Clinic to open near Ohio derailment as health worries linger
apnews.com
apnews.com
It's been surreal to see this event unplay in the media.
Some things I haven't seen talked about:
1. How desperately poor most of the population in that area is.
My fear is that if the crash has long terms effects people will never get justice.
These are people who can't afford to go to a doctor regularly. They can't afford to miss work. They can't afford to sue a railroad and they'll very likely take a small payment to waive all liability because any amount of money right now is better than whatever they might theoretically get in the future.
And for the most part no one there would tell you they're poor or disadvantaged. I don't mean to imply that they are downtrodden or helpless. I certainly didn't think that of myself or anyone else growing up there.
It is only with the perspective of having left and having traveled the world and having risen through the economic ladder that I have the ability to look back and see how disadvantaged they will be against a large corporation.
Barring legislation and government intervention I cannot imagine they will have even a shot in hell at getting a fair evaluation and fair deal.
2. Train wrecks happened in the area somewhat frequently
Growing up I remember at last 3 or 4 train wrecks bad enough that people had to be put up in hotels.
I don't know if that's a lot of a little for an area in a ~10 year span but it feels like a lot.
I also don't know if train wrecks are tracked and reported anywhere other than local paper archives but I would be very interested to see the internal data and memos the railroad has related to derailments.
If anyone is aware of such a resource please let me know.
Having poked at it a bit, it does seem happy to spit out a list of train derailments sliced and diced in quite a few different ways.
I think we all know corporates nearly always win if history is anything to go by! Even judges get lent on so cant be considered independent and free of influence.
If I was in your family and friends shoes over there, if I couldnt take a 4-6 week out of town vacation, I'd be increasing my Omega-3's intake to may be as much as 1g a day to increase my neutrophil size, keeping to a minimum Omega-6's as it already causes enough trouble in the western diet, cutting out all sugar from the diet except starch, to increase my neutrophil phagocytic capacity, and be taking some B12 to help my neutrophils remain normal with todays polluted world in general.
In other words, plenty of fish and potato from out of town.
Thats not a nice situation over there, but you are lucky it even got on the news, some things dont even make it onto the news in some countries.
Good luck!
What do people need and is there anything that can be done to help them?
Thanks to my job as a software engineer I felt like I was in the position to help people financially but the dozens of people I've asked at this point have all told me the same thing:
1. Their immediate needs are taken care of.
The ones who got evacuated were put up in hotels at first and have tons of support from local organizations. The ones who were more than 1 mile away generally are staying with friends until they feel like it's okay to return home.
2. They want life to return to normal.
This has been a major disruption in their daily routines. They want it resolved so they can get back to living their lives.
3. They're anxious and terrified about the health implications.
Ignoring the actual smoke cloud when they did the burn: the smell of the burn went for miles. It's hard to believe someone telling everything is safe when you home still reeks of chemical smell.
When the burn happens lots of people experienced runny noses, sore throats, and other minor symptoms. Was it a result of the chemicals? Was it stress? Was it all in their head? We just don't know.
There's a ton of dubious information flowing around social media scaring them. They don't know what to believe.
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The main thing that will help people is to feel like their situation is being taken seriously.
Things like a congressional hearing to establish answers to what happened and how it can be rectified. The federal government stepping in and committing to long term testing of the area. The railroad being forced to provide medical screening for at least the next several years.
Someone in a position of authority stepping up and saying they're committed to making things right instead of trying to minimize the situation or use it as a talking point.
Those are things no individual can do by themselves but if I had a suggestion I guess it would just be to reach out to your congressperson and tell them that you care about this getting fixed and never happening again.
Just take us seriously and let us go back to normal. Money is the last thing people want.
chemicals.
Trying to think constructively here, maybe third party Chemical Testing for residuals would provide these people with some peace of mind.
If we could have something like a community strike fund that could be payed back into when/if their case is won, I'd happily donate while I have a stable job.
Who knows, maybe some day I'll be in some affected community that could make use of such a fund
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/17/opinion/ohio-train-derail...
