CDC team studying East Palestine train derailment fell ill during investigation
cbsnews.com
cbsnews.com
This is ridiculous. Even with the above, they are “unsure” if it was related to anything else like “fatigue”. Like come on.
Talk to people all day about symptoms they're experiencing and you can develop psychosomatic effects. Especially if you're over-worked and that kind of censusing isn't your day-to-day.
Not to say nothing happened to them. Just that medical causality is really complicated.
Don't you remember what happened to 9/11 workers who then died of specific forms of cancer? The US government fully knew that working there was dangerous for their health due to the toxic dust.
What executive working at the CDC now will still be there in 15 years? That won't be their problem...
Vinyl chloride exposure risk, in contrast, is pretty well understood; we've been working with it for over 100 years (and crashing trainloads of it for about that long).
I agree the EPA (not CDC) made errors after 9/11, but they were working with a novel threat.
You underplay this, however unwittingly. (Sorry for the long post here.)
I lived in New York suburbs and had a firefighter friend who by his commanding officers was encouraged not to go down there (reasons unknown to me) despite being willing. I was glad for him (and his family) because the risk of spending days/weeks in that strange smelling smoke were pretty obvious.
Common sense isn’t “science” but the Bayesian priors for the risk given what we knew about asbestos, asbestos in office buildings, other chemicals in plastics in office buildings, the prolonged period people were working in the smoke, the lack of leadership demanding masks due to the discomfort/heat and the great strange stench of the smoke were all pretty obvious to anyone following the news in the area.
Amidst very reasonable questioning and concern for first responder heros spending large amounts of time in the smoke (and after it was clear there were no more survivors to be found), while smoke was still abundant, the EPA literally declared it was “safe” during public questioning about it and in very strong terms, when it was clear there could be no such scientific basis to conclude a statement as strong as that. I was shocked at the time and I hold their previously respectable but politically-oriented leader Christine Todd Whitman personally responsible for the lie and injury to 1000s of people so that the capitalist system could rebuild as fast as possible at the expense of first responder suckers who trusted the elite all the while praising them for their sacrifice. (I don’t usually view the world in such terms but in this particular circumstance I completely do.)
The way people clearing the site as fast as possible were lied to was unconscionable. I am sure Ms. Whitman was pressured from above her, but I consider it one of the most obvious blatant political economically-driven hypocritical lies to come out of my government, a complete self-betrayal of the EPA in fulfilling their core mission purpose and values, and a dark disgrace upon all involved.
Looking back, I don’t think I misremembered the EPA characterization of it as “safe”. They did declare it safe per Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Environmental_...
Per Wikipedia, Ms Whitman claims the agency statement of “safe” was never about ground zero, just lower manhattan, which I will concede may be true, but ground zero was a super obvious concern at the time amidst press questioning and even if I should be charitable and not claim it was a bald face lie, it was a lie by omission, misdirection, etc. The lack of clarity on the risks to ground workers or public concern or advocacy for them by the agency with the most expertise and pertinent mission was and is a betrayal. They couldn’t have added a qualifying statement of concern with whatever degree of uncertainty they had at the time about ground zero at the time? “There are risks/unknown here but not here?” I don’t mind also blaming local political officials also for using/misusing/twisting EPA words for their agendas and on behalf of are business owners small or large, or national security officials playing psychological or political games at the requests of their leadership, but I came away with the a stench of deception.
I try to tell myself “Deception? Couldn’t it have been just ordinary incompetence, a failure of leadership, scientific uncertainty?” But the silence about the risks to first responders and cleanup teams —all the while while the entire culture was voluminously heroizing them, to me, speaks volumes. This was a completely predictable tragedy which, while perhaps not completely avoidable, would have been much more morally defensible if the risks and unknowns would have been openly acknowledged and disclosed responsibly to the people who put their lives and health on the line to accelerate economic recovery so they could make an informed decision or requested at least hazard pay before taking the risks. But no. They were deceived and lied to. All while being praised for their sacrifice. Makes me sick.
No causality, nothing to report.
Multiple trains derailed in East Palistine. Netflix even filmed a documentary about it there.
Knowing all that, both parties sided with the railways and voted to force the rail workers back to work.
Post accident, audio recordings of a railway supervisor ordering safety inspectors to ignore safety issues were released.
Poisoning an entire town is not a good look for either the Democrats or the Republicans, so the CDC has every political incentive possible to downplay this incident, regardless of who wins the next election.
The CDC scientists in this case almost certainly came to the obvious conclusion and then properly documented and reported it.
After all, protecting these people was the justification the public health administration used to say "masks don't work".
