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Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

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Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#311

Post by Georgelemental »

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…

Yeah, this is why it was "impossible" to give railroad workers sick leave. It would be incompatible with PSR, and scrapping PSR would mean gasp lower short-term profits for shareholders!

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#312

Post by Georgelemental »

Schroedingersat wrote: post #183
TheDudeMan wrote: post #51

This is fine but we can't have nuclear reactors.

Or maybe neither are fine and we should stop making unnecessary shit?

Do you think reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels is "unnecessary"? Because that can't be done without nuclear power

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#313

Post by Georgelemental »

s5300 wrote: post #134

This 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 disagree, politics is changing for the better in Appalachia. See for example Senator J. D. Vance

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#314

Post by wkat4242 »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #295
TylerE wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not so much a matter of safety as that it’s the freight railroads that own the rails, whereas is most of Europe the infrastructure is mostly government owned, or in some cases was and is now (sorta) privatized but still under a sort of open access model.

That's a different, orthogonal issue. Look it up there's a bunch of tedious FRA rules about crash-worthiness which Europe doesn't have. It makes the trains which can legally run needlessly expensive and they wear out the tracks faster. The rules don't apply to metros and subways, but if the tracks have any switch anywhere connecting to the national network then FRA rules apply to the whole system. The result is that…

Do metros in the US even use the same gauge as trains? Here in Europe they're almost always smaller gauge so sharing isn't an option.

The exception here in Barcelona is Line 1 which is a wider gauge than all the other lines, for historical reasons though it doesn't share any tracks (but lays right beside the train ones at some stations)

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#315

Post by weard_beard »

mikrotikker wrote: post #247
salawat wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Sounds like a great opportunity for everyone to resign simultaneously. Sure be a pity if you couldn't find enough people to hire to do all that train work needing to be done. Not a strike if everyone just says "Fuck it" and leaves.

It would be catharthic but they might have children and mortgages

Set up a gofundme. I'll donate.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#316

Post by everforward »

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 think it falls outside what the average viewer understands well, so it's hard to get that visceral emotional response. We're talking chemicals outside the average lexicon, which are then burned and turned into other weird chemicals, which may or may not affect the water table (and the water table itself is not commonly understood or referenced).

I just don't think there's a good hook here. The topic is complicated, the people impacted aren't a minority, so there just isn't a good single-sentence headline to drive outrage.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#317

Post by kurthr »

op00to wrote: post #127
kurthr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doubtful on the HF since it's not vinyl fluoride. More likely HCl. Likely, there's some phosgene, though I've read that in large fires that mostly get's burned up. Of course there's CO. The liquid remnants are carcinogenic. https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=10699... https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/2001.pdf

There’s not nearly enough F in the air to create HF. Where does the fluorine come from? It’s like 5ppb in the air.

It doesn't... there is none. Any reporting that says there is likely is confused about other stuff too. I'm open to finding out there was a tank of Fluorine (now that's hazardous cargo!) in a nearby car, but it just sounds like gibberish from here.

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#318

Post by Rebelgecko »

Izkata wrote: post #246
Rebelgecko wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. If they're STILL running multiple stories per hour after all this time, it must be a big deal, right? Seems to contradict the narrative that the media is now trying to hide what happened.

> is now trying to hide The story seems to be blowing up now, after people were saying last week it wasn't getting much attention.

I'm hearing contradictory theories in this thread. Either that the media initially reported on the train derailment and then was forced to stop following up. Or that the media initially tried to cover up the derailment and then gave up and started reporting on it.

Do both of these competing theories have traction? If so, why?

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#319

Post by sbaiddn »

fargle wrote: post #203
sbaiddn wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least two.

actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature. Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.

So I didnt know what to compare for the orders of magnitude.

Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet).

But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data.

But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(

Re: Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

#320

Post by TylerE »

wkat4242 wrote: post #314
IIAOPSW wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a different, orthogonal issue. Look it up there's a bunch of tedious FRA rules about crash-worthiness which Europe doesn't have. It makes the trains which can legally run needlessly expensive and they wear out the tracks faster. The rules don't apply to metros and subways, but if the tracks have any switch anywhere connecting to the national network then FRA rules apply to the whole system. The result is that…

Do metros in the US even use the same gauge as trains? Here in Europe they're almost always smaller gauge so sharing isn't an option. The exception here in Barcelona is Line 1 which is a wider gauge than all the other lines, for historical reasons though it doesn't share any tracks (but lays right beside the train ones at some stations)

It's all over the place. Probably standard gauge is most common, but there's tons of variation. For instance, the DC Metro is slighly (like a half inch) narrower than standard gauge, but SF BART is MUCH wider, something like 8 inches.
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