Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

epa.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 263 posts

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#71

Post by the_optimist »

piva00 wrote: post #53
it_citizen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately they rarely cut programs immediately. It would be too easy to see the consequences. Instead: 1) freeze or reduce the budget 2) put incompetent people in charge with crazy mission statements 3) wait a bit for the program to fail and skilled employees to leave 4) point at how inefficient and useless the government program is 5) replace it by private sector and contractors It is a classic move and not just…

A classic example of this strategy being used in the past 10-20 years outside of the US is the UK's NHS. It's been slowly crippled, putting more and more pressure in the system, and eventually the solution to be proposed when the system finally collapses through malicious maladministration will be to privatise it.

If this idea were completely backwards, there would be no way to tell the difference from what you’ve suggested. In fact, there isn’t even a basic counterexample that holds without predominant confounding factors.

In other words, unfortunately, this is theory is a non-falsifiable conspiracy theory.

Edit: It is rather validating when poking a pet theory produces a negative yet non-substantive response. Sure, go on believing in fairies and yeti. Best of luck to your children.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#72

Post by fullstop »

pookha wrote: post #27

Apparently there are something like 1K derailments a year in the US? Had no idea...Seems pretty high. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...

From what I understand a lot of those are in the rail yards and not at full speed.

Here is a poorly made website which can generate reports on this:

https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/que...

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#73

Post by creato »

hammock wrote: post #39
xadhominemx wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They burned off the vinyl chloride because the combustion products are relatively benign, it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks, vinyl chloride is quite volatile and acute exposure to high concentrations of vinyl chloride vapor is dangerous, and they wanted to get everyone back in their homes (and yes, get the r…

>the combustion products are relatively benign Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades. I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though

Maybe this is out of date, but:

> There is also the theoretical possibility of burning vinyl chloride forming dioxins which are known carcinogens. So far, no dioxins have been detected.

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition-histo...

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#74

Post by hammock »

xadhominemx wrote: post #70
hammock wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the combustion products are relatively benign Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades. I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though

Phosgene also has very low environmental persistence. I think the actual amount of dioxin created from combustion of vinyl chloride monomer at atmospheric pressure is very low. In any event, both were dispersed into the atmosphere at concentrations that pose(d) very little danger to people outside of the temporary evacuation zone.

I stand corrected. They did a great job and no one in East Palestine is sick

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#75

Post by shanebellone »

gretch wrote: post #69
ROTMetro wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great idea. And I like the idea of fines being X% shares outstanding, not X dollars as that proportionally penalizes shareholders for not being good corporate owners. It's a win in so many ways.

This probably doesn’t do the thing you want it to do 1) if there is a demand to have something, it usually raises price of that thing. You could interpret this as a forced buyback, which may raise prices of shares (and thus reward bad behavior) 2) what does the govt do with the stock after it has the stock? It doesn’t have a system for processing it, as it does with USD Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders?…

"Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders? In the future they’ll think twice about investing in companies that cut corners to juice short term gains"

+1

Losses speak louder than words.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#76

Post by ezfe »

thepasswordis wrote: post #17

I'd like to see the head of the EPA, the transportation secretary, the executive team at NS, and anybody in the Biden administration who was involved in blocking the rail workers from striking move into East Palestine and live there, with their children. Don't want to do that because it isn't safe? Then buy these people all new homes. We can start the bidding at $1M per household. I cannot overstate the fury that I f…

For what it's worth, while we are sending billions of value to Ukraine, we're not literally just sending cash. Many of these things have already been manufactured anyways, the money has already been spent. Might as well use it instead of throwing it away in another decade or two.

It's the same thing with space ships. The probe development cost $565 million, but we're not just launching that money into space. We're paying people and companies that money to produce a probe, which supports our economy and lets us go to space.

note: I'm not trying to draw a comparison in mission goals between a rocket ship to Pluto and funding the war in Ukraine

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#77

Post by InCityDreams »

spaceguillotine wrote: post #11
xadhominemx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you’re overestimating the cost of this cleanup by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Vinyl chloride is not particularly toxic, has low environmental persistence, and does not bioaccumulate.

wait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.

Hearsay: in Germany if US vehicle kills a pig, uncle sam is on the line for 6 generations of what hat pig could produce ...

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#78

Post by [deleted] »

mushbino wrote: post #8
jmclnx wrote: post #5

Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference. Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.

I'm really hoping the residents and rail workers realize they need to come together for this common cause. Unfortunately, busting the rail strike as both parties did only contributes to this problem in a major way. Nobody is coming to save us. These issues can only be resolved with people coming together in collective action. As a side note, i hope they go bankrupt and we expropriate them. Railroads are too important…

[deleted]

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#79

Post by naasking »

hammock wrote: post #30
thechao wrote: post #26

Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the tr…

There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)

> There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment [...]

I think that's a problem worth discussing as well. Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump, then the rail companies spent billions in stock buybacks and tried to tighten the screws on their labour force even further for cost-cutting reasons.

There are a lot of pathological behaviours that have gone into "thousands of derailments per year" that are worth discussing, and I'd say those are a lot more important than just this one derailment.

Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

#80

Post by maybelsyrup »

mushbino wrote: post #8
jmclnx wrote: post #5

Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference. Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.

I'm really hoping the residents and rail workers realize they need to come together for this common cause. Unfortunately, busting the rail strike as both parties did only contributes to this problem in a major way. Nobody is coming to save us. These issues can only be resolved with people coming together in collective action. As a side note, i hope they go bankrupt and we expropriate them. Railroads are too important…

Nationalize the railroads, 100%.
Post reply on HN