Can you show me a single comment on this website

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]

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34791609

I'm not sure why you think this is blown out of proportion. The fact that they had fear of the train car explode and cause a much worse disaster (ie, not small scale) cannot and should not be written off.

People all over social media are calling this "Chernobyl", which is absurd.

A lot are also calling this "Bhopal"

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.

If there is any chance that human error contributed to this disaster (either via the people there or maintenance deferred or done less than perfectly), then "a more humane work schedule" would have made that less likely due to everyone involved being well rested.

It's funny yet sad at how differently HN reacts to a company making its employees go into the office than this. Maybe that's how we should frame it - "railroads force employees back into office, even when sick" might garner some more sympathy.

> 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.

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.

If you drive a vehicle knowing it is unsafe shouldn't you refuse? Any other vehicle and we would hold the worker accountable for not refusing such a negligent order.

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.

I wonder if anything disempowering happened in that industry recently that might have discouraged rail workers from speaking out

This is exactly what is happening. Any worker that continually bring up problems is removed one way or another and you effectively get the normalization of deviance via the dead sea effect. Things that should be called out are suddenly "That's what we always have to do because we don't have enough time", and 99.999% of the time it works out fine. Then the ten thousandth time you explode a gaping hole of poison in the earth.

> Any other vehicle and we would hold the worker accountable for not refusing such a negligent order.

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.

>Would we also give that worker legal protection?

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: not legal advice

But who’s got the time and money to deal with it? I’ve tried to file an osh complaint before. They told me they hadn’t even gotten to the ones from this decade yet.

The OSHA stop-work criteria (noted in my below post) explicit state you needn't wait for a complaint to stop-work for imminent dangers too soon for inspection.

Note: this is not individualized advice and I am not a lawyer.

the legislation last year forcing an end to the labor dispute meant that rail workers stopping work had no legal protection. the railway labor act makes it illegal to stop work before exhausting a lengthy dispute process

> If you drive a vehicle knowing it is unsafe shouldn't you refuse?

So a strike then? You’re literally describing what they tried to do.

In a way but legally they aren't identical. Conditions:

- 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

[0] https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/mou/2012-07-16

Stealing someone else's comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34784255

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.

As I understand one of the things the rail companies want to do is have just one person running a train instead of the current two. In this case the single engineer likely would not have been able to decouple the other 10 hazardous containers and pull away. Also that this failure happened due to a seized axle or bearing is indicative of the refusal to invest in the rail equipment and safety systems. There are a number of different ways to detects failing bearings that have been at least deployed for decades. I thought I heard this might have been a broken rail but that seems to have just been a guess on the day of the accident.

"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 reason people are so upset is because they watched a smoke plume reach all the way to the cloud layer. That's it. That's the whole story.

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.

This has echos of the Flint water crisis all over it. The "trust authorities" crowd would have happily let Flint residents drink yellow water until lead poisoned an entire generation.

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

Question, yes, but then the question needs an answer. "Just asking questions" with no follow-up is just signal-jamming.

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 contrast, this is a big scary smoke cloud of a well-understood volatile compound that we've spilled into the ecosystem in the past

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 a reporter was wrongfully arrested for asking questions about the incident.

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.

> We also have seen some evidence that animals nearby are dropping dead and humans feeling sick.

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 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

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's videos of entire coops of chickens dying out

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.

> I know experts make mistakes

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...

If you have specific evidence of what exposure to (burned, trace amounts of) vinyl chloride might do, or its denatured byproducts (besides the HCL, which probably killed some fish), feel free to share them. An anecdote about dead chickens isn't that without a causal link (and the current rampant bird flu is a far more likely explanation).

"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?

> This isn't a mystery chemical; we've been working with the stuff since 1835, we've spilled it into the environment numerous times

It has never been burned at anywhere near this quantity. There are other chemicals that can react with it. Your strawmanning isn't winning you any points here.

> What is your goal...

I would like for these coverups to lose their effectiveness. I'd like for executives that gamble with human lives and the environment to be held responsible. I would like politicians and media organizations that repeatedly enable them to lose credibility. I would like the concerns of railroad workers to be taken seriously. I'd like for journalists to not be wrongfully arrested for doing their jobs. I'd like for the safety precautions for carrying hazardous materials to be enforced. I'd like to have institutions that I can more or less trust to tell me the truth.

Then I'm sorry because this isn't the disaster you're hoping for. But take heart, people continue to use technology so another disaster will certainly come along.

> 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...

What an obvious troll. Do you get paid for this or is this just something you do for fun?

Either way, boring. Move on elsewhere. Maybe Reddit will be more susceptible to your lying rhetoric.

>The reason people are so upset isn't necessarily because of the environmental impact, it's because the people who work on these trains have been warning things like this could happen for years, and when they tried to strike over it, the federal government stepped in and crushed them into submission. There was a car on that train that was on fire for at least 20 miles before the derailment. If I can get pulled over for having a busted tail light, a train full of toxic chemicals should get stopped for being on fire.

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.

The problem is an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I have friends in this industry so I have more context than most.

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.

> There was a car on that train that was on fire for at least 20 miles before the derailment

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.

This article has information and various photos from security cameras showing the sparks coming off of the car prior to the derailment - https://unicornriot.ninja/2023/like-the-doors-of-hell-were-o...

Also DemocracyNow! has been covering the disaster the last two days featuring interviews with both local residents and railway workers.

> There was a car on that train that was on fire for at least 20 miles before the derailment. If I can get pulled over for having a busted tail light, a train full of toxic chemicals should get stopped for being on fire

Ifwe did the same shit they get away with, we'd be in jail real fast

>There was a car on that train that was on fire for at least 20 miles before the derailment. If I can get pulled over for having a busted tail light, a train full of toxic chemicals should get stopped for being on fire.

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.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector

It should not be seen as business as usual when these kinds of things happen. It was at least tolerable due to my ignorance when you talked about these chemicals boiling off, but then to say "no biggie that petroleum spilled everywhere, I'm sure it burned off too."

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.

Nationalizing is an overreach. This is why events like this have to be downplayed because if you don’t the vultures will swoop in with their own agendas and try to stir up emotions to garner support for unpopular causes.

This take needs more coverage. In fact the current freakout is almost entirely due to the deliberate burn and the big plume it caused, with almost no one taking the time to explain that the combustion products are simply much safer than the products that were leaking.

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.)

> This train was sitting in a pile for more than a week and no one cared.

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.

The ultimate problem is the breakdown in trust of our institutions to get this right - the overriding incentives are wrong at every level. Burning a product because it would have otherwise needed to be recovered and transported under pressure seems like exactly the kind of amoral tradeoff a company would take, not particularly caring about the combustion products apart from what they can legally get away with.

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.

> Burning a product because it would have otherwise needed to be recovered and transported under pressure

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.

> It was leaking. No recovery was feasible

I do not see how leaking would preclude recovery. It's likely "feasible" is shorthand for 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 would make 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 user surveillance. It's an overwhelming 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.

But real chemical engineers are making these decisions

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.

The cars weren't leaking, they were vented and ignited because they had the potential to explode otherwise. The other cars were burning from the crash, and an explosion would make the situation exponentially worse.

The EPA famously declared the air safe following 9/11. Their credibility is, at least for me personally, negligible. The flint water crisis and the Gold King Mine are other examples.

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?

The EPA has absolutely nothing to do with Flint.

Did you even bother checking?

https://www.epa.gov/flint

> 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

Even if that were true, it would only make them look worse.

You should probably let the EPA know then:

https://www.epa.gov/flint

So how do you explain the dead fish, chickens, and people with rashes etc.?

Because the accident released a ton of nasty chemicals in one spot. However they are pretty volatile and naturally dissipate. If you see recent pictures from the crash site, nobody is wearing PPE and the EPA has deemed the area as safe to be in.

EPA also said the dust from the towers collapsing on 9/11 was safe.

The actual EPA pronouncement was that the air and water in NY city were safe (not to warrant an evacuation). They still recommended that first responders and people in the vicinity wear respirators.

Didn't realize that distinction - thank you.

Do you know if they recommended it right away or after a few days?

Well, I don't think the EPA was in a position to make any statements right away - they weren't going to stop people from running in and trying to save lives so they could take air samples back to a lab.

The amount of blame that got pinned on them after the fact was probably pretty unfair.

Lived across the water and my family lived in the city during 9/11. Everyone (news, first responders, agency officials) was saying avoid ground zero unless you have respiratory equipment. That didn't stop heros from running in maskless to help people, or stop people from running through the dust to get to safety. But as you moved uptown and to other boroughs, the particle density dropped significantly, even though the wind was sending dust and debris over brooklyn/staten island. It was immediately well known that people were going to get sick from the fallout

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

Are you going to list every call the EPA made and whether it was right or wrong? Or just cherry pick?

