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Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

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Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#261

Post by vGPU »

xattt wrote: post #136
epakai wrote: post #20

Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or t…

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.

Because literally nobody cares about the balloons aside from the laughingstock the US military became after they let the first one float across the entire United States before finally shooting it down.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#262

Post by naasking »

Accujack wrote: post #181
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 wonder about who is pushing narratives about this vs. the balloons in an attempt to distract the public, but I can explain why the derailment isn't much of a story. It's because it's being handled fairly well. There is a cloud of smoke that's scaring people, but it's "ordinary" smoke. There's no environmental apocalypse that's going to make that town "uninhabitable". There will be after effects from everything asso…

> It's because it's being handled fairly well.

Even if that were true, which is debatable, it should be a huge scandal that this happened at all literally weeks after rail workers tried to strike over safety issues and were forced back to work, and that Obama required train brakes to be upgraded, then softened the requirements after corporate pushback, which Trump then repealed and Biden failed to reverse. There is a lot to say on this topic and no one in the mainstream is saying it.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#263

Post by nortonham »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #204
Natsu wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the people in Ohio wondering if they're going to be in a Flint-like situation, WTF these chemicals the average person has never heard of are, and what's going to be done about it are all interesting subjects. Alas, I haven't heard much about them from those knowledgeable enough to chime in on the subjects and I'd love to. As for balloons, they got boring last week, other than some airspace closures that only…

> the methods might be new, but not the fact of it It’s a diplomatic escalation with global geopolitical ramifications. If you have any business or personal exposure to China, or anything in Southeast Asia, that’s directly relevant in a way lives in Ohio, unfortunately, are not. Also, Ohio is out of immediate crisis. Now is the time for investigation and litigation. The train has derailed. Yet balloons may keep comin…

>ohio is out of immediate crisis

Is it? Sounds like an environmental crisis with serious ramifications

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#264

Post by mikrotikker »

trynewideas wrote: post #87
avalys wrote: post #56

Oh, in fact, I have heard of it, and all the coverage I've heard is people grimly telling me about how horrible it is and how no one is covering how terribly horrible it is. What I haven't seen is any actual reporting . You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. But hey, those ominous black clou…

> What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de... > “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at lea…

Note that cover up in some context refers to literally covering pools of chemicals with the new rail line without doing a proper decontamination in order to get the line open again.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#265

Post by r85804306610 »

SilasX wrote: post #238
r85804306610 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

from another thread, https://time.com/6238361/joe-biden-rail-strike-illegal/

Can you quote the part where union leaders are warning about something in the way the grandparent describes? I’m not seeing it.

you're right, the other comment led me astray and i didn't check. it's just partisan trash. so to make up for it,

Wp starts its `background` analysis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_railroad_...> with `The rise of precision scheduled railroading has resulted in resource and staffing cuts; to compensate railroad companies have enacted strict attendance policies for employees. These policies eliminate any free time which workers have, requiring them to be effectively on-call for weeks at a time. Workers have complained of increased levels of stress and fatigue.` The bulk of the argument is supported by this vice article https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-have...> which is frankly horrifying. It's a bunch of quotes from train conductors talking about falling asleep, being tired, taking caffeine pills, etc. It ends with a 2020 derailment. "A BNSF TRAIN CARRYING OIL TANKERS DERAILED IN WASHINGTON STATE IN 2020. WORKERS ARE WORRIED MORE CRASHES LIKE THIS WILL OCCUR UNDER THE NEW ATTENDANCE POLICY."

Wp again "Unions representing about 17,000 workers threatened to strike over the points system, but BNSF Railway sued and won a restraining order to prevent the unions from striking. The Railway Labor Act grants Congress the authority to intervene in any railway or airline strike. Under this authority, the National Mediation Board has mediated negotiations between multiple freight railroads and unions starting in June 2021." and there's your crux.

then a bunch of back and forth happens, and then it ends with biden/congress/senate doing their thing. it seems like the gist of the forced solution was to raise salaries and some sick leave, but no other mitigations.

wp again, "Writing for Jacobin, Barry Eidlin, associate professor of sociology at McGill University, said the message sent to the rail workers by the president and Congress was "shut up and get back to work." The Biden administration's intervention in the dispute was condemned by over 500 labor historians in an open letter to Joe Biden and Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh."

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#266

Post by ChickenNugger »

AtomicOrbital wrote: post #14

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

>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

It's going to dump into the Ohio river and spread this over the planet, just like C-8.

Less than a month after Biden made it illegal for rail workers to strike.

No political party taking corporate money is your friend.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#267

Post by ChickenNugger »

Izkata wrote: post #179
Rebelgecko wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

And the chemicals are going to leech into crops and well water for decades.

It's another https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#268

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #218
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…

These trains are over 3 miles long . This is to amortise the overhead of staffing? The locomotives and their cost scale linearly with the train, but the engineers do not?

that's part of it but not the main reason. the main reason is that if you make the cargo train too big to fit into the pull off on single tracked rail, then passenger trains have to yield to the cargo trains.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#270

Post by kodah »

epakai wrote: post #20

Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or t…

The issue is that PSR trains have been resulting in these crashes for a while. If you want to look at the data for yourself: https://railroads.dot.gov/accident-and-incident-reporting/tr... Select "Class 1 Railroad". That's nearly half a billion dollars in damage since 2018 to ecosystems and small towns that are hamstrung on dollar amounts like that. The fact that you're just hearing about this kind of stuff is the problem that people are trying to communicate.

The problems that underly these kinds of PSR accidents aren't lost on people either. PSR trains were a way of scaling down an industry of people. That's to say, it's a labor movement problem; more cynically put, mutli-billion dollar companies are passing their error rates off on ecosystems and relatively unwealthy areas. It's not some tin-foil hat secret that American media generally does not cover these kinds of areas or things.

Instead of responding in rage, respond in empathy, or you could use the old tactic of just ignoring it until it goes away. It's not like you'll suffer social penalties for any of those options; after all, you just did the ASCII version of dropping trou in response to outrage over a social and ecological crisis and suffered zero penalties.

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