I've posted on Hackernews before mentioning that I grew up in East Palestine and my entire immediate and most of my extended family either live in the town itself or within 20 miles.
It's been surreal to see this event unplay in the media.
Some things I haven't seen talked about:
1. How desperately poor most of the population in that area is.
My fear is that if the crash has long terms effects people will never get justice.
These are people who can't afford to go to a doctor regularly. They can't afford to miss work. They can't afford to sue a railroad and they'll very likely take a small payment to waive all liability because any amount of money right now is better than whatever they might theoretically get in the future.
And for the most part no one there would tell you they're poor or disadvantaged. I don't mean to imply that they are downtrodden or helpless. I certainly didn't think that of myself or anyone else growing up there.
It is only with the perspective of having left and having traveled the world and having risen through the economic ladder that I have the ability to look back and see how disadvantaged they will be against a large corporation.
Barring legislation and government intervention I cannot imagine they will have even a shot in hell at getting a fair evaluation and fair deal.
2. Train wrecks happened in the area somewhat frequently
Growing up I remember at last 3 or 4 train wrecks bad enough that people had to be put up in hotels.
I don't know if that's a lot of a little for an area in a ~10 year span but it feels like a lot.
I also don't know if train wrecks are tracked and reported anywhere other than local paper archives but I would be very interested to see the internal data and memos the railroad has related to derailments.
If anyone is aware of such a resource please let me know.
The data on the site is fascinating, and can be downloaded as CSV, XLS, etc. (I live about 100m from a rail corridor, and though I love trains, I do worry occasionally about accidents).
An idea I've had for a while now is to put together a site like GoFundMe, specifically to crowdsource funding for people who couldn't otherwise afford legal representation. This is absolutely a good use case for such a project.
People really underestimate how much 2 or 3 community members who don't have to worry about working or making rent and focus solely on this issue can get done
If we could have something like a community strike fund that could be payed back into when/if their case is won, I'd happily donate while I have a stable job.
Who knows, maybe some day I'll be in some affected community that could make use of such a fund
Thanks to my job as a software engineer I felt like I was in the position to help people financially but the dozens of people I've asked at this point have all told me the same thing:
1. Their immediate needs are taken care of.
The ones who got evacuated were put up in hotels at first and have tons of support from local organizations. The ones who were more than 1 mile away generally are staying with friends until they feel like it's okay to return home.
2. They want life to return to normal.
This has been a major disruption in their daily routines. They want it resolved so they can get back to living their lives.
3. They're anxious and terrified about the health implications.
Ignoring the actual smoke cloud when they did the burn: the smell of the burn went for miles. It's hard to believe someone telling everything is safe when you home still reeks of chemical smell.
When the burn happens lots of people experienced runny noses, sore throats, and other minor symptoms. Was it a result of the chemicals? Was it stress? Was it all in their head? We just don't know.
There's a ton of dubious information flowing around social media scaring them. They don't know what to believe.
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The main thing that will help people is to feel like their situation is being taken seriously.
Things like a congressional hearing to establish answers to what happened and how it can be rectified. The federal government stepping in and committing to long term testing of the area. The railroad being forced to provide medical screening for at least the next several years.
Someone in a position of authority stepping up and saying they're committed to making things right instead of trying to minimize the situation or use it as a talking point.
Those are things no individual can do by themselves but if I had a suggestion I guess it would just be to reach out to your congressperson and tell them that you care about this getting fixed and never happening again.
> experienced runny noses, sore throats, and other minor symptoms. Was it a result of the chemicals? Was it stress? Was it all in their head? We just don't know.
>My fear is that if the crash has long terms effects people will never get justice.
I think we all know corporates nearly always win if history is anything to go by! Even judges get lent on so cant be considered independent and free of influence.
If I was in your family and friends shoes over there, if I couldnt take a 4-6 week out of town vacation, I'd be increasing my Omega-3's intake to may be as much as 1g a day to increase my neutrophil size, keeping to a minimum Omega-6's as it already causes enough trouble in the western diet, cutting out all sugar from the diet except starch, to increase my neutrophil phagocytic capacity, and be taking some B12 to help my neutrophils remain normal with todays polluted world in general.
In other words, plenty of fish and potato from out of town.
Thats not a nice situation over there, but you are lucky it even got on the news, some things dont even make it onto the news in some countries.
I would absolutely not trust 'government experts' or anyone hired by Norfolk Southern to do a thorough job of sampling and testing the surrounding environment. The EPA's gross failures in the Deepwater Horizon blowout with respect to overseeing the use of surfactants like Corexit should be proof enough of that.
