Just ask an Ohioan where the come from and they're likely to say "Pennsyltucky" (Pennsylvania and Kentucky being eastern and western border states to Ohio), to obfuscate the existence of their severe danger zone![0]
[0] cf. Poe's Law, as this note serves as a "clear indicator" of my parody.
They lit some hazmat containers on fire a week ago to prevent an explosion. It's long since de-escalated.
I guess people are focusing on it because anyone that counters them ends up looking like they are trying to minimize a rather calamitous event.
Like burning off the vinyl chloride monomer is going to produce quite a lot of gnarly stuff like hydrogen chloride (which turns into hydrochloric acid when in solution with water), but there hasn't been any information produced that indicates that there will actually be a persistent problem stemming from it (at least, relative to the emissions environment that exists).
As per usual, these things are flashy and attention grabbing, but not really relevant in the grand scheme of things. It's microplastics, fertilizer runoff, and CO2 that's killing the world, not train crashes that happen once or twice a decade.