I just think it would be wise to not blindly trust any agency right now. I would like to see some independently verified levels at the crash site and at the locations where people are reporting issues.

I mean, dead fishes and chickens and rashes occur at natural rates in any population regardless of the presence of chemicals.

Is there any reason to assume the burn, under these conditions, would be complete enough to fully consume the product such that there would be zero danger to the environment?

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.

This is a really glaring example of mismanagement on the federal government's part. Apparently the number of staff who maintain the rails was cut some time before the incident, and this is the main reason the rails were not properly maintained and this accident was allowed to happen.

Meanwhile the transportation department is still celebrating their accomplishments and acting like we don't have a huge disaster on our hands https://www.newsweek.com/pete-buttigieg-ignores-ohio-train-d...

Why is Federal government at fault, and not, you know, the rail company that owns the railroads and collects the revenues?

In my mind because Biden/Buttigieg had Congress impose a labor contract to prevent a strike a few months ago and rail safety due to labor cuts by these same rail companies was one of the issues workers were concerned about?

Yeah anything short of meeting the strikers demands is insane. I still can't believe that's not what went down. These are possibly some of the most important workers in the country, and they can't even get sick days.

It sure does seem weird that something as fundamentally efficient as trains are supposedly so hard to run economically that treating workers properly just isn't economically feasible.

Of course it is feasible, but the transit corps are only interested in maximizing profit and the government backs them up. They could run these trains with 10x the crew, with full top-tier benefits, and still turn a sustainable profit. But right now these companies are being run as paperclip maximizers and merely sustainable profit isn't good enough for them.

Capital always behaves this way, it isn't really surprising. What's embarrasing is the federal government and the news coverage making it seem like the strike was a huge risk and the only way to deal with it was to forcibly silence them when the obvious solution is to meet their demands. It's like such a thing never crossed their minds, and it's nuts.

Both are.

Are you really a pilot? You should know better than to treat blame as finite and indivisible.

I'm not one that usually advocates for nationalization, but with these rail companies, this should be done.

For multiple reason:

- These companies make absurdly huge profit that could be reinvested into the network to improve the network for everybody (electrification, passenger transport). And these are not some complex tech companies that the government couldn't operate.

- These companies are blocking passenger travel and don't care that they are doing it, all other approaches to prevent this have failed. With the current structure there is no change for the US ever to develop a serious passenger rail infrastructure, either inter-city, regional or S-Bahn style. Many local government and states might want to do more train stuff but currently don't feel empowered to do so any trying is often not even worth it.

- They are removing anything not absurdly profitable, shifting things from rail to trucks. And then trucks use government funded road and highway infrastructure instead. Its just bad intensives.

- Current companies have a bad track record and there are way to many derailments, and this is serious strategic concern for logistics that the government should really take better care off.

Just for reference, with the current profit of these companies, the US could easily executed a systematic program of electrification, track and signaling upgrades. Vastly improving both the amount of cargo that can be transported and the passenger that can be transported, and doing so in a much more substantial way.

While trains are energy efficient, and its better then trucks, currently they use very dirty locos with no plan of changing it (some mild greenwashing but nothing real). Some of these train companies are literally some of the largest individual users of fossil fuels (behind things like DoD) and no plan for change anytime soon.

It would also make transporting cargo from city-to-city easier if these cities are currently in the domain of one of the competitor companies. This is a real problem for shipping.

If the US wants to seriously drive modal share of cargo and passenger transport to green energy efficient trains, its the only way I can see it gone work.

But how do you nationalize an entire industry?

If only the president's party controlled both houses of Congress, they could have passed a bill and he would have signed it. An hypothetical situation, when this was being discussed about 3 months ago...

No, I mean, how do you do it? Do you walk into the offices with the army and force them out? Take all their assets? You realize you'd probably have people funded by the railroads storming the capital? It'd be like a revolution.

You buy out the shareholders in a compulsory acquisition.

Fantasies about the army and revolutions are childish imagination run wild.

Hahaha for sure.

How did FDR buy up all the gold? Just pass a bill, no army needed. Isn't the USA a rule of law state?

Now, if the railroad bosses are willing to fight with the federal government, they are welcome to hire mercenaries. I hear Wagner wants cash.

This is basically the plot of “white noise” with Adam driver (on netflix).

Which oddly enough was filmed in the town this happened in… the universe is weird.

Oh wow. Well that probably means it happened before?

Lots of people saw this coming. This isn't a surprise, but it is horrifying. The safety concerns were a large part of the railroad workers union's complaints a few months ago, which was squashed by the US gov. All the corners have been cut to extract more value for shareholders, and there's nothing left to squeeze out.

Yea, oddly this has not yet bubbled to the surface of this story. Your government at work!

I take it that nobody is thinking sabotage?

I thought that there were just some people from the town that were extras and it was filmed elsewhere in Ohio?

Which is based on the famous Don Delillo novel. This reads a bit like describing LotR as "that movie with Viggo Mortensen".

Yes that is right. Forgive me, but don delillo is not so famous outside of the English speaking world so I did not think of mentioning it, although I have seen his name in the end credits.

White Noise had several plots over chapters. The plume scenes were a fantastic balance of hilarious and scary:

     Summary: Chapter 21
     Jack finds Heinrich on the roof, looking through a pair of binoculars at a distant black cloud of smoke. Heinrich informs Jack that a train car has been derailed. Later, they both return to watch the cloud. Heinrich says that the burning chemical in the air is Nyodene Derivative, or Nyodene D., a toxic substance that causes lumps in rats. The radio has already listed nausea, skin irritation, and sweaty palms as potential symptoms of exposure. Jack tries to reassure Heinrich that the smoke won’t come toward them and continues to act comfortable and indifferent. He sits down to pay the bills, even as rumors of increasing danger come in over the radio and phone. Sirens begin to blare through the neighborhood, but Jack declares that such things can’t happen in a town like theirs. New symptoms are reported on the radio, and the cloud is given a new name: the airborne toxic event. Heinrich tries to get his father to acknowledge the danger, but Jack declares that he is a college professor, not to mention the chair of a department, and can’t imagine someone like him fleeing something like an airborne toxic event. The family anxiously gathers for dinner as the air raid warnings grow closer.

https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/whitenoise/section7/

https://www.wlwt.com/article/ohio-train-derailment-white-noi...

https://twitter.com/Marfoogle/status/1625323668397256704

When I hear Ohio and trains I immediately think of the huge federal grants for building a higher speed rail line from Cleveland over Columbus to Cincinnati that were already granted.

The same was granted for Wisconsin and Florida.

And one by one their governors refused to use these grants to build the infrastructure, and one by one the federal grants were reassigned, until in the end Florida got 2.3 billion dollars for building a high-speed rail line Miami-Orlando-Tampa. That was also sabotaged by its governor.

But because such a rail line is so incredibly economically effective a private company started to build it anyhow, just at lower speeds.

I’m still flabbergasted about this.

so... the grants were unnecessary? Also, how can someone see this catastrophe and still want to go with trains -- 200+ year old tech that is clearly environmentally destructive, doesn't solve last-mile, and can't be parallelized or re-routed, or even rescheduled easily

> Also, how can someone see this catastrophe and still want to go with trains

Perhaps because most of the industrialised world run tens of thousands of freight and passenger trains every day.

What happened in Ohio is not an inherent issue with trains.

It’s not more environmentally destructive than any of the alternatives, quite the opposite actually. And it’s the most efficient way to transport cargo and passengers across land.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but the speed at which this story has overtaken social media has made me skeptical. That coupled with the fact that the story practically doesn't exist in mainstream media. And in this case I just don't buy the whole "lamestream" media narrative. The mainstream media was all over the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. There's no reason they wouldn't be interested in giving more coverage to this story if it were worth covering.

Something about this story's rise to fame has seemed really inorganic to me.

> The mainstream media was all over the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Different victims and different person/people/organizations/administrations to blame.

It went viral on TikTok. Was that entirely organic? Or did the Chinese government throw some tinder on the fire? It’s pretty bad that they have the capability.

Not sure if you misread it but I said it was inorganic.

Yes I was agreeing with you. It’s very possible it was inorganic.

It's not a conspiracy. The amplified version of the story originated from Chinese state media as a direct response to the balloon story: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64633990

> At the same time, state media has begun focusing on a different narrative - a derailed train carrying hazardous material in Ohio.

> Though the incident happened in early February, Chinese news outlets are now devoting significant coverage on the topic, citing US media reports. US officials have performed a controlled release of toxic chemicals from the train to prevent contamination.