Unfortunately a rigorous sampling and testing protocol by an independent registered laboratory (which is what you'd need for the collection of evidence that would hold up under legal scrutiny) is an expensive and involved process.
The technology needed is well-established, just collect a lot of vials of water, soil, stream bed cores etc. on a grid scale focusing on the entire region, paying attention to downwind zones from the accident in particular. Then they need to be run through an established, documented extract-and-analysis procedure (gas-chromatography-mass-spectrometry would be appropriate, maybe high-pressure-liquid-chromatography for some of the less volatile species).
You'd want to look for the species that were on the train, of course, but also the various combustion products (which could be more hazardous than their source materials) - the list I've seen is vinyl chloride, benzene, butyl acetate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene, plus some other petroleum products. What kind of combustion products were generated is a more complex issue (phosgene has been mentioned, hydrogen chloride etc.).
At the very least, people should be collecting and labeling samples in a manner that provides proof-of-origin, maybe video documentation and so on. Here's an example of the kind of sample storage vial needed. Cost is about $3 each, you have to buy them in lots of about 75 or so. Maybe someone should set up a GoFundMe for this?
If you have the collected samples, documented and securely stored, you can potentially get them all analyzed later by a certified lab, providing court-acceptable evidence.
> The technology needed is well-established, just collect a lot of vials of water, soil, stream bed cores etc. on a grid scale focusing on the entire region, paying attention to downwind zones from the accident in particular. Then they need to be run through an established, documented extract-and-analysis procedure.
Yes, and in addition, surface- and groundwater transport should be simulated given any known hydrogeologic data on the region. The federal government in fact develops free and open source software for exactly this. NS should have limited involvement in the testing process, feds and independent parties should collect data independently and compare results in public view.
> Water samples on Friday showed the plume is now completely gone, DeWine said.
I saw an unverified video linked on reddit that alleged to show that the contaminants sink to the bottom of water [1]. Could this be the reason why the water does not appear contaminated?
I don't mean to downplay the disaster, but just because there's a sheen that appears when disturbing the creekbed doesn't indicate it's a result of the contamination from the disaster or even petroleum-related contamination at all: for instance, bacteria can form a similar oil-like sheen on water. I don't think it's possible to conclude anything without sampling the water, and definitely not from a video of someone just stirring up the water.
(as also mentioned in the Reddit comments, the fact that the Twitter poster is a staunch North Korea supporter should make people evaluate the context of this video a little more critically -- I don't mean they can't be right, but they are at least pushing this with a certain agenda)
The other person who posted a viral video of the water with an oil-like sheen was US Senator JD Vance, who is... ahh... well, basically the furthest thing from what the other Twitter poster put out.
The Air Traffic Control meltdown we’re seeing (ask any airline pilot about the vaccine mandate’s effect on ATC and pilot early retirement/staffing) the shipping port mess in 2021, continuing supply chain transport issues, seemingly frequent train crashes — Shouldn’t Buttigieg be taking flak?
The FAA budget for example stated a priority for “equity” and inclusion. Shouldn’t the priority be air fucking safety? The FAA is a mess right now. And it’s Buttigieg’s fault. But at least we were able to spend millions changing “airmen” to “air missions” in the NOTAM system — all while doing nothing to actually fix the NOTAM system. Now the FAA also wants to stop people from using the term “cockpit” — not realizing that there is nothing in the history of that word that is “gendered.” Just stupidity and madness. JD Vance is right to hammer the administration: while DoT is worrying about gendered language, trains are derailing with toxic chemicals and planes are nearly crashing because of faulty ATC.
Of course. I don't doubt the scale of the disaster but it's very easy in the face of uncertainty for anyone to jump to conclusions without doing their due diligence, either due to some agenda or just inadvertently.
The nice thing about extremists is that they're sufficiently non-invested in making the status quo look good that they're happy to point out when it's shit.
Frankly I really like the extremists on both sides of the isle. While I might vehemently disagree with them on specifics they are at least generally principled people who derive their policy positions from their beliefs logically and I have respect for that.
But they'll also happily claim that the status quo is terrible even when it is in fact objectively quite good.
Re your second paragraph: Things that logically derive from insane starting points can still be insane. Often are, in fact. When they are right, they are right only by random accident. I'm not saying "don't read them", but don't use what they say to adjust your priors very much.
> While I might vehemently disagree with them on specifics they are at least generally principled people
Being so staunchly principled that you cannot compromise or be practical or be open to have your mind changed is not a virtue, in my mind. If anything it is arrogant.
> who derive their policy positions from their beliefs logically and I have respect for that.