You have to be a total sucker to believe they're optimizing for your subpopulation. They're the #1 Greater Good Team.
If admitting they got sick would reduce faith in the government and that would be bad For The Greater Good, they would just lie.
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-07-27/timeline-cd...
March 24, 2020
Even as the coronavirus spreads across the United States — shutting down businesses, sporting events and schools — the CDC’s advice around masking remains unequivocal: Healthy people who do not work in the healthcare sector and are not taking care of an infected person at home do not need to wear masks.
Yes, the CDC said masks don't prevent the spread of the virus. They also said it mitigates the spread of the virus, which are both true statements when the number of people wearing masks grows to "most of the country."
Medicine is a statistical science, which a lot of people have a hard time wrapping their heads around the nuances of.
Hardly makes a difference though. CDC advice in March 2020 was that the vast majority don't need to wear one. Then suddenly everyone had to wear one, on pain of fines. Nothing about masks or the virus or "the science" changed. The reliability problem remains.
Are you sure? Because I'm pretty sure they refined the transmission model after understanding the virus better, looked at the cost / benefit ratios on mitigation options, and concluded that masks were better than nothing given that quarantining everyone wasn't an option.
In that sense, "the science changed" in that we understood the situation better. There is also, of course, the gap between policy and science; the science can say X is true, whether we do Y in response to X being true is a cost / benefit calculus, and that calculus was changing continuously as policymakers updated economic impact estimates and saw how people responded to different approaches.
Reality is, respiratory viruses and masks have been around a long time. There was very little that was novel about SARS-CoV-2 despite attempts to claim otherwise, and prior understanding was correct: masks did nothing and that's clearly visible in the data. They were forced on everyone for political and ideological reasons, not scientific ones.
>> given that quarantining everyone wasn't an option.
It wasn't!? Because lockdowns sure seemed like quarantining everyone to the rest of us!
Frankly, one big reason why COVID was so bad in the US was because of how terribly the CDC fucked up testing.
They banned every test that wasn't their flawed one.
NPR did a good article on how massive the fuck up was - https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/929078678/cdc-report-official...
The CDC also knowingly advised against masks, for months, claiming that they wouldn't help and could even hurt despite knowing better.
And that wasn't the only time they kept quiet with information that would have benefited Americans - this well sourced article points out a few of the more egregious incidents. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/07/31/cdcr-j31.html
Yes, I know, the irony!
My anecdotal experience, and I think it matches with lots of other people, is that I never caught covid for most of the pandemic while wearing an n95 and even travelled and was out in public quite a bit. It wasn't until after I and most other people stopped wearing a mask in public that I caught it. It could have been due to virus mutation or whatever, but I had quite a few close calls where I was around infected people but wearing a mask and did not catch it. I also have a large extended family, so lots of people caught it and there was always a homegrown investigation on where they got it. Every single time, there was always some maskless gathering a week or two before where multiple people became infected or a family member that brought it home.
Luckily the CDC has admitted it's mistake, though they haven't properly updated guidance accordingly.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-teeny-tiny-scientific-screwu...
I take that to mean the opposite of the quote you gave. So it's unclear which is true.
Does anyone have a reassuring reason why I shouldn't be worried about this? Does the food industrial complex have controls to prevent chemically contaminated grain from getting into processed food supply chains? Is there a reason to believe the government is regulating this competently?
I think I'm going to try to avoid processed food and buy produce as locally as possible for a few years (which also has some other benefits anyways). But, am I being overly paranoid?
There are tons of carcinogens around, East Palestine is the least of your worries unless you live near there.
(I have zero scientific background)
By simple volume, people have more to be concerned about from the plastic vapors left over from the packaging and shipping processes for the food they're buying from the grocery store then the risk of vinyl chloride contamination from the East Palestine spill.
Does anybody have a scientific (not clickbait) citation for this?
The quick HYSPLIT plume simulation I ran[0] showed the plume crossing over New England on its way to the Atlantic. There is agriculture there, but I would hardly describe it as the nation's bread basket.
Don't get me wrong, there's a lot of contamination of the food supply from pesticides and soil-accumulating heavy metals in fertilizers. Buying local and organic food isn't paranoid, but it would be a mistake to over-attribute these pollution sources to the East Palestine incident.
[0] https://www.ready.noaa.gov/hypub-bin/hyresults.pl?jobidno=28...
The lack of this in the coverage of the East Palestine train derailment is interesting.
So many of the claims goes back to TikTok videos and reddit comments.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/113wyj3/hy...
Looks like the plume didn't blow west much, which probably mitigates agricultural impact significantly, good point!
I would urge you to consider the motives and reasons of those who would disagree with, or try and stop you from doing so.
https://statuscoup.substack.com/p/east-palestine-bombshell-e...