> It has since become a significant talking point on social media. On Weibo, China's equivalent to Twitter, the main Ohio train hashtag has been viewed more than 690 million times since the weekend, with more than 40 hashtags created on the topic.

> Many Chinese netizens have expressed worry that the incident would turn into a global environmental crisis, and anger over the relatively sparser coverage of the train incident in US media compared to the balloons.

> "Turns out the Wandering Balloon was being used to take the heat for Ohio," a post liked nearly 3,000 times reads.

Flint is a great example because it only gained attention because residents started complaining on social media and in public forums[0][1]. Despite widespread protest and refusal to drink the water, and mass sickness, official sources maintained that the water was safe to drink[2]. National news media picked up the story almost 2 years after the switch in water treatment systems[3]. Even still EPA officials refused to acknowledge issues with Flint water, with Obama drinking Flint water at a press conference to convince people it was safe[4]. It wasn't until 2017, 2 and a half years after the switch, that media and official consensus was that Flint constituted an emergency.

So yeah, keep your pitchforks out people!

[0] - https://midmichigannow.com/news/local/flint-residents-avoidi...

[1] - https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2015...

[2] - https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/01/22/w...

[3] - https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/watered-down

[4] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZynkD3N_k

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioxins_and_dioxin-like_compou...

>PCDD/F-compounds were never synthesized for any purpose, except for small quantities for scientific research.[12] Small amounts of PCDD/Fs are formed whenever organics, oxygen and chlorine are available at suitable temperatures.[1] This is augmented by metal catalysts such as copper. The optimal temperature range is 400 °C (752 °F) to 700 °C (1,292 °F). This means that formation is highest when organic material is burned in less-than-optimal conditions such as open fires, building fires, domestic fireplaces, and poorly operated and/or designed solid waste incinerators.[3] Historically, municipal and medical waste incineration was the most important source of PCDD/Fs.

I see a lot of these responses starting with "The reason." I don't see many people talking about institutional bias. I don't see a lot of people talking about this disaster getting no coverage while the media is stuck on shooting down balloons. I don't see many people talking about the fact that if this was anywhere close to wealthy people that it would have been headline news. I don't see many talking about the absolutely soulless response of everyone responsible. I don't see many talking about historical precedents that paint a clear picture of what is likely happening. I don't see many talking about how the best coverage of the event has been on Tiktok and that people on the ground might have something valuable to report.

This is NOT s trivial thing in any way. This is not a wait and see thing. This is a total disaster that will impact the health of people in the area for generations. And without any pushback the terrible people responsible well likely just get away with it.

> don't see a lot of people talking about this disaster getting no coverage

Oh my god this is the only thing people are talking about. Please don’t do this. Let’s talk about the actual disaster instead of spinning up another useless whirlpool of meta-debate.

No it’s not? There’s one measly story way down past the fold on the NYT homepage.

It’s nowhere on the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal or USA Today homepages (I cmd+F’d).

There’s a tiny clip on the left of the Fox News homepage that’s tangentially about it but really about Tomi Lahren bashing Pete Buttigieg.

The most prominent is the New York Post, which has a headline about it being “worse than feared” after a bunch of scrolling past stories about Kathy Hochul banning gas stoves and Emily Ratajkowski hanging out with Eric André.

It’s since moved further down. Mike Pompeo is angry about balloons, which is clearly more important.

There’s probably some political issue around the incident.

Your comment would have credibility if three of the sources you cite weren't Murdoch mouthpieces. Also USA today is literally a printer and the AP wire service rewritten to a 5th grade level and with even more less information then the AP stories that are copy pasted.

I’m not really making any claim as to their credibility; we’re talking about what the news is publishing and these are the most popular newspapers.

I know it could seem this way. And now that's true. But when it first happened big media largely ignored it or parroted available talking points without any real attempt to do meaningful reporting. But I agree that the impact on people is more important than the media critique.

Correct - there has been a total lack of coverage after the first day or two; it's completely dropped off most front pages, barely getting a blurb at this point. Far away from the header news sections/now relegated to back pages. The EPA should be providing daily updates, and the major news outlets should be syndicating these daily updates.

This is the largest land-based environmental disaster since Three Mile Island.

I just checked US News & World Report and CNN front pages - not even listed.

Yes because nuclear incident = more disaster then the anfo plant that blew up in Texas, numerous refinery explosions the BP oil rig explosion etc.

The NYT does not have this barely at all. There should be a giant picture of the mushroom cloud on their front page to reflect the severity (potential or real) of the situation. It's shameful.

> should be a giant picture of the mushroom cloud on their front page to reflect the severity (potential or real) of the situation

It was front page on Bloomberg. I admit I didn’t click on it. To the degree this is of urgent national concern, it’s in a rail safety bill we have months to debate.

Not sure when you checked, but right now it's literally nowhere to be found on Bloomberg. I count three stories on shooting down UFOs, though, and one on comedians finding side hustles as babysitters.

> when you checked, but right now it's literally nowhere to be found

When this happened. Nobody clicked on it so it fell off. (I’m still failing to see why this is a national tragedy requiring minute to minute updates.)

This is going to give a whole lot of Americans cancer. I’ve heard this described, by an extremely level headed commentator I trust, as “we just nuked an American town”. This story is way bigger than some balloon.

I’m not sure how to reconcile “this is the only thing people are talking about” with “these stories have fallen off all the top news sites because nobody is clicking on them”.

This story should get more traction. It isn’t because it isn’t of general interest. Not because of a conspiracy.

This is not reflective of modern news practices. There isn’t interest because that interest hasn’t been spun up. When all attention has been pulled to manufactured stories, it’s reporters’ jobs to pull and manufacture interest into things that matter.

> that interest hasn’t been spun up

This usually happens outside the news room, investigative journalism being the exception. The lack of environmental NGOs raising a fuss may be part of the problem, if you think spin is the issue. (I do not. I think most Americans simply aren’t concerned with this, and those who are, and have influence, are mostly looking at rulemaking and liability ramifications.)

I cancelled my NYT sub over the pandemic. I felt dirty supporting them even for just the word games.

Wow you're right, only mention is way at the bottom of the main page, just a title "A Train Carrying Toxic Chemicals Derailed in Ohio. Here’s What to Know." No picture, not even a mini-summary like some of the other links.

I think that it is the NYT's policy to not put giant pictures of potential disasters on their front page to avoid being sensationalist.

I would not fault you for disagreeing with that style. Most importantly I think that it risks missing important events: at first they are either not verified (or not verified to be important, like here) and a few days later they are no longer newsworthy. But at least it seems that there is some logic to it.

avoid being sensationalist?

The Chinese spy-on-the-weather balloon debacle is the textbook definition of sensational yellow journalism. NYT has had constant front-page coverage of it.

Because this is a regional story being amplified by Chinese state media. The NYT not running shock headlines based on trendy internet topics probably has more to do with their editorial scrutiny.

> Oh my god this is the only thing people are talking about. Please don’t do this. Let’s talk about the actual disaster instead of spinning up another useless whirlpool of meta-debate.

This may be true in your circles. But almost no one in mine even know this happened. It has not been a top headline in any of the mainstream news sites, I only learned about it by visiting alternative news. It's pretty disturbing how hard the news is trying to bury this story.

i feel similarly to you but i'm finding that people who are less online than i am have no idea that anything even happened in ohio. my media is full of coverage and lots of people pulling their hair out about the lack of coverage, which seems totally inaccurate. but my family who watch tv news and spend no time on reddit or hn or tiktok basically still haven't heard about this yet.

I generally agree with you, and I also agree about the uselessness of meta-commentary. But this story has been ranking quite low on news sites, eg on the default) Google News it's not on the homepage at all and is 7th in the US news section which usually displays 3 stories per 'page' requiring scrolling. PBS Newshour, which normally covers environmental stories in detail - especially the kind involving long term problems like cancer cluster - only addressed it yesterday and then very briefly.

We need a better way to quantify media coverage to assess whether stories are under- or over-reported relative to others of the same type, but absent that people-talking-about-it is what we've got. I sometimes think HN could use meta-headings to cluster exceedingly obvious topic subthreads, because the top-to-bottom linear format is not ideal for multi-lateral discourse.

> I don't see a lot of people talking about this disaster getting no coverage while the media is stuck on shooting down balloons.

I’ve seen hundreds of comments and posts with this sentiment on Reddit, including some that made it to the top of r/all.

Usually they say something like “why aren’t major media outlets covering this?” while linking to CNN or CBS or some other major media outlet that is in fact covering the event.

It was the better part of a week before it got any coverage beyond local news. That's what people are pissed off about.

