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Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910
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I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things. If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time). I have to wonder why a story of environmental disas…
False. I have heard about it.
Evidently 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
The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)
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Remember the Flint water crisis? That was a population-dense city, with multiple school districts all being poisoned by lead and legionnaires disease. Nobody cared about it until it was turned into a political negligence story, then it was all you could see on Fox and CNN...
People just don't really care about this stuff. It's novel from a social media perspective (black plume of smoke occludes forested midwestern town!) but it's not like the media has any shortage of humanitarian crises to report on.
The footage has a lot of NSFW language, so just watch out for that. Within that thread there's some good discussion about some of the compounds that are being released into the air, and it is indeed very grim.
Interestingly here in Australia, I've heard about it a lot more in traditional media than my American friends seem to be hearing.
Does the NTSB look into train derailments? Would be interesting to see whether the systems engineering for trains hauling large quantities of industrial chemicals is on par with that of airlines. If not, it probably should be.
Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]).
High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box
[3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
[7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...