When a GM tube is overloaded, the particles create too many overlapping trails, and the tube cannot stop conducting electricity. This continuous flow of electricity does not trigger the edge detector, so it thinks the level of radiation is zero. Some modern equipment has an alarm for this condition.
https://katv.com/news/local/authorities-responding-to-plane-...
Not "investigators"...
Most of the people sent on site to perform tests and surveys are private contractors payed by the train company (Norfolk Southern) [0]. This is 1980 USSR level of corruption.
[0] https://www.propublica.org/article/east-palestine-ohio-norfo...
A better question is why is a CDC news article on train derailment on hacker news. What part of this article is related to technology or computers? It's just regular news.
No links to any reports containing any factual studies, any reports, any discussion on the chemical components (beyond listing what they are).
So I just don't think it deserves to be on HN, but that's fine. It's got 441 votes so obviously at least that many think it does.
They should have sufficient protective equipment when investigating these types of disasters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...
I hope Erin can help to bring the attention and justice this disaster deserves.
At least GWB, though a contemptible fellow otherwise, took his frat attitude up in a chopper to survey Katrina.
Over 1,000 derailments! Maybe we should work on getting those down before patting ourselves on the back for job well done.
In any event. it's really tone deaf to say, hey, no big deal we have approx three accidents like this every day of the year, deal with it! What a wanker.
What is the overall percentage any train spends derailed?
The big problems, for both trains and nuclear plants, are rare.
For instance, plane crashes are far more severe - and still happen relatively frequently despite all effort to stop them.
1000 also feels roughly consistent with the rest of the world considering how big the US is.
That's how the derailment I was in worked. This was an Amtrak going from the Seattle area to Los Angeles. We pulled onto a siding to let a freight train by. When our train started again it went a few feet and then there was a thud and it abruptly stopped.
What happened was that the rails had separated a bit just ahead of where we had stopped on the siding, and so when the train resumed it fell off the rails.
Amtrak sent a couple engines to help. One went to the back or our train, and one went to the main track in front of where the siding started. The back one was connected to the back of our train, and the derailed engine was disconnected. The back engine then pulled the rest of our train backwards onto the main track. The other engine was coupled to the front of our train, the back engine decoupled, and we were back on our way.
It took around 6 hours or so from the engine derailing to the rest of the train resuming with the new engine. That was pretty annoying because we were without power most of that time, which apparently caused issues with food storage resulting in dinner being cancelled. Many of us who got on in the Seattle area had not had lunch either. The train was supposed to leave Seattle about an hour before lunch so we had planned on lunch on the train, but it actually got to Seattle after lunch.
We have coal trains rumbling through town every day. They have nothing covering the coal. It's often windy. Result: the entire town is blanketed in a pall of black dust. It gets everywhere. Comes around the windows, even modern well sealed double glazing units. On patio furniture. In our lungs, one assumes too.
That this is what people care about is why nothing gets done. A politician can't even say a fact without the news media or another opportunistic politician spinning it in the worst way possible. Imagine if this was how your company handled postmortems. Given that half the time politicians majority of time politicians spend is on optimizing their sound bites, it should be no surprise that they outsource the actual policy making part to the lobbyists.
A kind NASA engineer thanked us for our time, but noted that there's a lot of what we do in software that can't be applied to the NASA approach because, ultimately, their bosses are Congress and Congress is... somewhere between "dumb" and "an actively hostile agent." Words must be carefully chosen and information can't be widely-shared internally until the message is crafted because about half of Congress is incentivized to look for the worst possible interpretation of data collected and weaponize it.
I think it's fair that he's held to a higher standard than Ellen Chao who was pretty much just a nepotism appointment and, as far as I've seen at least, has no real desire to get into serious election competitions.
So we’re supposed to show deference to an appointee whose a member of a family controlling a Chinese maritime shipping company who happens to be the wife of the Senate Majority leader, because she’s just a patronage appointee?
So many regulatory changes were made during the Trump administration that directly benefited shipping interests. Chao isn’t some Washington DC housewife!
To clarify - when I said I hold them to a higher standard than Chao it's because my expectations were for Chao to wave in a series of corrupt defunding decisions and they ended up only being relatively corrupt - they cleared the extremely low bar I had for them. I had expectations about Buttigieg and they have not lived up to them.
Personally wading in saving the fish?
People died in Katrina. There were no immediate deaths from this environmental catastrophe.
Given that criteria, Katrina was most definitely an environmental catastrophe.