It probably wouldn't have gotten the coverage it did as quick as it did if some uppity cop didn't rough up some uppity reporter giving the media an axe to grind.

It had articles on Reuters[1] and CNN[2] within a day.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/train-derailment-causes-mas...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/04/us/east-palestine-ohio-train-...

I don't see many people talking about the fact that if this was anywhere close to wealthy people

They don't put wealthy neighborhoods near railroads carrying toxic chemicals. Or rarely do they. Meanwhile, lower end neighborhoods will have the train tracks and some even a garbage dump within view.

> They don't put wealthy neighborhoods near railroads carrying toxic chemicals.

Usually the causality is reversed... Railroads carrying toxic chemicals exist, and wealthy people are able to opt to invest in properties not near these undesirable things.

I know that sounds pedantic, but it's important to note that "they" didn't "put" neighborhoods with preordained social classes somewhere... They zoned neighborhoods and if they'd said you weren't allowed to build houses there, they'd have been accused of nimbyism, not building enough housing to keep up with demand, etc.

That's a fair and great point.

> This is a total disaster that will impact the health of people in the area for generations.

[citation needed]. Vinyl chloride breaks down quickly (especially when it's all set on fire) and doesn't bio-accumulate. That's why the OSHA standards for it are for career-long exposure. Its byproducts are also pretty volatile and should burn through biology and dilute quickly.

There's no 4-alarms here because it's not a 4-alarm situation. It's a disaster, but one of the more well-understood and easier-to-contain ones.

Right. It's essentially impossible to be both highly reactive and build up persistently in the environment. It'd just react!

More and more, this is starting to look like a major f#ck-up by Norfolk Southern.

Given the geographical extent of the derailment's impact (well over 100+ miles, encompassing Pittsburgh and surrounding areas), it's not hard to imagine how it will lead to the kind of class-action lawsuit that can hobble or even bankrupt the entire company.

Ugly, ugly, ugly.

Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940 - Feb 2023 (300 comments)

Ask HN: Any HNers have air quality sensors near-ish 'East Palistine, Ohio'? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783664 - Feb 2023 (11 comments)

Ohio vinyl chloride accident summary - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34781184 - Feb 2023 (7 comments)

Ohio catastrophe is ‘wake-up call’ to dangers of deadly train derailments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34773513 - Feb 2023 (230 comments)

Toxic gases connected to Ohio train derailment cause concern - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 - Feb 2023 (212 comments)

Health concerns mounting as animals become sick after train derailment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34758525 - Feb 2023 (128 comments)

Weird comment about masks not working for vinyl chloride. Whilst it’s true that a particulate filtering mask (N95) isn’t enough, you can definitely get some protection from an organic vapour cartridge fitted to a reusable respirator. See https://www.osha.gov/laws-regs/regulations/standardnumber/19...

Where are the environmentalists? This is a huge catastrophe that will have long term repercussions across a wide area.

Are all the climate change organizations/lobbyists actually corporate sponsored and don't want to rock the boat?

There is little information on why so many trains with hazardous cargos are derailing in north America. This could be sabotage by malevolent actors.

> This is a huge catastrophe that will have long term repercussions across a wide area.

No it’s not, and no it won’t.

Care to share why you think that way?

The chemicals are not very toxic and they have low environmental and biological persistence and they were almost all destroyed in the controlled fire

That's a glass half full perspective! How come so many fish and animals are still dying or are dead in the area?

Fish are very sensitive

I grew up ~12 miles from the incident. My family still lives there. To add insult to injury, the local Shell plant is also doing a safety burn right now.

https://twitter.com/BreatheProject/status/162525554863023311...

As an OSHA Train-A-Trainer what I'm seeing in the Media is making me cringe. Why aren't the workers wearing chemical respirators? They need to check OSHA Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Standards so they're protected along with their families. Why isn't OSHA Region 5 dealing with this situation? And lastly, why haven't the citizens of Palestine, OH been evacuated as of yet. This is a serious situation some of these chemicals are carcinogens and cause their lungs, eyes, skin, and even in the long run cause various cancers. Please evacuate as soon as possible before these chemicals affect your health. Here's the OSHA Region 5 Cleveland Office Number (216)447-4194. Stay Healthy and Be Safe.

If you're in the Ohio river basin, I recommend you install reverse osmosis and carbon filters on your tap water, which will effectively filter nearly all vinyl chloride. Ventilate rooms where you shower before / afterwords to ensure contaminated vapor doesn't stick around.

Cincinnati Water Works uses granular activated carbon filtration already, and plans to shut the Ohio River water intakes during the period of maximum contamination (anticipated some time next week). Given that water demand is below peak in the winter (nobody watering yards or washing cars etc), the water in towers and reservoirs will likely be enough to last through the worst part of the plume. I believe they have 3 days of water during peak times, so likely more like 5.

Source: chatting with a waterworks engineer after a tour of antique steam engine water pumps. They ran into the 60s! https://cincinnatitriplesteam.org/

Also,

https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de...

I've had a hard time finding any information about the geography of impacted areas (air and water) other than sporadic reports on water testing.

I'm still trying to find a reliable boots-on-ground in people's face news journalism. Anyone have boots on group stuff?

This guy has been giving daily updates https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom

It's odd how silent out Transportation Secretary is about this. A cursory review of his twitter page is just gushing reports of important meetings and platitudes about "building back better". Some accountability or semblance of investigation would be appreciated.

Saw an interesting video about Precision Scheduled Railroading[1] saying it is related to this accident. Not sure how accurate it is, but definitely worth checking out. I'd never heard of it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2-fdkGsnf4

NBC suit and mask is starting to go from "crazy prepper territory" to sane supply keeping.

We live in a country where everything important is owned and controlled by billionaires or hedge funds who also control the government via bribery. Events like this make me think that it's much, much crazier to trust the government to keep us safe.

That would be great if it were true, unfortunately railway accidents are merely a reality of transporting dangerous chemicals hundreds of times per day.

If we want to blame the railroad union not getting any time off or sick leave, there are no secret cabals of the rich - that is purely the white house.

> If we want to blame the railroad union not getting any time off or sick leave

A huge part of what they were striking over were safety concerns. Maximum train lengths, minimum crew sizes (did you know trains can be run by a single person and the government has no issue with that?), and required maintenance were all things the union was fighting for, and were all totally ignored by good old union joe.

> there are no secret cabals of the rich

lol. lmao even.

> did you know trains can be run by a single person and the government has no issue with that?

So, let's add additional regulation and oversight. Let's just make sure we vote in people who want to add additional regulation and oversight. I'm sure American's vote this way... next time.

The "most union friendly president in history" just signed a law making it illegal for the union workers to strike, and forced them to accept the terms they had already rejected. Who the fuck are we supposed to vote for if this is what we get with the people who are supposed to care about regulation?

> If we want to blame the railroad union not getting any time off or sick leave, there are no secret cabals of the rich - that is purely the white house.

The cognitive dissonance required to write these two bits right next to one another... Some blame surely does land on the White House for the union busting. But there would have been no union busting without those cabals of the rich turning the screws to begin with.

This divide and ignore half the problem is at the very root of our political decay.

The make up of the federal government changes greatly every two years. Our states probably have a similar turnover. This is why it's important to vote, not only in general elections, but also primary elections. Seats shouldn't be safe for incumbents who let this happen or anyone who takes huge donations from the billionaires or hedge funds you're talking about.

Edit: I mean: the makeup of our government may change greatly every two years - this is why it is important to vote!

If the makeup of the federal government changes every two years, and yet nothing ever meaningfully changes, what does that say about the importance of voting?

If oligarchs spend tens of billions of dollars buying media companies in order to influence how people vote, what does that say about the importance of voting?

These are both the same statement, and I agree

Also note the influence of oligarchs on the politicians themselves

That the outcome of the voting is very important to those oligarchs.

If football teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their players, what does that say about the importance of football?

That applying your program after it has been voted against is a lot more expensive than applying your program after it has been voted for?

It was legal to have a gay marriage 20 years ago. Is that not a meaningful change?

Also: if you live in a non-swing state, consider voting in the primary of whichever party is most likely to win the election, even if that isn't the party you'll likely vote for. AIUI although you can't vote in more than primary you can still vote for whomever you want in the regular election regardless of which primary you voted in.

The idea being that in such states (mostly red or mostly blue), the primary effectively is the election, since the minority party has such little chance of winning the final election.

I agree. I don't know if this is true in every state, but in some this requires you to update your voter registration.

Some states have open primaries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_primaries_in_the_United_S...

The class of people in the government doesn’t change.

