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

epa.gov

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

#221

Post by [deleted] »

tristor wrote: post #125
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...

>Seems pretty high. This is a similar discrepancy between the technical meaning of language as used in statistics, and the popular usage of language as the layperson understands it when they read it in the news as happens with the term "mass shooting". When a layperson hears "train derailment" they think of what happened in Ohio. When a layperson hears "mass shooting" they think of what happened at Uvalde. In actuali…

[deleted]

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

#222

Post by ashwagary »

xadhominemx wrote: post #34
hammock wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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…

>it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks

It would have taken weeks for a large org like Norfolk Southern to unload the payload to other containers? Seems like an unreasonably long amount of time.

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

#223

Post by lesuorac »

crazygringo wrote: post #193
ballenf wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the mandatory evacuation order only for a 1-mile radius?

How much larger are you suggesting it needed to be, and based on what? Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.

I think the radius of the evacuation zone should be up to the issuer to justify.

If you want a 1-mile zone it seems that you should be able to articulate why or else it should just get denied. However, it seems that wikipedia et al don't seem to have a citation as to how 1 mile was picked so it's hard to say if a smaller or larger zone should've been done.

Edit: Found a chart from Ohio.gov [1] showing impact areas. It does seem to be much smaller than 1mi.

> Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.

I mean if hot air only went up the Earth would have no atmosphere after a sunny day.

[1]: https://governor.ohio.gov/media/news-and-media/east-palestin...

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

#224

Post by lesuorac »

sclarisse wrote: post #211
akira2501 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.

Returning money to investors is great, whether it’s buybacks or dividends. It’s the core purpose of a company. The primary alternative is growing the bigcorps ever bigger, more powerful, and dangerous. Ever-expanding bloated conglomerates. The good argument against buybacks is that companies tend to do it when the stock is high, and that’s bad for the shareholders.

> It’s the core purpose of a company.

It's not though. A state (New Jersey for J&J) gave the company a charter to do X.

J&J's charter was not to return money to shareholders [1].

[1]: https://www.investor.jnj.com/_document/johnson-johnson-resta...

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

#225

Post by ashwagary »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #220
jcrawfordor wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money. Most states have very little funding for emergency recovery, so it's routine to use a federal emergency declaration to authorize federal funding. In general with civil emergencies, the state has the authority but the feds have the money.

How much money and to do what?

Temporary housing for the residents most directly in harms way. Low interest loans for people needing to relocate permanently.

Both can help people avoid long term health consequences if this is as dangerous as some observers claim.

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

#226

Post by phpisthebest »

pixl97 wrote: post #206
phpisthebest wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril. 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…

Eh, the problem here is you're taking 'government' as a single entity, but it's not at all. If it were up to the singular 'government' there would have been better brakes on the trains and the company would have been following the law on transporting the chemicals. All the issues at hand were well known about for years. The problem here is very little government but instead for profit corporations going "How can I sq…

Right on schedule here we have exactly that I predicted. Government is good, they just did not have enough power to stop the evil capitalism... because the evil capitalism forced other parts of the government to stip the good parts of the government of power...

Responses like that should be laughable but far too many people believe that narrative. Never mind that rail is one of the most heavily regulated industries, and even if more regulation was passed the next disaster will be again "well there is still not enough regulation" because again government is measured by intention not results

There is never "enough" regulation, there is never "enough" power transferred to government, and it could never ever be that government failed in their duty to enforce existing regulations, or failed to use their existing power. No it is always evil capitalism corrupting the pure government preventing the noble public servants from protecting us all...

Never mind that the regulation that everyone talks about (the brake system) has been shown that even if that regulation was in place it would not have applied to this train at all

Never mind that we do not even know what the cause of the derailment was at this point.

It has to be that norfolk southern tried to "squeeze more blood out of this penny" as evil capitalist, and the good pure government could have stopped it if they were just given more power, more money, or more regulation....

Same story over and over again through out time, Authoritarian Statists have no other tale to tell

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

#227

Post by kevviiinn »

jcranmer wrote: post #113
kevviiinn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which was what, exactly?

Essentially, the US government undermaintained the railroads (the modern public transit scourge of "deferred maintenance" practiced a hundred years ago). It ran the railroads with a more or less single-minded mindset to supplying war goods, and after the war was over, kept a heavy touch on the railroads which made them unable to adapt to the increasing competition from heavily-subsidized highways and airlines, which…

According to the wikipedia article, Conrail actually inherited a terrible maintenance situation when the railroads bankrupted and were nationalized. Conrail then proceeded to manage maintenance and got things profitable.

It was doing just fine when Reagan decided to privatize for some reason.

Nationalizing actually fixed the situation so I don't kmow where you got the impression that it made things worse

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conrail

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

#228

Post by piva00 »

fr0sty wrote: post #217
piva00 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entgleisungen would be derailments. The EU-27 transported 2,927 billion ton-kilometres of rail freight, the US ~2,200 billion ton-kilometres.

Where did you find those EU-27 numbers? I am seeing something around ~400B ton-km. > "Rail freight activity in Europe, measured in tonne-kilometers, grew from 339 Billion tonne-km in 2003 to 398Billion tonne-km in 2019" Page 14 https://erfarail.eu/uploads/The%20European%20Rail%20Freight%...

From the quarterly numbers here: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

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

#229

Post by tolstoshev »

rootusrootus wrote: post #63
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…

We know the bearing was on fire for 20+ miles before it derailed, and it passed through at least one hotbox detector in that condition without being detected. On average, such detectors are placed every 10-20 miles. The one in East Palestine spotted the problem but it was too late to prevent the derailment. Maybe a start would be to adjust regulation such that detectors need to be placed with higher frequency. ECP is…

Why don't they put the hotbox detectors on the trains themselves? I'm cynically assuming cost?

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

#230

Post by xwdv »

Avshalom wrote: post #173
xwdv wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe we should start holding software engineers liable. Will push a lot of tech bro imposters out of this industry.
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