Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Honest question: how many Norfolk Southern ads have you seen? Even just a ballpark number.
top institutional ownership for nsc.n is vanguard, jp morgan and blackrock
Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
171–180 of 346 posts
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#172This really should be part of the EPA doing an honest and thorough scientific investigation.
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
God, that footage is grim. Every railroader I know (BNSF & UP) has been super vocal about the working conditions for years. I know a guy who left his engineer position with the BN just due to how much the schedule sucks, this guy took a ~50% pay cut simply because the schedule and working conditions are so bad. All of this is preventable, but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expe…
> but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses. All companies will do that. The reason rail companies can do this so ruthlessly and recklessly is complete lack of competition and exceedingly generous industry deregulation.
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Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trains derail all the time. It’s dog bites man, not man bites dog.
Your dismissal make the ops point. The train derailment is not the news the environmental disaster that is happening because of it is the news. But you only know about the train derailment not much about the environmental disaster which should have been milked for views by the media normally.
No, I know about it because I read it on the my times the day after it happened.
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#175This is going to sound exceptionally crass… But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from…
"I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. " Myself, I'll try not to laugh when millions of people stupid enough to live on the San Andreas fault line relocate into the ocean overnight. Out of a misplaced sense of unrequited empathy.
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Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> US companies make money from stories about Chinese weather balloons. They lose money when horrific things like this happen. The carrier will lose money. But a news company would make money, wouldn't they? Bad news is good news after all, and environmental disasters are bad news.
I think jingoistic China bashing pays better than putting the spotlight on America's various problems and shortcomings. They did it in the 1970s and aside from brilliant Hollywood movies it wasn't a good decade for America. The less introspection the better as far as the media and political interests are concerned.
How is it jingoistic when China is flying warplanes over Taiwan and their media is now making claims the US has flown 10 balloons over their territory and supposedly were about to shoot down one of them and feign ignorance about the ones they sent over to us? Or are you saying both sides are being jingoistic?
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#177April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends.
A lot of armchair experts on here wrote him off when it was posted to hn.
I worked with a former locomotive engineer at the time who echoed the concerns reported here. He left the industry after about 10 years because of the grueling schedule and conditions.
It is interesting and alarming how it is essentially an open secret among industry workers that trains are run such that they are always in an elevated risk of derailment and danger.
https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-pe...
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#178This isn't too far from me. Curious to hear thoughts from folks with deeper backgrounds in chemistry than I have (high school).
I posted some things on Reddit about it, but I'll summarize here.
There are a lot of alarmist people posting about how they're sure the town is "uninhabitable" and that it's being "covered up".
The truth is that the people handling the derailment and fire made some very tough calls to avoid an explosion that might have leveled half that town or exposed hundreds to thousands of people to a carcinogenic chemical.
They chose to burn off the chemicals to avoid the explosion. People are scared by the dark cloud and by the smells, and that's understandable.
But the burning does seem to have eliminated much of the chemicals on site, and none of the air testing that's being done to look for combustion products or gaseous Vinyl Chloride is finding any. There are pictures of people walking near the destroyed railroad cars now, with no hazmat suits.
Vinyl Chloride has a half life in the atmosphere of about 20 hours. It decomposes into CO, CO2, HCl and trace Phosgene (a tiny fraction of a percent). Any Vinyl Chloride Monomer released into the air or soil will be decomposing into acid (once the HCl mixes with atmospheric water) and that acid will have a somewhat higher (weaker) pH than household vinegar.
At least with regard to the Vinyl Chloride monomer tanks, the authorities seem to have done the right thing. If they managed to burn off the other tanks, those chemicals create even fewer toxic combustion products - carbon monoxide is basically it.
The dark cloud is probably coming from all the other stuff that burned or partly combusted due to that very hot fire... paint on the rail cars, plastics in the box cars, whatever else was in the box cars, railroad ties that caught on fire, and chemicals outgassed from nearby objects exposed to that amount of heat. It's probably not something you'd want to breathe, but it's also not the "cloud of death" that's being clamored about by the conspiritards.
Both the air test reports and the pictures of people without masks walking on the site now show that it's likely the burn off achieved the desired effect. Within a few days the dark clouds will dissipate like any other smoke, and people will finally calm down.
It's still an awful situation for anyone whose home got covered in smoke or whose animals died due to the derailment or fire, but it's not an apocalypse.
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#179Evidently this briefly hit the mass tv news cycle then went silent... This deserves wide scale attention... Pollution and toxic destruction needs to trigger a commensurate fine both for clean up and punitive damages sufficient to motivate big business to proactively avoid these events Looks like media has been told to drop this story... Or even worse to self censor anything outside it's allowed news topic criteria
What media? I saw it on CNN today. Fox News's website has multiple stories about this from the last hour. The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)
> today
> last hour
It happened a week and a half ago, so...
Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
The previous HN comments were also filled with “the media is not covering this!”. With the HN post linking to the Guardian and the top comment I saw at the time being a link to the NYTimes. There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a co…
I searched for this. There are 4 pieces in the NYTimes alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-... https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic... https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
“Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an urgent evacuation notice on Sunday night to more than 500 people who had previously declined to leave their homes and were within a one-mile radius of the derailment site.”