Maybe in your district this is true (and some districts are more homogenous than others, for sure), but I'll challenge you to really take a look at the candidates of your next primary election. You'll probably find find meaningful differences between their political philosophies, even if class isn't among them. As an example, though, AOC and Joe Crowley are different in many meaningful ways. As are Connor Lamb and John Fetterman. These are cases where I think people of the political insider class were defeated by challengers that people didn't think fit the proper mold.

A lot of people living in a small town in Ohio felt the same. Just stay away from the urbanization and cities and the government won't bother you... until a quasi-national freight train comes rolling through your town with a literal chemical dumpster fire in tow.

That a "Doomsday Preppers: Where are they now?" follow-up sequel has not yet been produced is highly disappointing

I thought about the one who was worried about a flu pandemic all through 2020. I wonder if she stayed as paranoid, and how long she managed to avoid getting COVID.

This happens every day around every fracking site on a smaller scale but add them all up and it's even bigger than the train.

Oddly no-one seems to care about that.

If the train was carrying gasoline would people say "oh well what can you do, we need gas"

I can't believe that the supposedly internet savvy crowd here is citing CNN, USA Today and Murdoch mouthpieces for poor news coverage. CNN and USA today are literally rewritten Wire service or newspaper articles.

The train that was carrying all of this passed through Cleveland, Ohio, just prior to this accident. Imagine the fallout if this had happened around a population of hundreds of thousands of people?

Still don't see this story anywhere in my Google News feed.

Maybe I missed it but does anyone know where these things were going/delivered to? What's the use for chemicals like this? I can't seem to find any info.

Vinyl chloride (VC) is used to make polyvinyl chloride (PVC), an inert plastic material used in all sorts of things, but is well known as the PVC in PVC pipes which are used everywhere.

Another 4Chan conspiracy proven to be false! Toxic fumes are proven by science to be safe and effective. The dose never leaves the muscle tissue.

> The dose never leaves the muscle tissue.

Yes it does, quite rapidly in fact.

They call it a derailment, but isn't "explosion" a better word choice? Seems like downplaying.

The "explosion" was part of an intentional burn as part of the prescribed cleanup plan: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154760911/ohio-train-derailm...

I just watched the HBO Chernobyl miniseries (excellent, btw) and the parallels to the initial lack of action to a huge public health threat is chilling. If there is a carcinogen in the air, get people out of there!

There is not a carcinogen in the air. They evacuated the town while they performed the controlled burn, but now the combustion products (not really carcinogens) have dispersed and it’s safe to return.

So you would feel fine having your kids live their day-to-day in this area? Would you buy a house 1 mile away from the epicenter?

Ya. It’s easy to measure the contamination and the spilled products have very short half lives in the air/soil. I would probably want to monitor my well water for a little while if I were in the immediate vicinity.

> It’s easy to measure the contamination

Can you elaborate on how you'd do that ? Don't tell me you'd trust the official line, given the track record it's not a viable option

Same for well water ? Can you get a same day reading on it ? What would you do in the meantime ? Wouldn't it be too late by the time you get the air results ?

Just like 911's ground zero was safe ;) nothing to see, move along, uh what cancers are you talking about ?? you must be imagining it

There was an asbestos ad [1] featuring the twin towers. How can one expect the air to be safe after we know what asbestos does to you.

[1] https://preview.redd.it/8cf7ufrnxlw31.jpg?auto=webp&v=enable...

Yet: "Former EPA head admits she was wrong to tell New Yorkers post-9/11 air was safe"

It's the real world and in the real world you have dozens of entities competing against each-other to get their version to be believed. Same shit with Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The truth doesn't really matter until decades later.

You'll have overly cautious people, overly pessimistic people, overly optimistic people, straight up lying to cover their asses people, &c.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/epa-head-wro...

Excellent example to make my point. First responders stood directly on the smoldering pile of thousands of chemical compounds for months with no PPE. You see how that is very different from the EP situation, no?

Prediction: nobody gets any resolution except the lawyers.

Vultures gotta vulture, be they lawyers or the politicians who will swoop in to sympathize with the people once enough concern is registered and magically becomes a touchstone issue.

Health concerns also grow in East Palestine

Legislation passed under President Obama required trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes.

The law was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.

> Electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes are a type of modern railway braking system which offer improved performance compared to traditional railway air brakes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronically_controlled_pneu...

I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag.

In general I grow super weary of companies and the government downplaying these sorts of things. It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted. I feel so helpless like I wish there was a way to prevent this or create enough real accountability that people actually work to minimize these sorts of things but it never seems to pan out that way. My hunch is that the behind the scenes culprit of "why" this happens is rather banal, insurance covers it so people don't have to change, and it seems like those policies create a ton of moral hazard but I don't know the alternatives. I have no answers here it just feels like yet another weight on the side of the scale that the average person has very little control over their lives even for simple things like not being hurt by toxic chemicals in soil / drinking water. Feels easy to lose even more faith in the institutions that are supposed to protect us all.

A number of rescued foxes and other wild animals were also affected in the nearby area [1].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/fox-dies-owners-arms-after-ohio-tra...

Are you:

- weary of these getting downplayed (pron. wee-ree = you are tired of it)

- wary of these getting downplayed (pron. way-ray = you are suspicious of it)

I think people combine leery and wary in their mind and end up with weary, which they don't intend. I see it a lot.

In the case of the parent comment however, weary does work.

The rare occasion that it does work both ways

And/or they've seen the word "weary" and assume it's pronounced like "wary", so they spell the word "wary" as "weary".

This is it - if you hear the word "wary" and know the verb "to wear" before encountering the written word "weary" it's totally understandable to assume that is how "wary" is written and to mix them up.

What I wanted to do with my comment is show this without coming across as a mean or pedantic - especially since in the context both work ok. I've no idea if I accomplished that, I probably come across as a dick but I hope I don't.

Isn’t “grow weary” a common phrase, though?

so is "grow wary", which is the potential problem.

"Grow wary" isn't a thing.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=grow+weary%2Cg...

Always remember to mind the y-axis and scale when looking at and thinking about graphs. They can be deceptive even without meaning to.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=grow+wary&year...

I'm not sure what your point is, since you looked at the vanishingly uncommon phrase alone, giving the false impression of popularity.

You said it's not a thing. It is, in fact, a thing. I've heard it and said it often enough to be sure it's not so uncommon that it's reasonable to say it's not a thing.

You also need to keep in mind what Google Ngram is.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/info

>> "When you enter phrases into the Google Books Ngram Viewer, it displays a graph showing how those phrases have occurred in a corpus of books (e.g., "British English", "English Fiction", "French") over the selected years."

It's a collection of books. Books remain relevant, but it tells you nothing of usage outside that. You only have to run a search on Google to see that it's used in a wide range of unrelated contexts. It's not some obscure anachronism or regionalism.

Much like how irregardless is now considered a thing. One of these days "mute point" will be a thing too :). I better not look that up, maybe it already is. I often wonder what people think they're saying when they misuse phrases like that.

Grow weary (tired of) and grow wary (suspicious of/concerned about) are different things though. Irregardless is a modification of the already useful regardless. I'm not sure how they're comparable.

It is, in fact, a thing

It isn't. "Grow weary of" is a common phrase. "Grow wary of" are words you can put together, but it's not a common phrase.

I've already posted all the evidence needed, and I grow weary of this misguided argument.

Your lack of familiarity with the phrase and misunderstanding your own source does not actually prove anything.

Here, I'll give you a head start on doing what I suggested.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22grow+wary%22

That sure looks like a phrase used across a wide range of contexts and unconnected fields, too wide to support any notion that it's obscure. There's even a non-English news outlet using it in its English coverage.

Even if that's the case, it's very easy to hear "grow weary" and conflate it with the similar word "wary", coming up with "grow wary" as a malapropism.

Both are valid phrases, and both can be true, even at the same time.

They are! That's why I asked which it was.

Where do they pronounce wary way-ray? I’ve always said it “where-y”.

Scotland - and the emphasis is on the first syllable ("wea-" is about 1.5-2x longer than "ry", with the "r" short and rolled). But remember mapping pronunciation of spoken-English to Latin characters is a little bit ambiguous due to accents. For example you use the word "where" to help describe how you pronounce "wary", but for me that "wh" in "where" is slightly aspirated.

Those pronunciation guides confused me a lot before I scanned back, and read the words themselves (trying to ignore the pronunciations I'd already seen!) - so let me proffer:

- weary 'weir[in a river]-(r)ee'

- wary 'wear[clothes]-(r)ee'

Which just goes to demonstrate how weird and multi-sourced English is, doesn't it. And also maybe we just pronounce these very differently (I'm British) - 'way-ray' is way off to me.