Unfortunately a rigorous sampling and testing protocol by an independent registered laboratory (which is what you'd need for the collection of evidence that would hold up under legal scrutiny) is an expensive and involved process.
The technology needed is well-established, just collect a lot of vials of water, soil, stream bed cores etc. on a grid scale focusing on the entire region, paying attention to downwind zones from the accident in particular. Then they need to be run through an established, documented extract-and-analysis procedure (gas-chromatography-mass-spectrometry would be appropriate, maybe high-pressure-liquid-chromatography for some of the less volatile species).
You'd want to look for the species that were on the train, of course, but also the various combustion products (which could be more hazardous than their source materials) - the list I've seen is vinyl chloride, benzene, butyl acetate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene, plus some other petroleum products. What kind of combustion products were generated is a more complex issue (phosgene has been mentioned, hydrogen chloride etc.).
At the very least, people should be collecting and labeling samples in a manner that provides proof-of-origin, maybe video documentation and so on. Here's an example of the kind of sample storage vial needed. Cost is about $3 each, you have to buy them in lots of about 75 or so. Maybe someone should set up a GoFundMe for this?
https://www.fishersci.com/shop/products/sample-vial-teflon-l...
If you have the collected samples, documented and securely stored, you can potentially get them all analyzed later by a certified lab, providing court-acceptable evidence.
Yes, and in addition, surface- and groundwater transport should be simulated given any known hydrogeologic data on the region. The federal government in fact develops free and open source software for exactly this. NS should have limited involvement in the testing process, feds and independent parties should collect data independently and compare results in public view.
I saw an unverified video linked on reddit that alleged to show that the contaminants sink to the bottom of water [1]. Could this be the reason why the water does not appear contaminated?
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/11480zm/east_palest...
(as also mentioned in the Reddit comments, the fact that the Twitter poster is a staunch North Korea supporter should make people evaluate the context of this video a little more critically -- I don't mean they can't be right, but they are at least pushing this with a certain agenda)
Frankly I really like the extremists on both sides of the isle. While I might vehemently disagree with them on specifics they are at least generally principled people who derive their policy positions from their beliefs logically and I have respect for that.
Re your second paragraph: Things that logically derive from insane starting points can still be insane. Often are, in fact. When they are right, they are right only by random accident. I'm not saying "don't read them", but don't use what they say to adjust your priors very much.
Being so staunchly principled that you cannot compromise or be practical or be open to have your mind changed is not a virtue, in my mind. If anything it is arrogant.
> who derive their policy positions from their beliefs logically and I have respect for that.
Outcomes are more important. If your beliefs are abhorrent then your policies will follow. That is not something to admire.
The FAA budget for example stated a priority for “equity” and inclusion. Shouldn’t the priority be air fucking safety? The FAA is a mess right now. And it’s Buttigieg’s fault. But at least we were able to spend millions changing “airmen” to “air missions” in the NOTAM system — all while doing nothing to actually fix the NOTAM system. Now the FAA also wants to stop people from using the term “cockpit” — not realizing that there is nothing in the history of that word that is “gendered.” Just stupidity and madness. JD Vance is right to hammer the administration: while DoT is worrying about gendered language, trains are derailing with toxic chemicals and planes are nearly crashing because of faulty ATC.
The scale of this is vastly greater, yet the reaction is just unfathomable to me given the scale of this disaster.
Again, not trying to stir anything. Just an observation.
The probable human deaths from this spill is a number somewhere between zero and 10 over decades.
That's a massive difference from a mass-casualty shooting.
Those most at risk are the first responders; everyone who heeded the evacuation order should be pretty much fine.
https://www.hitc.com/en-gb/2023/02/17/was-vinyl-chloride-use...
Phosgene breaks down in the environment on timescales measured from hours to days. The five-day evac window was more than enough to remove all appreciable amounts of phosgene from the environment. And given how reactive it is, you can trust the lack of anyone showing up in a hospital in east Ohio looking like they climbed out of an eastern-front trench as indicative that the phosgene has not caused harm.
