191–200 of 263 posts
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My friend from East Palestine took a video of the water in a creek that runs outside his house. The water is rainbow like an oil spill. This was yesterday. Whatever they combusted and dispersed, it's very much still there and I sure wouldn't want to be drinking that water.
Probably a biofilm.
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My first job (1983) was as a bench tech, at a defense contractor (microwave spy stuff/TEMPEST). We all had these little bottles on our benches, with a funny silver lid that acted a bit like a "birdbath"[0]. You pumped it a couple of times, and the contents would come up, into a shallow bowl. You'd then take a long "Q-Tip" swab, dip it in the liquid, and use that to clean flux off the PCB you were fixing. They also ha…
1-1-1 Trichloroethane??? Even in 1990 or so when I first came across it (also for cleaning PC boards), it was known to be hazardous.
Lots of pretty hairy stuff, in that lab. The gold-plating room had 50-gallon drums of cyanide.
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They evacuated people first.
Wasn't the mandatory evacuation order only for a 1-mile radius?
Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.
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I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this. But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.
As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions."
Their bungling of the response is completely predictable, extending a long long history of bungled responses to emergencies. Of course the predicable reaction to this bungling is not to simply acknowledge the reality of government incompetence, no.. it will be as it always is a mix of not enough money, not enough power, and capitalism / lack of regulation that will be to blame. Government agencies are always pure as the driven snow, and with out fault
Government is always measured by their intentions, never their results.
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Well based on the fact that - we’ve cleaned up 25% of sites in a system that only started in the 80s - the infrastructure bill in 2021 bringing back the superfund cleanup tax on chemical companies that expired in 1995 — at double the rate - and Congress also authorizing an extra $3.5 billion 2 years ago just for cleanups I think it’s too early to be so cynical
News flash: the 1980s were 40 years ago. At this rate we'll all be dead before they're done.
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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 f…
I'm not sure it was political. The FAST Act, the legislation from 2015 that mandated that regulators require ECP brakes on some trains also required that the National Academy of Sciences produce a report on the effectiveness of such brakes which would then be used to review the regulation to see if the assumptions behind it were valid. The regulators then had to either publish an explanation of how the regulation was justified or repeal it.
In 2017 the NAS report came out, and found that there really wasn't much evidence either way, and said they were unable to conclude that ECP brakes would outperform other types of brakes.
Given that NAS report I am not at all sure that the outcome would have been different under a Clinton administration.
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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.
If they cannot operate safely and they are essential to our national security, perhaps they should be nationalized. I bet the threat of nationalization would get their collective asses in gear.
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The length of the siding shouldn't prevent you from using it. It should just require the main track to be signalled stopped for other traffic in either direction while you are occupying it during the set out procedure. If the train is long enough, this could be quite a long time if you have to dump and then rebuild working pressure in the brake system.
There’s also the possibility that mechanical parts will seize up (especially in the case of overheated bearings) and will be unable to get moving again if you stop.
They can always split the train and cart off the working cars to a siding, and then if need be drag the sparkler at low speed with little risk of derailment. Or worst, you bring in a crane and replace the bogie on a siding. Or any number of actions that don't start a statewide emergency. Talk about normalizing deviance in name of profits.
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Well based on the fact that - we’ve cleaned up 25% of sites in a system that only started in the 80s - the infrastructure bill in 2021 bringing back the superfund cleanup tax on chemical companies that expired in 1995 — at double the rate - and Congress also authorizing an extra $3.5 billion 2 years ago just for cleanups I think it’s too early to be so cynical
I've never been sick more often than when I lived in super fund defending champion Mountain View during college.