61–70 of 184 posts
Is there any antidote for phosgene that can be manufactured quickly at home?
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> At least GWB, though a contemptible fellow otherwise, took his frat attitude up in a chopper to survey Katrina. What? Bush’s handling of Katrina was so bad “this is so-and-so’s Katrina” entered the political lexicon as a term for mishandling disasters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
The point is the double standard, Bush was there for a flyover on day 3, and on the ground day 5, and it was the worst response ever. So what is the East Palestine response in comparison?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is the double standard, Bush was there for a flyover on day 3, and on the ground day 5, and it was the worst response ever. So what is the East Palestine response in comparison?
After Katrina, almost 1400 people died, and 80% of the city of New Orleans (population ~400,000) was flooded for weeks. No one died in the East Palestine incident. Hard to see the equivalence.
It seems very premature to draw such a conclusion. If people start dying of cancer in high numbers a few years down the line, any early claims about the non-impact of this spill will age poorly.
Regarding Katrina, we have the benefit of hindsight and enough time passing to have gotten a handle on the impact and it’s worth noting that those 1,400 deaths did not occur overnight.
If you made an assessment of Katrina’s impact prematurely, such an assessment would be unlikely to capture the true impact of the event.
A premature assessment wouldn’t have even considered including ~300-400 of the people who eventually died in health care facilities after the fact.
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Uh, that’s completely unrealistic. No large scale system (or any system for very long) has zero downtime. What is the overall percentage any train spends derailed?
Not when the consequence of failure for spilling hazardous material is so great! What are you going to agree to next, that nuke plants are allowed a few minutes of core meltdown a year? Get real.
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People were evacuated for a reason?
And cleared to return? These people got sick doing door to door surveys, meaning people were back at home. This is ridiculous. Even with the above, they are “unsure” if it was related to anything else like “fatigue”. Like come on.
Talk to people all day about symptoms they're experiencing and you can develop psychosomatic effects. Especially if you're over-worked and that kind of censusing isn't your day-to-day.
Not to say nothing happened to them. Just that medical causality is really complicated.
Is there any antidote for phosgene that can be manufactured quickly at home?
It doesn't necessarily dissolve readily, but any surface that gets hosed down (or chunk of atmosphere that gets sprayed) will generally be phosgene-free.
That whole disaster was terribly handled. From The sec of transportation dragging his feel by weeks, to the president being dismissive and the train company saying no big deal... go back home, it's safe! I hope Erin can help to bring the attention and justice this disaster deserves. At least GWB, though a contemptible fellow otherwise, took his frat attitude up in a chopper to survey Katrina.
This is a rose tinted look at how GWB handled Katrina. He so bungled the response that people’s opinions of him dropped precipitously afterwards. The excuse for why he didn’t act sooner was that he was on a month long vacation. He was disconnected and praised FEMA which was universally considered to have bungled the recovery. I mean, knowing nothing else, one of the most memorable pieces of pop culture in the last tw…
That whole disaster was terribly handled. From The sec of transportation dragging his feel by weeks, to the president being dismissive and the train company saying no big deal... go back home, it's safe! I hope Erin can help to bring the attention and justice this disaster deserves. At least GWB, though a contemptible fellow otherwise, took his frat attitude up in a chopper to survey Katrina.
They want scary to equal dangerous. Real chemical disasters look like Love Canal, or the quiet fire that eventually ate Centralia, but people want to believe "train on fire" equals "generational trauma" and in this case it doesn't. A Bhopal or Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon is rare, and most chemical disasters are scary-looking-but-contained.
(... and that's before you factor in the work of foreign agents trying to inflate the story as a wedge issue. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2023/03/20/ohio-train-... )
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After Katrina, almost 1400 people died, and 80% of the city of New Orleans (population ~400,000) was flooded for weeks. No one died in the East Palestine incident. Hard to see the equivalence.
> No one died in the East Palestine incident. Hard to see the equivalence. It seems very premature to draw such a conclusion. If people start dying of cancer in high numbers a few years down the line, any early claims about the non-impact of this spill will age poorly. Regarding Katrina, we have the benefit of hindsight and enough time passing to have gotten a handle on the impact and it’s worth noting that those 1,4…
Does the vinyl chloride precursor burn into much worse stuff than the polyvinyl version, for equal masses? I get that it might cross some threshold for acute effects for people right near by that the other fires may never cause even for direct neighbors.
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Also transportation sec Buttigieg just casually saying not to worry we have over 1,000 train derailments a year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11760173/There-roug... Over 1,000 derailments! Maybe we should work on getting those down before patting ourselves on the back for job well done.
> Also transportation sec Buttigieg just casually saying not to worry we have over 1,000 train derailments a year That this is what people care about is why nothing gets done. A politician can't even say a fact without the news media or another opportunistic politician spinning it in the worst way possible. Imagine if this was how your company handled postmortems. Given that half the time politicians majority of time…
A kind NASA engineer thanked us for our time, but noted that there's a lot of what we do in software that can't be applied to the NASA approach because, ultimately, their bosses are Congress and Congress is... somewhere between "dumb" and "an actively hostile agent." Words must be carefully chosen and information can't be widely-shared internally until the message is crafted because about half of Congress is incentivized to look for the worst possible interpretation of data collected and weaponize it.