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

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

#211

Post by ajross »

mindslight wrote: post #196
ajross wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

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

#212

Post by gowings97 »

gruez wrote: post #204
gowings97 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? Wh…

>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_was…

"...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?

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

#213

Post by manmal »

shock-value wrote: post #137
petesergeant wrote: post #91

[flagged]

I don’t know or care what Chinese internal media is reporting — this is a significant story in the U.S. that is getting less play than it should. It’s an ecological disaster with potentially significant health concerns, and likely involves corporate negligence as well as a failure of governance by both political parties who recently forced rail workers back to work despite complaints related to possible causes of thi…

Another comment here brought up that this topic is big on Tiktok, which is indeed affiliated with the Chinese government.

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

#214

Post by kolanos »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #128
Julesman wrote: post #108

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 abso…

> 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.

> 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.

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

#215

Post by EGreg »

jsonne wrote: post #67

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 en…

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

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

#216

Post by qikInNdOutReply »

shadowgovt wrote: post #191
gwright wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eco…

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 t…

[flagged]

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

#217

Post by coolbreezetft22 »

lm28469 wrote: post #176
korroziya wrote: post #60

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

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

#218

Post by davesque »

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.

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

#219

Post by mrguyorama »

claytongulick wrote: post #162
unethical_ban wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, I don't see government ownership of society-critical industries with no opportunity for competition to be crazy. Tell me how you'd spin up a competing national rail line network.

Ayn Rand wrote a sci-fi/political philosophy book about this exact subject, named Atlas Shrugged. The main character in the book is a railroad executive struggling to keep her company afloat in the face of ruinous regulations that were designed to drive the rail systems towards nationalization. The flip side of course, that she fails to address completely in that book, is unethical behavior by private industry, such…

Also, you know, it's fucking fiction from an asshole who knew nothing about the world?

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

#220

Post by cycomanic »

xadhominemx wrote: post #178
yebyen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

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.

> 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.

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