It's real easy to over-estimate the damage this spill will do. In practice, people have been using (and spilling) vinyl chloride for over 180 years; we have a pretty good sense of the damage it can do. Not a good situation, but far on the low end of environmental impact risks (somewhere north of "a car full of diapers" and far, far south of "a car full of perchloroethylene").
But "calling for the ban of all guns" is such a poor summary of the kinds of policy reactions that briefly find their way into discourse (and do not find traction) that any reader could be forgiven for assuming it doesn't matter whether you're trying to be unreasonable or just a natural.
Still, if we're going to look for similarities between that situation and this one... I think you'd find many people are quite willing to discuss the further regulation and liability in chemical transport, including whether what we have now is adequate, just like they might be willing to talk about whether firearm laws and regulations are adequate. The article certainly mentions lawsuits the railroad is facing, so that's already one avenue of accountability in play.
What's "unfathomable" about accountability via lawsuit and the Ohio health department doing water monitoring? Do you have specific insights into what they're not doing correctly, or is this more vague distrust?
This is quite the stretch.
When was the last time you heard, on the news, that Jackson Mississippi still doesn’t have clean water?
Because they still don’t have clean water, haven’t for months, and are also a demographic where it could be spun as “racial injustice”
If you want to compare Jackson, MS..it’s 82% black (which is why you brought it up) in which its own state calls it the murder capital of the world. It appears they have a lot of city related issues including misappropriation of funds.
60,000 premature deaths were estimated to have been caused by air pollution in 2019, mostly from sources that were operating within regulations.
Was this bad? Yes. Is this a huge disaster in any way comparable to the ones we inflict on ourselves without a thought? Not on the evidence I’ve seen thus far.
There's already massive safety measures. If they weren't followed then that needs to be addressed.
I've heard Putin saying that the sky is blue. Now I have to wear colored glasses.
I'd be worried about if there's ash from the burn off that then mixes with water to become lye. Not sure if there's more of a chemical reaction necessary than that.
I had a vinyl wrap on part of my car and some ash from California brushfires fell on it, and then it rained a month or so after (I was procrastinating on properly washing it off) and the lye produced ate through the clear coat of the vinyl.
Is anyone aware if there is top soil or swipe testing for the train car contents or suspected partial combustion compounds?
That black cloud did not look like the cleanest burn. Isn’t it naive to burn a mixture then test for the fuel in the aftermath and say look no fuel here there must be no contamination?
What a mess.
Of course, my understanding is that the combustion compounds are also toxic, but I wanted to respond to what you've written.
My point is the rush to resume normalcy and choose the risk of false negative reassurance when its clear this is not a well thought out procedure is terrible. Testing for raw components alone neglects the entire set of potential contamination and routes. Also is a one mile radius evacuation adequate for an open burn like that? I don't know what is but it'd be nice to have support to leave for a time if living on the outside margin of "might not die depending on wind direction".
The story coverage in newspapers is decently good I don't think anything is being swept under the rug. But the official response and effort to put the threat in the past seems like damage control to exit the news cycle vs having any concern whatsoever about the people that live there. It is a poor populated area of the country and it is acceptable to open burn a million pounds of chlorinated petrochemicals. I know this happens in different ways under environmental permitting all over the US like in the gulf, etc. so its not unique. Still its terrible.
And the state and local officials are handling the media coverage and disaster response while the US federal government is shooting down multiple balloons out of the air with $400k missiles in the great 2023 balloon wars. It is absurd.
It sounds like without pressurization or chilling the risk of an explosive release was deemed higher than the risk of burning it.
And that's only counting the ocean, not air or freshwater or dirt.
I don't know if that's in the realm of detectable, but I think it's certainly not significant.
The local effects could be bad, but I don't think there will be any kind of global effects.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/02/biden-signs-bill-averting-ra...
This is the result of deregulation by both parties, and corporate greed cutting costs on safety margins in order to make more profits.