Outcomes are more important. If your beliefs are abhorrent then your policies will follow. That is not something to admire.
Yes but being principled to the point that you do obviously stupid things isn’t good, and it’s even worse when idealogical zealots seize hold of power. We want people to poke holes in things which is what I think you were getting at, but they should be nowhere near anything serious.
Interestingly the GOP is the "extreme right" in the US, where the Democratic party is primarily centrist/center right folks. Makes for really weird inter-party interactions within the Democrats.
I think it's great if people are vigilant regarding threats to clean air and water, and if people don't want to take the Ohio Governor's statements at face value when he says samples look clear, I can relate.
But "calling for the ban of all guns" is such a poor summary of the kinds of policy reactions that briefly find their way into discourse (and do not find traction) that any reader could be forgiven for assuming it doesn't matter whether you're trying to be unreasonable or just a natural.
Still, if we're going to look for similarities between that situation and this one... I think you'd find many people are quite willing to discuss the further regulation and liability in chemical transport, including whether what we have now is adequate, just like they might be willing to talk about whether firearm laws and regulations are adequate. The article certainly mentions lawsuits the railroad is facing, so that's already one avenue of accountability in play.
What's "unfathomable" about accountability via lawsuit and the Ohio health department doing water monitoring? Do you have specific insights into what they're not doing correctly, or is this more vague distrust?
19,000 Americans died as the result of a gunshot (excluding suicides) in 2020.
60,000 premature deaths were estimated to have been caused by air pollution in 2019, mostly from sources that were operating within regulations.
Was this bad? Yes. Is this a huge disaster in any way comparable to the ones we inflict on ourselves without a thought? Not on the evidence I’ve seen thus far.
Yes. The carcinogenic effects of acute exposure to vinyl chloride are low, and most of it was burned off intentionally by setting the train cars on fire.
Those most at risk are the first responders; everyone who heeded the evacuation order should be pretty much fine.
Some risk, yes, which is why I mentioned the first responders, as they were closest to the burn itself.
Phosgene breaks down in the environment on timescales measured from hours to days. The five-day evac window was more than enough to remove all appreciable amounts of phosgene from the environment. And given how reactive it is, you can trust the lack of anyone showing up in a hospital in east Ohio looking like they climbed out of an eastern-front trench as indicative that the phosgene has not caused harm.
It's real easy to over-estimate the damage this spill will do. In practice, people have been using (and spilling) vinyl chloride for over 180 years; we have a pretty good sense of the damage it can do. Not a good situation, but far on the low end of environmental impact risks (somewhere north of "a car full of diapers" and far, far south of "a car full of perchloroethylene").
My understanding is that the railroad recently implemented a new system to try to run tighter schedules with less staff and that railway workers attempted to strike because of overwork due to staff reductions. Those seem like plausible contributions to this disaster that could be addressed.
and if this happened just outside Atlanta, it would be all over the news for the next month..and senators would call it racial injustice. Not to mention every govt agency on site.
Train derailments happen regularly every week, but not to this extent. It’ll be an ecological disaster. The water may be fine now, but no so much in a month. Ground water seepage takes time.
You are trying to compare a large toxin spill against a municipal failing to upgrade their infrastructure. This is similar to Flint, MI.
If you want to compare Jackson, MS..it’s 82% black (which is why you brought it up) in which its own state calls it the murder capital of the world.
It appears they have a lot of city related issues including misappropriation of funds.
Or the mass freakout about covid... forcing people to do all sorts of silly health theatre seems to be fine in some circumstances- you can never be too careful when it comes to a politically popular health concern, but somehow (and I admit I don't understand the political angle here) people are saying "oh yeah there's lots of reasons why water can have an oily sheen on top of it". The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, but it's weird to see the doublethink
A bunch of people here in CT have been posting pictures of weird white deposits on their cars from rain (which, apparently, is currently carrying stuff from OH). Seems like there's a pretty high chance that this ends up as one of those things where we may not be fully aware of the fallout (no pun intended) until years from now, if ever.
I'd be worried about if there's ash from the burn off that then mixes with water to become lye. Not sure if there's more of a chemical reaction necessary than that.
I had a vinyl wrap on part of my car and some ash from California brushfires fell on it, and then it rained a month or so after (I was procrastinating on properly washing it off) and the lye produced ate through the clear coat of the vinyl.
Maybe it picks up dirt particles from the air. In my experience, stuff that gets rained on can sometimes acquire dirt that it wouldn't otherwise have. If ky clothes are drenched from the rain, I throw them in the laundry instead of considering them clean.
