Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of that smoke and no one got sick ? Hard to believe
They evacuated people first.
Wasn't the mandatory evacuation order only for a 1-mile radius?
EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
171–180 of 263 posts
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much less than 1000 (my German is pretty rusty)? e.g. 900 vs 1100 is not really statistically different, and doesn't suggest a systemic problem. Especially given the heavy focus on shipping for the US rail network versus passengers in the EU. Tracks in the US that are used for passengers are maintained better than shipping-only tracks, for sure.
Some light googling gives me 390B kilometer-tonnes[1] in Europe and 1.6T ton-miles[2] in the US for 2019. So that is 6x the freight movement. The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km). [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh... [3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a.…
Cursory googling throws out various different numbers for the rail length with english wikipedia saying that they're both roughly equal size at 210 vs 220 Mm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...) with old UIC data, the German one citing the cia world factbook which specifies 230Mm for the European union and 300Mm for the US (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/railways/).
I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).
This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.
It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).
The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
EDIT:
Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#173Glad 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.
Why would high level execs be forced to pay a difference? They are ultimately just employees. Does a senior software engineer get forced to pay a difference when a critical error results in damages to an end user?
software engineers? no. actual engineers? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malpractice
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#174Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents? News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go. Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
I have read that the governor of the state isn't requesting much in the way of federal assistance, and hasn't yet declared a state of emergency, which may or may not be a prerequisite for such federal action. That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the…
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#175Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents? News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go. Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
I have read that the governor of the state isn't requesting much in the way of federal assistance, and hasn't yet declared a state of emergency, which may or may not be a prerequisite for such federal action. That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the…
What types of assistance would require action at a federal scale? it seems like a pretty manageable problem at the state level.
It seems like there is a huge outcry that "something must be done" without really examining what that something would be or reviewing what is already being done.
Do people have shelter or need it ?
Do people have access to medical care or need more?
Are safety tests being conducted or not?
Are cleanup plans progressing or being neglected?
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#176Has 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…
https://homesignalblog.wordpress.com/2021/12/27/efficiency-a... for the general issues. Uday is writing a senior thesis on this topic, I believe, which should be a great read.
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 f…
The way to put the screws to the rail companies isn’t to regulate better brakes - just have the NTSB have a policy of shutting down any line that has a derailment for months or longer. The companies will solve it themselves.
The rail companies are "too big to fail" since they are core national logistics.
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
I stand corrected. They did a great job and no one in East Palestine is sick
All of that smoke and no one got sick ? Hard to believe
I don't want to downplay anything that happened here, but if you said a train of dihydrogen monoxide derailed and the vapors were spreading through the community, some number of people would come forward claiming to be sick. Statistically, someone is going to wake up with a cold on the day of the derailment. And the brain is a very powerful drug, if you scare someone with a chemical spill, they can show symptoms regardless of whether or not some chemical is acting on their body.
This is a risky comment to make, because it sounds like I am supporting NS's cleanup plan, and I'm not. I'm just saying that people saying they're sick doesn't mean the plan was executed incorrectly.
Re: EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Goddamn I love government websites. A simple form, with clear and common styling, with no place I have to put my email, with no popup about joining a damn mailing list, with no ads, and when I click the submit button, the response is instant and a clear table that doesn't do anything stupid with javascript. Every time the government spends my tax dollars developing a web page with a form that generates reports, an an…
Yes, I like that part greatly. The text was very small, though, and zooming does not behave as I expect.
And yet, this boring and older system is probably more accessible to disabled people.