I add the '(r)' because being British (and I believe some of the US) an 'r' following a vowel is under-pronounced (in the opinion of some other accent holders), as in 'wear', but not when followed by another (pseudo)vowel, in 'weary' - but that may not be the case for you.

I'm finding it extremely hard to separate signal from noise in the social and legacy media spheres right now. I'm waiting for things to settle.

Yeah, I used to do that.

Then I realized that it is always a conspiracy theory until it is too late.

If you are potentially impacted, you have to do your own homework, and learn from your mistakes.

I think it is still a good heuristic that most people should follow.

Step 1: do I need to have an informed opinion

Step 2: Do I need that opinion NOW

Step 3: WHAT do I need to know NOW

There is a vast amount of conspiracy theorizing that people could avoid by following this approach.

Absolutely. I live in a completely different state and I'm pretty unaffected by this whole tragedy/negligence. I could sit and speculate about what actually happened, but what does that do other than spend energy on something that I'm not actually involved with?

Yeah, There is something to be said about genuine curiosity, but in the face of a emotionally changed misinformation blizzard the best option is to take a step back.

If you decide you are curious and actually want to care about railroad safety, dont react to the current crisis, "hit the books" and read some actually informative material about past events.

100%. It's important to note that doing so also doesn't make you complicit. I have a general disdain for the "do your own research" type of people because often they're not trying to seek out actual education, they're just trying to bolster some sort of preconception they have.

Well, first off, trains run everywhere. So if it happens in Ohio, it can happen near where you live too.

Workers have been pushing to get a single day of paid leave per month and threatening a strike - but rail bosses have greedily ignored them to give more money to their stockholders (ie, themselves too). Then Congress voted to force a bad deal.

What you could do is to get informed and see the results of this blatant corruption.

You didn't actually explain why they should care if you aren't worried about train derailment near you.

Step 4: Always carry a towel

For real. This looks really bad. Authorities in the area seem to be playing it like "it's safe until we have evidence that it's not," but who wants to volunteer to become the evidence?

If you're in that area, it'd be prudent to get out if you're able. It's systemic contamination. You don't get to go back in time for a mulligan if it turns out to be bad.

It's always played down. Nobody ever says "we really fucked up this time so you ought to fend for yourself." It's been, what, 10 days? There's barely coverage, and there's no transparency.

There's still lead in the water in Michigan...

> Then I realized that it is always a conspiracy theory until it is too late.

In one lens, what you say is true. But that is because {true, confirmed, and supported} information comes slow from breaking events. And especially when money / harm is at stake, someone is usually willing to lie or hide the truth.

But viewing what you said through another lens, it can be easy to see this as confirmation bias (or other similar cognitive biases) that underweights all of the times you suspected a conspiracy, but where no causality was proven. As the joke goes, economists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.

Be careful to remain at least as skeptical of social media posts as you are of companies, governments, the wealthy, and those in power.

Belief in multiple conspiracy theories can erode a person’s ability to remain rational. It seems to me that lots of Flat Earthers, for example, base their belief system more around who they chose to reject, than necessarily being accurate about what specific ideas they choose to believe.

I agree with your last paragraph in the sense that we should all be forever curious and we should spend a lot of trouble to reevaluate our errors in belief. That said, “do your own homework” seems to be misinterpreted by many as “reject all information from official sources”, which is a terrible idea.

That's because someone is pushing very hard for the after effects of the derailing to be believed catastrophic.

There's zero critical thinking being applied because they (whomever they are) have been building up belief leveraging mistrust of the government, mistrust of corporations, mistrust of science (related to the actual chemicals involved) and false information about the facts of the derailing.

It's very similar to the way that Trump and company brainwashed their followers into almost overthrowing the US government. I won't be surprised to find out it's being done by the same people as before.

"I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag."

I wouldn't bother watching a Tiktok video unless the video maker is an environmental professional. Otherwise this is just the blind leading the blind.

Here's a legal definition of environmental professional used by developers when they do a environmental assessment, from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_I_environmental_site_ass...:

Someone with:

a current Professional Engineer's or Professional Geologist's license or registration from a state or U.S. territory with 3 years equivalent full-time experience;

a Baccalaureate or higher degree from an accredited institution of higher education in a discipline of engineering or science and 5 years equivalent full-time experience;

have the equivalent of 10 years full-time experience.

You are correct about that, but it's also worth noting that there's also no point listening to a corporate press release that's telling you everything is fine, either, because we don't put press officers in prison for lying.

We also usually don't have environmental professionals also working as press officers. If the press person even consulted with an environmental professional, the content has been filtered by both their lack of domain knowledge and their desire to put a good spin on things.

I will say the same thing about an environmental professional on the company payroll.

The problem I'm concerned about isn't ignorance, it is cynical CYA-ism and a giant conflict of interest.

You need a culturally-trusted institution to handle this sort of thing. I am not sure Ohio currently has one that can handle this, so I expect to not know anything until the lawsuits settle over the next decade.

There are plenty of other people who you might expect to give a reasonable update on how nature (in general) is dealing with something like a chemical spill. Gardeners, birders, fishers, even some walkers or runners are outside regularly and tend to have a feel for what is going on in the environment around them. There are people I trust when they say the fish are hiding in the afternoon because the river is too hot and they stop fishing to avoid causing too much stress. If one of them told me they were seeing dead fish more often after an event I would file that away as a mostly trustworthy source of information.

Tiktok is unverified with no reputation attached to it. People can and do fake things happening on Tiktok for views all the time. The parent comment claims "people have been showing" without linking any of the video evidence, which if it exists which makes this 3rd hand rumor already.

"hey look, here's a bunch of dead fish that weren't here yesterday"

"show me your degree"

tears up your degree for your comments being against "professional ethics"

How do we know they’re dead from something specific? An expert could tell us the evidence for that. Some dipshit who posts a picture of some dead fish on TikTok can’t.

"Prove it." would be my first respones. Followed by "Why are they dead?" and "Did you kill them yourself?" and "How often have you found dead fish anywhere?" and "How often do you look?" and "What killed these fish specifically?" etc

I guess falling back to "show me your degree" might be an easy way to answer all those questions at once.

I wouldn't assume the dead fish weren't there yesterday just because someone on Tiktok says so, for one thing.

Would you believe a random Tiktoker if they told you Elvis came back to life and camped with Aliens at the local park, the other day? If not, why is a video about dead fish more credible?

What are your qualifications for making that statement?

Anyone with a high school degree should have been introduced to the concept of authoritative sources.

Many peopl say that capitalism should be laidsez-faire and government should leave us alone. But actually, government is on the SIDE of capital and corporations, and they constantly work together to keep the public distracted and divided enough to actually force these corporations to change:

https://magarshak.com/blog/?p=362

yeah, it's not that bad when you are in DC or on Wall Street

A tad of Yes, Minister wisdom [1]:

  "The Four Stage Strategy:
  Stage 1. Nothing is going to happen.
  Stage 2. Something may happen, but we should do nothing about it.
  Stage 3. Maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.
  Stage 4. Maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXIetP5iak

Legislation passed under President Obama required trains carrying hazardous flammable materials to have ECP brakes.

The law was rescinded in 2017 by the Trump administration.

Agreed.

1. Let's not pretend that this was a "crazy" Trump move. Any Republican would have done this.

2. Let's stop pretending both parties are the same. Yes, there are places where they overlap, but there are important places where there is NO overlap. Environmental action is the big area where there is little to no overlap.

And yet despite having a majority of the house and senate under Biden they've been unable to deliver almost anything except an unfair railroad contract.

So maybe, just maybe, the 2 sides are willing to shout about different things but at the end of the day are in fact the same.

Razor thin margin in the Senate and at least 2 of the "Democrats" are not really going to vote on anything controversial. They have been shills, so far, for business interests.

Are you saying there was no possible way to get railroad safety through?

But it was the Republicans' fault

well it seems Dems put the rule in place, Republicans removed it, and then the Dems didn't act fast enough to re-instate it.

if i where to point at who has the most fault it here would be the Republicans.

If someone puts up a tent and someone else purposely burns it down, is the first person partially at fault for not rebuilding it when everyone gets rained on?

no? its the 2nd person for burning it down. full stop.

I'm saying the situation Biden has been in since he took office is very tenuous. There was a virtual tie on paper, with the VP breaking the tie, but 2 of the people on the Dem side were not at all cooperative with the agenda that Biden wanted.

To say "the Dems could have done it if they wanted it" is not at all true.

Both parties primarily serve the interests of the 0.1%, hence the reduction in safety protections under Trump and the imposition of an unfair contract and the removal of the right to strike under Biden. Got to squeeze out every last fraction of a percent of profit to keep Berkshire Hathaway's stock price up.