Now, if you mean "When was the last time a president visited a catastrophe that involved chemical/biological/radiological factors?" -- well, that's a bit more rare; but I presume that it's done not as a matter of appearing placid by the society at large, but as a form of damage mitigation before all the facts are presumed known.
it's essentially a rite of passage for the president to hug people in some tornado ravaged state for photos. I presume the risks outweigh the positive P.R. in actual danger zones.
tl;dr : it's easier to declare a hurricane or flood site to be safe enough for presidential passage, so it represents a fairly easy to coordinate photo-op. Things are shakier when the facts about the danger present are not done rolling in.
p.s. I feel the need to clarify something: what I mean to remind by calling Katrina an environmental catastrophe was the significant role that society had in amplifying the damage of the event through both careless engineering, careless maintenance, and careless planning -- which was then exacerbated by careless response.
"Carter was ordered to Chalk River to lead a U.S. maintenance crew that joined other American and Canadian service personnel to assist in the shutdown of the reactor.[30] The painstaking process required each team member to don protective gear and be lowered individually into the reactor for 90 seconds at a time, limiting their exposure to radioactivity while they disassembled the crippled reactor. When Carter was lowered in, his job was simply to turn a single screw.[31] During and after his presidency, Carter said that his experience at Chalk River had shaped his views on atomic energy and led him to cease development of a neutron bomb.[32]"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/20/jimmy-cart...
https://www.verifythis.com/article/news/verify/national-veri...
https://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/about_us/naval_service
> 16 OCT 1952 - 08 OCT 1953—Duty with US Atomic Energy Commission (Division of Reactor Development, Schenectady Operations Office) From 3 NOV 1952 to 1 MAR 1953 he served on temporary duty with Naval Reactors Branch, US Atomic Energy Commission, Washington, D.C. “assisting in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels.” From 1 MAR 1953 to 8 OCT 1953 he was under instruction to become an engineering officer for a nuclear power plant. He also assisted in setting up on-the-job training for the enlisted men being instructed in nuclear propulsion for the USS Seawolf (SSN575).
I mean, knowing nothing else, one of the most memorable pieces of pop culture in the last twenty years was “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”
What? Bush’s handling of Katrina was so bad “this is so-and-so’s Katrina” entered the political lexicon as a term for mishandling disasters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
It seems very premature to draw such a conclusion. If people start dying of cancer in high numbers a few years down the line, any early claims about the non-impact of this spill will age poorly.
Regarding Katrina, we have the benefit of hindsight and enough time passing to have gotten a handle on the impact and it’s worth noting that those 1,400 deaths did not occur overnight.
If you made an assessment of Katrina’s impact prematurely, such an assessment would be unlikely to capture the true impact of the event.
A premature assessment wouldn’t have even considered including ~300-400 of the people who eventually died in health care facilities after the fact.
Does the vinyl chloride precursor burn into much worse stuff than the polyvinyl version, for equal masses? I get that it might cross some threshold for acute effects for people right near by that the other fires may never cause even for direct neighbors.
I think it would also be unwise to draw unfounded conclusions about deaths-to-come as if they're some foregone conclusion, because we are in a stage of not knowing the full impact of what happened. At the same time, we also live in a world where we now understand the long term impacts of things like asbestos and a myriad of other chemicals/substances, and concern seems warranted.
I haven’t found anything confirming that this spill is believed to match the characteristics of other spills in such a way that would alleviate concerns.
They want scary to equal dangerous. Real chemical disasters look like Love Canal, or the quiet fire that eventually ate Centralia, but people want to believe "train on fire" equals "generational trauma" and in this case it doesn't. A Bhopal or Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon is rare, and most chemical disasters are scary-looking-but-contained.
(... and that's before you factor in the work of foreign agents trying to inflate the story as a wedge issue. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2023/03/20/ohio-train-... )
Seriously, what cited information in these threads should I be looking at? The "status coup" blog? The poster who is alleging some kind of conspiracy to kill people investigating industrial accidents in Ohio?
Further horrifying to think that some of these people may rationalize minimizing and hiding evidence of harm from this disaster because they believe it would serve their political goals.
80% of Dems support universal healthcare, but the lobbyists who control the party kept it out of the 2020 platform.
Biden was losing the nomination until the party whipped the other candidates to endorse him so he wouldnt be polling worse than Bernie
Yes - most folks probably aren't going to shove their noses in the train wreck but the people with the weakest resistance to poisons (kids) absolutely will be all over the site. If adults are getting significant side effects then children will likely have very severe reactions.
It doesn't necessarily dissolve readily, but any surface that gets hosed down (or chunk of atmosphere that gets sprayed) will generally be phosgene-free.
I'm feeling the same symptoms described right now. But there's a cold going around.