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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

#251

Post by Workaccount2 »

ajross wrote: post #211
mindslight wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

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.

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

#252

Post by dendrite9 »

anotherman554 wrote: post #165
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…

"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 envi…

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.

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

#253

Post by toiletfuneral »

shadowgovt wrote: post #197
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…

> 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-…

[dead]

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

#254

Post by xhrpost »

colpabar wrote: post #29
Workaccount2 wrote: post #15

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…

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 fo…

> 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.

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

#255

Post by colpabar »

jasonlotito wrote: post #174
colpabar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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?

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

#256

Post by c1ccccc1 »

notch898a wrote: post #192
slantedview wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

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

#257

Post by jakelazaroff »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #187
johndevor wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#258

Post by whamlastxmas »

Filligree wrote: post #232
whamlastxmas wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#259

Post by shadowgovt »

rcme wrote: post #224
shadowgovt wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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).

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

#260

Post by sam0x17 »

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...

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