Normally I'd agree with you, but not on this.

The Democrats had the option of doing nothing. The railroad workers would have had a strike for a variety of their issues (safety being high on the list), and the workers would have gotten a better deal than the one they got.

Unfortunately the strike would have to have lasted long enough and been painful enough for the train companies to accept that they had to negotiate with workers rather than trying to bargain with Congress. That's fundamentally why Congress caved - because THEY would be blamed for the economic disruption. But that doesn't change the fact that simply doing nothing would have been a better outcome for workers.

Have you ever considered that maybe the reason there’s always a Democrat or two willing to block progressive legislation is that the Democratic Party wants it that way? That way they can have their cake, by promising progressive reform, and eat it, by not delivering that reform and thus, not pissing off their donors. I’ve been hearing about these one or two non-compliant Democrats my whole voting life (remember Joe Lieberman?), and yet the party never invests resources in primarying them.

Just a thought.

It’s always a popular conspiracy theory that either side has certain “renegade” members that are there mostly to prevent popular with people but not with big money laws from getting through.

And Biden and Buttigieg didn’t make it a priority to re-implement the law while they had control of both houses, and instead shoved an unfair contract down railroad workers throats.

Fair point, but from what I've read the preliminary cause identified pertains to an axle (not braking) issue?

The idea is that you stop quicker, before the axle actually fails.

So the train initiated a stop, the axle broke, and they did not stop in time? Why did they initiate the stop?

First I've heard of this.

*Update - NTSB is saying it was bearing failure - https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...

ctrl+f for 'axle' or 'brake' from the NTSB statement - zero results

What do you think the bearing is containing?

That doesn't mean it was the brake. The bearing contains the brake. The axle contains the bearing. The train contains the axle.

Not enough information to determine what caused the bearing to fail, bearing failures account for 5.9% of all train derailments[1].

Though we can look at common train bearing failures to get a likelihood...

Most likely it was a simple lack of maintenance. It's possible to prevent this with more sensors[2] and tighter maintenance checks.

[1] https://www.wisnerbaum.com/blog/2016/september/the-most-comm...

[2] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/projects/...

No, you e got it backwards. The train contains the bogey which contains the bearing which contains the axle.

Err yes you're right on that.

My point though is the "bearing failing" is too generic to determine what on it failed.

Sometimes the brakes are fixed to the axle, are they not? In that case it couldn't be the brake.

I’m not waiting y the brake failed. It can take minutes for air brakes to respond on a long train. Once they become aware of the hot axle, if they could stop quicker, then the bearing doesn’t fail, which causes the axle to drop out, and thus the train to derail.

Think about pulling over as soon as you know you’ve taken a hit to a tire instead of continuing to drive until you’re on nothing but a rim and sparks.

Containing? Discs for braking are mounted and fixed to the axle. Bearings allow for rotation of the axle and are offset from the disc brake mount and constrained on other axes. I don't know what kind of train or brake system was used on this train, so I can't speak to whether brakes or Donald Trump ;) are to blame for this.

Sure, but it's a little more complicated than that. A 2015 act of Congress mandated that the Department of Transportation repeal the braking requirement if an analysis showed more costs than benefits. The act was mostly to address high profile oil tanker derailments, shipments which peaked around 2014. The Trump administration concluded, probably mistakenly, that an cost-benefit analysis justified it revocation. Of course there was much lobbying by the railroad and oil industries.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s department has no plans to reinstate an Obama-era rail safety rule aimed at expanding the use of better braking technology, even though a former federal safety official recently warned Congress that without the better brakes.

The Biden administration has had every opportunity to reinstate the safety rule in the past two years.

https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2018/12/20/trump-ad...

https://jacobin.com/2023/02/department-of-transportation-tra...

To be fair, besides the primary initiative of keeping all the wealth in the hands of a few, the secondary purpose of a Republican administration is to undo anything done by a Democratic administration. There was no way for Trump to know whether the legislation was good or bad. It could have gone either way, really.

It's felt like any republican 'rolling back' dem-initiated legislation tends to have more negative consequences for more people than positive benefits for others. I don't have any specifics in mind - if I think of any I'll edit/add here. But perhaps others have counter examples to correct my gut feeling?

So republicans are just guilty until proven innocent?

You posted two duplicate comments in this thread only to claim that it was Trump's fault?

Would ECP brakes have stopped this, a serious question? I don't know if the severity of this warrants blame on a lack of ECP braking. There is a study done[1] that compared different pneumatic vs electronic signal brakes and ECP brakes could have potentially reduced the number of cars in a derailment but I don't know if it's a significant decrease in cars that are derailed, 50 cars derailed. It does not seem that way to me. But I could be wrong.

[1]: https://www.ntsb.gov/news/events/Documents/2017_casselton_BM...

No it would not have, as another posted, the NTSB has reported this was a bearing failure[1].

Bearing failures account for 5.9% of all train derailments[2].

It's possible to help prevent this (not fully as many things derail trains) with more sensors[3] and tighter maintenance checks.

This was most likely due to a lack of maintenance.

[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...

[2] https://www.wisnerbaum.com/blog/2016/september/the-most-comm...

[3] https://www.southampton.ac.uk/engineering/research/projects/...

In another universe, ECP brakes would have saved the day. It sounds like the Trump administration still deserves criticism for decaying train safety.

> ECP brakes would have saved the day

Citation needed.

It sounds like all administrations (especially those currently in charge) deserve criticism for not focusing on the correct regulations for train safety.

Requiring something that isn't needed doesn't help... It can hurt as it takes resources away from actual necessities, like sensors, and tighter maintenance inspections.

Did you just ask for a citation from a hypothetical universe?

Well then, we’ll have to do with a hypothetical citation from a real universe.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) found that a train derailment near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in May 2015 was prevented from being a disaster thanks to the train’s Emergency Control Power (ECP) brakes. According to the NTSB report, the ECP brakes, which are activated when the engineer loses control of the train, stopped the train within 1.25 seconds of the engineer’s attempts to stop it, preventing it from derailing. The ECP brakes are the most efficient braking system available, allowing trains to stop within a very short amount of time. Without them, the tragic derailment of Amtrak Train No. 188 may have been much worse.

"U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. "Investigation Report: Derailment of Amtrak Train No. 188 Near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 12, 2015." May 2016. https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Reports/....

easy! serial HNer contrarianism

Yeah how absurd of me to me to ask for their reasoning.

Not absurd at all to bring up another universe...

I ignored that silly part of their statement as you should have.

Read the link I posted above. It estimates braking distance with EPC vs pneumatic along with reductions in cars that derail. It DOES reduce breaking time in emergency stops which has fewer cars derail but I don't know if it is enough of a reduction to be worthwhile. I don't think it would have dramatically reduced the number of cars that derailed in this accident. I am willing to be proven wrong.

Why does this sound really familiar? Because it's very close to the Narcissist's Prayer [1]

That didn't happen.

And if it did, it wasn't that bad.

And if it was, that's not a big deal.

And if it is, that's not my fault.

And if it was, I didn't mean it.

And if I did, you deserved it.

https://www.thelifedoctor.org/the-narcissist-s-prayer

> It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted.

I recently learned that smaller versions of this even happen in the Lasalle/Peru area in Illinois with some regularity. It makes the local news, and maybe some Chicago news, but hardly a blip on national news.

And this is people telling me they live miles away from the incident, and are experiencing fuzzy orange snow. It's curious, because this is getting more press coverage, and at the same time the conspiracy wingnuts are claiming the press is covering it up.

Imagine a world where journalists have enough time in the day to participate in a coverup

>"journalists"

You keep using that word. I do not think that word means what you think it means.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_hGKT5FI78

There's a lot of self-styled "Citizen Journalists" these days of wildly variable quality.

See: Jessica Reed Krause

Better to be a labelled conspiracy wingnut, as someone who maintains justified suspicion of those who hold power in our society (media, corporate barons, politicians), than to be too trusting and assuming all is well.

> labelled conspiracy wingnut, as someone who maintains justified suspicion

If your suspicions were justified then by definition you wouldn't be a conspiracy wingnut. But most of the wingnuts think everything is a conspiracy, which makes them no more useful than a broken clock.

was I a conspiracy wingnut for thinking the war in Iraq was fought on dubious grounds? Don't have time to go down the rabbit hole. Let's just apply Mark Twain's quote and replace "read the newspaper" with "watch/read corporate news". He's still right.

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you do, you're misinformed.”

Was the clock broken when it told me it 6.30 the other day?

The cancer rates in that area are wack. I know a teacher at a local school and the amount of children who are lost to cancer is outrageous. Every year at least. The town is 10,000 people.