No doubt, but presumably those non water things are all things that evaporate, so wouldn't get left behind then the rain dries. The rain would have to pick up something up on the way down for it to contain something that precipitates out. That could be dust or soot, I'm not sure what else, but any minerals would have to come in that way
The fact that I'm referring to them as "weird" means that they are not, in fact, normal. Presumably if any of these people had seen such a thing before, they wouldn't be so concerned about it.
Air and surface water measurements are mentioned for the train car contents.
Is anyone aware if there is top soil or swipe testing for the train car contents or suspected partial combustion compounds?
That black cloud did not look like the cleanest burn. Isn’t it naive to burn a mixture then test for the fuel in the aftermath and say look no fuel here there must be no contamination?
Purely speculating: it's possible, in the scenario that you described, that the fuel is far more toxic than the combustion compounds, so something was indeed achieved
Of course, my understanding is that the combustion compounds are also toxic, but I wanted to respond to what you've written.
I think it was an impossible call to make and the product of a bunch of terrible circumstances and prior decisions. Additionally the response team was probably motivated to act instead of wait for the situation to develop unpredictably and they were reading a climbing temperature. If they believed it was avoiding an uncontrolled explosion where the was no idea how the rail car contents would release then it could be the right call in hindsight. I can see not wanting a big plume of that uncombusted stuff releasing, persisting and causing acute and chronic harm. I cannot argue anything about the call to burn it or not that sounds like a terrible choice.
My point is the rush to resume normalcy and choose the risk of false negative reassurance when its clear this is not a well thought out procedure is terrible. Testing for raw components alone neglects the entire set of potential contamination and routes. Also is a one mile radius evacuation adequate for an open burn like that? I don't know what is but it'd be nice to have support to leave for a time if living on the outside margin of "might not die depending on wind direction".
The story coverage in newspapers is decently good I don't think anything is being swept under the rug. But the official response and effort to put the threat in the past seems like damage control to exit the news cycle vs having any concern whatsoever about the people that live there. It is a poor populated area of the country and it is acceptable to open burn a million pounds of chlorinated petrochemicals. I know this happens in different ways under environmental permitting all over the US like in the gulf, etc. so its not unique. Still its terrible.
And the state and local officials are handling the media coverage and disaster response while the US federal government is shooting down multiple balloons out of the air with $400k missiles in the great 2023 balloon wars. It is absurd.
It seems very strange that they'd rather burn the vinyl chloride instead of attempting to capture or recover it, both from an environmental and economic perspective.
Vinyl chloride, when burned, can create poisonous byproducts such as phosgene and carbon monoxide. Vinyl chloride that leaks into the environment is a carcinogen that can cause damage decades into the future. It's a tradeoff, but probably a good one. We can deal with the acute danger of poisonous gas by temporary evacuations and air filters. Once a carcinogen is in the ground or the water, though, it's much more difficult to get it all cleaned up.
I'm pretty worried about this. The fallout/plume won't just be isolated to a region we can avoid or mitigate. It's in our waterways and in our air. I wouldn't be surprised if a year from now we can detect it all around the world. We might not know the full extent of the disaster for many years.
I think they're right that it will be detectable globally in a few years if folks know what they're looking for, but I don't think it will show up meaningfully as an impact to health outcomes far outside the currently contaminated region.
I'd be surprised. Doing quick napkin math, there were very roughly 4.710^30 particles of vinyl chloride released. Google says there are 4.610^46 molecules of water in the ocean (I can't vouch for that). So the concentration would be something like 0.0000000001 ppm.
And that's only counting the ocean, not air or freshwater or dirt.
I don't know if that's in the realm of detectable, but I think it's certainly not significant.
The local effects could be bad, but I don't think there will be any kind of global effects.
Well the president just told rail workers they couldn't strike like a month ago. They wanted to strike because of unsafe working conditions and skeleton crews and crazy shifts. But I'm not really sure it's a political issue, both parties are on the side of the railroad owners here.
Yes, you're naturally going to see a mix of mass psychogenic illness and actually-chemically-induced symptoms, and it's going to be terribly difficult to tell them apart, especially from just news reports. :-/
As one of HN's resident leftists, I drew attention to the story early and it got little traction. While the right has indeed begun screaming loudly about it, calling it an attack on white people and so on (Charlie Kirk@TPUSA, Jesse Watters@Fox, Benny Johnson@Newsmax have all made such claims in the last 48 hours), refuting their claims is not the same as saying the incident is not important.
It is, and I think both the Ohio and federal governments have done a poor job of addressing it, notwithstanding the slow-moving nature of the disaster.
It is political because nobody wants to actually help. By making it political, you take it out of your hands. It is someone else's fault, and you shouldn't have to fix it.
