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Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

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Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#251

Post by bruce511 »

tomcam wrote: post #182
bruce511 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am intrigued by your outrage (seriously). I'm curious to know what you are hoping the world's media will accomplish there? On the one hand train derailment, chemical fire, environmental damage - it makes for a story but really not a terribly interesting one (to me). It's certainly an unwelcome event, but there doesn't seem to be anything deeper than what you see on the surface. Is there a deeper story here? Is ther…

Completely valid question. It seems like a pretty big situation. Those usually get tons of press coverage, presidential visits, cabinet-level management, and media scrutiny of all parties involved. This is how problems get solved, and, one hopes, prevented in the future. It’s why planes are so safe. When I was young crashes were much more frequent. I don’t know why Rihanna gets way more attention than Ohio. Or Flint,…

Is it a big situation though? I mean it's not small obviously, but compared to other events (Syria earthquake, war in Ukraine, hurricanes in Puerto Rico, blackouts in Texas, wild fires in California, snow storms across the NE US, Covid etc it seems small. (not unimportant, but small.)

Granted this is very man-made, and apparently the result of very human profit motives. Which means politics. Which means its a 5 minute topic until the next political outrage comes along.

Ultimately Rihanna gets more attention because discussing that doesn't devolve into a screaming match of the intrinsic americaness of exploitation over environment and people.

And just like Flint the media will move on, but there's not a lot of long-term progress. Just like another mass shooting, the politicians will offer hopes and prayers, but won't take any action.

I know, I'm jaded and cynical, but frankly media attention means nothing. It doesn't change minds, or votes, so ultimately events like this are just a "cost of doing business". It sucks, but am I wrong?

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#252

Post by lolbert3 »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #112
refuse wrote: post #5

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…

I've often wished for something that I'm calling (in my fiction) The Ministry of Indices. It would be their job to rank things. Things like media coverage. We could turn to the MoI and see that this chemical spill got a 4 and then compare with other events. Sure, it's subjective all the way down. People will always quibble about the outputs of services like that. But having a number that some expert (statistician?) o…

[dead]

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#253

Post by encryptluks2 »

perihelions wrote: post #92

Here's some data from the federal EPA (what they're measuring and where and what the numbers are), https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593... ( "East Palestine Train Derailment" )

So the government investigates a big disaster caused in part by their actions and everything is within normal levels. A lot of time the same regulators will say the water is fine when brown stuff is coming out of the faucet.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#254

Post by mikrotikker »

nilespotter wrote: post #71
bsder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly. If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago. But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so i…

> union workers warning about this 2 months ago First I've heard that, got a reference?

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden...

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#255

Post by XorNot »

r85804306610 wrote: post #194
XorNot wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue this is getting covered exactly the amount it should. Because everyone seems to know about it, and no one who thinks it should be covered more seems to have anything to add to it.

i personally want whoopi goldberg to go over the shipping manifest https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%... > during her day time show, and eli5 to her listeners what those various substances are, what their short and long term effect on the environment are, and specifically the effects on the various ohio river tributaries where EPA has already detected some of the contaminants. i know that's…

Sure but here's the problem: all of those chemicals are biodegradable. Most information about what is happening is basically "there was a large release of a non-environmentally persistent contaminant" which just plain isn't going to hit the fears right for people.

Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly.

Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal.

Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like.

[1] https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#256

Post by mikrotikker »

r85804306610 wrote: post #171
mrzimmerman wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Their subsideries will buy a hell of a lot of ads.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#257

Post by JumpCrisscross »

naasking wrote: post #250
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have there been hundreds of stories about this? Chinese balloons are novel. This is not. It’s tragic. But its most memorable element seems to be the meta-debate around its coverage. That's boring.

It's not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns? On the facts it's frankly a huge scandal. I think the coverage tells quite a different story though, namely distractions on external "enemies", like Chinese balloons, providing cover for corporate sponsors that fund the po…

> not novel that a train derailed spilling toxic chemicals into a small town literally weeks after Congress forced a settlement on train workers who wanted to strike partly over safety concerns?

No, it's not. Over a thousand trains derail every year [1][2]. We have superfund sites under millions of Americans [3] that even locals can sometimes barely muster a bother with.

We also have no evidence this derailment was caused by an issue the recent deal forced, e.g. unpaid sick time. (It could have been. That would be a story.) But in the meantime it's not novel unless you're into trains or from that region. Exhibit A of that is the most interesting thing we, on Hacker News, can find to discuss about it being the meta debate.

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/3539221-how-often-do-trains-der...

[2] https://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/OfficeofSafety/publicsite/Que...

[3] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/superfund/

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#258

Post by mikrotikker »

trenning wrote: post #177

April 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 grueli…

LeMegantic should have been a wakeup but nope... Gotta make a few extra bucks for the hedgies

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#259

Post by [deleted] »

tomcam wrote: post #182
bruce511 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am intrigued by your outrage (seriously). I'm curious to know what you are hoping the world's media will accomplish there? On the one hand train derailment, chemical fire, environmental damage - it makes for a story but really not a terribly interesting one (to me). It's certainly an unwelcome event, but there doesn't seem to be anything deeper than what you see on the surface. Is there a deeper story here? Is ther…

Completely valid question. It seems like a pretty big situation. Those usually get tons of press coverage, presidential visits, cabinet-level management, and media scrutiny of all parties involved. This is how problems get solved, and, one hopes, prevented in the future. It’s why planes are so safe. When I was young crashes were much more frequent. I don’t know why Rihanna gets way more attention than Ohio. Or Flint,…

[deleted]

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#260

Post by mikrotikker »

unethical_ban wrote: post #212
xattt wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tinfoil hat spin: the “no one is talking about it” angle is being propagated by foreign psy-ops as a distraction from the balloon stories. The “look, we found balloons too” angle floated like a lead aerostat. The general population pays closer attention to the derailment story because a cover-up is intimated by a “grassroots” perspective, and the balloon story floats away into thin air.

I say this earnestly: I trust that the military has interest in making sure our national security is protected. I don't harbor suspicions of intentional negligence with these balloons. I totally believe that our civilian federal government and executive agencies have no capacity to deal with massive environmental crises like the one in Ohio, or Flint, or in CA with PG&E or many other places. Our system is too weak, a…

The companies have progressively made the system weak through lobbying and regulatory capture
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