Also, something similar happened just recently. <fortunately> the carus chemical plant explosion is but a tiny blip compared to the Ohio disaster. https://abc7chicago.com/carus-chemical-explosion-potassium-p...

But it is terrible nonetheless.

> Also, something similar happened just recently.

Yeah, exactly why this was on my mind. I had an interaction with some folks who mentioned the explosion and the fear in the community, and the response from the company and local authorities being not very satisfying.

Me: "The one a year ago?" Them: "No, it happened again a few weeks ago. It happens couple years, seems like. Welcome to LaSalle!"

Moral Mazes has many good examples of how this happens.

Aaron Swartz quoted one excerpt about an industrial accident towards the bottom of this blog: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/bizethics

Management deferred replacement of a $6M battery and the cost of its failure was 100-150M.

>People are always calculating how others will see the decisions they make. … They know that they have to gauge not just the external … market consequences of a decision, but the internal political consequences. And sometimes you can make the right market decision, but it can be the wrong political decision.

> It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects

Yeah but most of the time the panic spread on social media actually does get it wrong.

I am familiar with nuclear matter and the amount of insane social media post about any little nuclear thing is pretty crazy and have no scientific bases.

> In general I grow super weary of companies and the government downplaying these sorts of things. It seems to constantly follow the pattern of people saying "It's not that bad" and then only years later do we actually see the horrific health and environmental effects of these sorts of things play out when it's too late for the folks that have been impacted. This isn't really the same, but I've been thinking in similar areas a lot lately in the context of climate change, and the debate around climate change, although debating any topic doesn't change many minds.

If you bet on the scientific majority around climate change being wrong / non-existent / something we can't control, and end up being wrong, then the worst case scenario we make the planet uninhabitable (I'm going to the extreme here).

If you bet that climate change exists and is man-made and end up wrong, we've unnecessarily invested a huge amount of money into reducing pollution, more efficient buildings / manufacturing / transport, and reduce the dependence on a limited set of oil producers to be able to hold supply of oil over nations.

For something more immediate like health concerns with this derailment, is should the officials be more willing to be wrong? And message as such?

Unfortunately, the problem here is that for the individual politicians, if you bet that climate change exists, the worst case scenario is that the big money turns against you and you lose office.

If you bet that climate change doesn't exist or can't be fixed, so we might as well go on with the status quo, the worst case is that you get voted out by environmentally-conscious voters...after getting scads of campaign contributions from the big money, and with a good chance of getting a cushy lobbying post from them afterwards.

These are the incentives we need to change.

You’re betting other people’s money in the second case, and they have a say.

That money was granted to them as a reward for contributing to society. Society has a say in how it can be spent.

They were either granted it or they weren't.

Getting money from society doesn't come with a grant of immunity to it's rules. Are you saying that it should?

If you use your money to start a business involving a giant tire fire in your back yard then society will, rightfully so, have something to say about it.

In a civilized, democratic society that's always true. But it doesn't disqualify the original point.

And it works both ways... Other people have spent trillions of US dollars on, for e.g., the war in the middle east. Some of my tax money went to that. I didn't have the ability to veto it.

There should be a reasonable public debate and then people vote. Very often it involves spending other peoples money. That's just how it works.

>If you bet on the scientific majority around climate change being wrong / non-existent / something we can't control, and end up being wrong, then the worst case scenario we make the planet uninhabitable (I'm going to the extreme here).

Have you heard of Pascals wager? What do you think of it?

The problem with your 2nd part is it hasn't been actually shifting away from oil, just shifting where in the chain uses more of it. 'Green' infrastructure and products are still overwhelmingly powered by oil & coal and require such significant amounts of emissions to extract that it is self-defeating in the majority of cases. The strongest advocates of 'Green' energy have been frequently silent on Nuclear Energy, which is an obvious and much easier solution to their own alarmism than wind farms (have you seen local eco impacts and blade disposal?) solar (works only where it's sunny with limited options for power storage which is its own can of worms).

>For something more immediate like health concerns with this derailment, is should the officials be more willing to be wrong? And message as such?

I think transparency is what is being requested, not wrongness.

> Have you heard of Pascals wager? What do you think of it?

If I have I don't remember it, thanks for bring it up. I'm still trying to absorb it, but I find it to be a fascinating insight. Part of it, is I often try to remind myself that I don't know what I don't know.

> The problem with your 2nd part is it hasn't been actually shifting away from oil, just shifting where in the chain uses more of it.

Well that's true today, but is also basically correct no matter what happens. Our society only operates because of the stuff, so today, any other energy types are going to be transported by oil, manufactured using electricity from hydrocarbons, etc.

> The strongest advocates of 'Green' energy have been frequently silent on Nuclear Energy, which is an obvious and much easier solution

What really changed my mind on this side of the discussion, was a point I heard somewhere that we would've really need to start this 15 years ago. Nuclear is so capital intensive and so long to build, we don't get the necessary impact for far too long if we start now. I'm totally onboard extending lifetime of current reactors if safe to do so, and think new nuclear should be some mix of future energy supplies. I'm keeping an eye on the industry here and totally want the startups to succeed, but I'm under the impression we need to pursue other options here as well.

This probably isn't the best thread to debate the nuances wind and solar and storage, you're right, there are real waste and safety problems with these technologies. But I don't know that also means they aren't the current best option for some mix of new investments.

But, I simply don't know what I don't know.

> I've been seeing content on Tiktok where even 100 miles away they're seeing small dead fish which is apparently according to the folks making the videos a massive red flag.

It's interesting that you mention that you saw this on TikTok. In the last two days, the Ohio train derailment has become one of the hottest topics in ALL of Chinese social media (Weibo, tiktok, Little red book, etc), 10 days after its happening.

I was confused when my Chinese friends started asking me about this event, which I saw on the news the day it happened.

Why the huge lag? Oh yeah, because of the Chinese "balloons" -- nationalist citizens are mad that CCP has taken a "soft" stance in the face of US shooting down Chinese balloons. Chinese official statements are along the lines of "how dare you shoot down my balloons, they are just passing through on accident", then stating that American balloons have entered Chinese airspace previously and that's unacceptable.

This entire thing is a mess, so here comes the typical media manipulation to focus both Chinese and non-Chinese negative attention on America, even though American media has been giving this event no less attention than something like this usually receives.

What is being underplayed:

-Same chemical by products as the chemicals stored at the Bhopal disaster -Railroad unions have been warning of this outcome for more than 10 years

They will end up suing NS as the town will have to be evacuated again and demolished as they will find that the water-table has been polluted beyond repair.

Bhopal was methyl isocyanate.

The most concerning chemical when Bhopal occurred was methyl isocyanate. But, although it was the most concerning, many other chemicals are at Bhopal that would be a significant problem in themselves, which are not possibilities for the current topic.

...Not to mention the dispersion along the entire Ohio River watershed, which supplies drinking water for about 5M people.

Not sure why this is being downvoted.

Because it's extremely misleading. They're invoking the name of the Bhopal disaster even though they seem to know that the actual toxin released in that disaster (methyl isocyanate) is not one of the chemicals on the NS train (or one of their products, as far as I know). Instead, they're talking about the chemicals "stored at" the Bhopal disaster, which may make the comment technically true (I don't know) but very very misleading since those chemicals had nothing to do with the mass death for which the incident is infamous.

Because it's entirely wrong.

>Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Train derailments are the latest conspiracy theory for tinfoil hats right now. I guess food processing plant fires fell out of vogue.

"nO oNe iS rEpOrTiNg aBoUt tHiS" cries the conspiracy theorist reporting about the incident using screencaps from news reports.

It's not completely unreported but compare it to the few balloons you guys popped in the last week that made international news it's weird. Especially since these balloons are 99.9% mass hysteria

The balloons seemed to get the most coverage and hype on social media / twitter. And now the same social media / twitter is complaining about how the news spent too much time talk about the balloons.

Reading the economist on a weekly basis, the balloon story didn't get the same kind of hysterical coverage that I was lead to believe by twitter. I wish people would actually spending time reading instead of just scanning headlines and twitter and drawing strong conclusions and getting angry about it

I can tell you the balloon made front-page news for at least the BBC, the guardian, der Spiegel (Germany) and the NZ herald (New Zealand). And I'm not even talking about US news. It definitely was blown way out of proportion in regular media and not only on social media (there is probably an interesting discussion about cause and effect to be had here).

One is about global geopolitical games and a possible upcoming war in the next few decades.

The other is a local environmental disaster. There's a national angle in pointing out this is exactly what the rail unions told us would happen but is even Fox News reporting on that?

> is even Fox News reporting on that?

There was a segment by Hannity and Tucker Carlson about this yesterday which I found on Youtube.

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