Not once in all of the threads on this topic have I seen someone ask "what can I do to help". Mud slinging and politics is easy because you can do it from a keyboard for free.
The American liberal media is not "left" they are liberal.
That being said, they are probably trying to downplay it because it's directly related to the railroad union strike that Biden shut down a few months back. They wanted more time off-- which would mean more workers and less hours.
It's literally front page news on all of the "left" news sources and has been since the accident.. a bunch of weird grifters are proclaiming the left has abandoned the town by not declaring a Federal disaster when it would be illegal to do so since the law only recognizes natural disasters.
What's so odd is the secretary of transportation himself downplayed it by saying "hey, there are a thousand train derailments a year [big whoop]!
Really so the implication is there are ~2.75 of East Palestine derailments per day and therefore no biggie? Or, the others are mostly very minor but I want to downplay this so I'll say this happens almost three times a day, big whoop, deal!
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News? You've been doing it repeatedly, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
The idea here is: if you have a substantive point, make it thoughtfully; if not, please don't comment until you do.
The unions desperately wanted to fix the problems that lead to stuff like this and Biden forced them not to strike so I can’t see how unions would be the problem here.
I mean, Biden brokered a deal to avert the strike, worked with the house and senate to craft a law guaranteeing the railworkers the benefits they were seeking which was then filibustered by senate republicans, but that's apparently too complicated or politically inconvenient for HN to understand so they pretend like stopping the strike was the end of that story.
Wasn't it an amendment that Sanders added to Biden's bill, was blocked by Republicans, and then enough Democrats voted for the bill despite the fact that it didn't include Sanders' amendment that should have been part of it from the start?
Everybody who voted for it bears the blame for taking away the railroad workers' rights.
You could easily rephrase your comment as "Biden took away their only option for self-directed action and then passed the buck to an organization known for doing nothing."
Sometimes complexity doesn't actually add anything useful :) Focusing on the DC play-by-play is good for convincing yourself the other team is at fault, and not much else.
Sure, you could rephrase it to something inaccurate if it was your prerogative to "both sides" something that failed almost entirely along party lines after attracting the support of several very conservative senators. I'm not sure what value that adds though :)
Were the worked who wanted to continue striking allowed to, or not? Was the response of the Republican-dominated Senate predictable or was it a surprise? If I give fine china to a toddler who drops and breaks it, which party is really at fault?
The left is downplaying it because it happened on their guy's watch, and he's not doing much about it. In fact, the Biden administration just said that Ohio wouldn't get any disaster money for this. So either the derailment's consequences are nothing, or the left's guy is ineffective at dealing with the real world. The left therefore chooses to say (and even think?) that the problems are nothing.
I think it's about Pete Buttigieg and his 2024 presidential prospects burning away faster and more effectively than the chemicals in this terrible accident.
If Democrats think this unbelievably stupid approach will work in the election, they might as well be regarded as Trump supporters. The country is watching this incident with bated breath and tremendous skepticism.
Yeah unfortunately the media in the US just overplays every bad thing that happens under someone they don’t like and underplays the bad when their guy is in office.
But corporate media is just bad so I guess that’s about all we can expect.
Its one thing to claim certain organizations pick and choose what aspects of a story to focus reporting on, but I can't fathom how someone can come to the conclusion that is as utterly ignorant as yours other than being completely brainwashed.
It's been surreal to see this event unplay in the media.
Some things I haven't seen talked about:
1. How desperately poor most of the population in that area is.
My fear is that if the crash has long terms effects people will never get justice.
These are people who can't afford to go to a doctor regularly. They can't afford to miss work. They can't afford to sue a railroad and they'll very likely take a small payment to waive all liability because any amount of money right now is better than whatever they might theoretically get in the future.
And for the most part no one there would tell you they're poor or disadvantaged. I don't mean to imply that they are downtrodden or helpless. I certainly didn't think that of myself or anyone else growing up there.
It is only with the perspective of having left and having traveled the world and having risen through the economic ladder that I have the ability to look back and see how disadvantaged they will be against a large corporation.
Barring legislation and government intervention I cannot imagine they will have even a shot in hell at getting a fair evaluation and fair deal.
2. Train wrecks happened in the area somewhat frequently
Growing up I remember at last 3 or 4 train wrecks bad enough that people had to be put up in hotels.
I don't know if that's a lot of a little for an area in a ~10 year span but it feels like a lot.
I also don't know if train wrecks are tracked and reported anywhere other than local paper archives but I would be very interested to see the internal data and memos the railroad has related to derailments.
If anyone is aware of such a resource please let me know.