Ohio cleaning up toxic train derailment as pollution 'plume' moves downstream

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ohio-cleaning-up-toxic-train-derailment-pollution-plume-moves-downstream-2023-02-15/

by VagueMag • 3 years ago

111 117 3 years ago

swader999• 3 years ago

There's a lot of claims being made by officials in this article. Be nice to see the data.

legitster7• 3 years ago

Dr. Bruce Vanderhoff, director of the Ohio Department of Health, said the compounds spilled can cause headaches, eye and nose irritation even at levels considered safe, but that the "measured facts" show air sampling is not reporting any dangers.

The data is that there is nothing to report.

The burn off took place over two weeks ago - I'm not sure why we would be looking for dangerous vapors still.

rob74• 3 years ago

Railroad union officials said they have been warning that such an accident could happen because railroad cost-cutting harmed safety measures. [...] The train of three locomotives and 150 freight cars [...] 20 of the cars were carrying hazardous materials, including 10 that derailed. The NTSB said 38 cars in total left the tracks and that the ensuing fire damaged an additional 12.

Maybe put hazardous materials on shorter trains that are in less danger of derailing? But yeah, ok, that wouldn't be as profitable for the railroads...

uoaei3• 3 years ago

Hey wow remember those rail strikes a couple months back? The ones where none of the media talked about what the workers wanted except for allegedly-dubious demands for "sick days"? The ones where "Amtrak Joe" pulled all the strings he could to shut it down? I wonder what they were so adamant about back then...?

infecto2• 3 years ago

Was this crash related to labor safety or mechanical? I got the impression that this might have happened because the conductor was told not to stop until it hit some sort of secondary wheel/axle temperature check, it had already failed one.

Not that I disagree with the busting of the strike but it is important to not conflate the two issues. If the above is true this could be more related to Trumps repeal of ECP brakes.

legitster7• 3 years ago

This is a bad idea. Having more, shorter trains actually increases the odds of derailment/accidents.

LargoLasskhyfv• 3 years ago

No. Because longer (freight) trains with dispersed multiple engine units pulling and pushing freight cars with old braking systems, have different driving physics and characteristics. They are not a good fit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_power

kevinventullo• 3 years ago

That seems to assume the probability of derailment is independent of the length of the train. If, at a certain size, doubling the length of a train more than doubles the probability of derailment, you are better off with shorter trains.

advisedwang3• 3 years ago

The whole point the union is makings is that the railroad companies are making trains longer and longer.

jokoon• 3 years ago

Will there really be acid rain?

Anyway it's really weird how there is so little news about this incident.

jakear11• 3 years ago

Is there? It's been all over this site, all over twitter, and all over AM radio around me. NPR has reported about it, as have other major media outlets. Yet I keep seeing people insist it's "not being talked about".

chucksta4• 3 years ago

How much have you heard about the balloons in comparison?

detrites4• 3 years ago

Are MSM reports clearly stating there's a massive black cloud that will likely rain acid? Are they showing fish floating belly up? Are they covering the farmers saying animals are dying and becoming ill many miles away?

Are they showing the panicked videos all over twitter and tiktok showing residents and their relatives stating MSM news is not telling the real story, that nobody seems to be taking care of them and that some have become quite ill?

a1445c8b• 3 years ago

58 sources according to ground.news: https://ground.news/article/ohio-train-derailment-leaves-tox...

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

Meanwhile I'm struggling to find a single instance of a balloon story on their front page, out of like 100 articles. Why isn't anyone talking about the balloons!?

maxerickson2• 3 years ago

The burning vinyl chloride produces hydrogen chloride (which becomes hydrochloric acid when in solution with water). Tens of thousands of pounds of it was present.

So the answer is probably yes, with it being a lot harder to say what the exact effects are (because how much did it dilute in the atmosphere before going into solution, how quickly did it fall in rain, etc.).

It seems likely enough that there will be some rain that is moderately effected and not much else (because in terms of mixing with the atmosphere, tens of thousands of pounds isn't that much material).

NegativeLatency• 3 years ago

Don’t forget the dioxin!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_dibenzodioxins

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Canal

perihelions• 3 years ago

- "The burning vinyl chloride produces hydrogen chloride (which becomes hydrochloric acid when in solution with water). Tens of thousands of pounds of it was present."

A single Space Shuttle / SLS launch releases far more than that [0]. The solid-fuel boosters are 70% ammonium perchlorate; the primary form the chlorine ends up as is HCl. No one ever gave a shit.

Really, the HCl component is the least concerning part of this disaster. This isn't 1970's-era acid rain, from the coal industry releasing sulfuric acid on a million-ton scale.

[0] e.g. Table I, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA289852.pdf ("Stratospheric Ozone Reactive Chemicals Generated by Space Launches Worldwide")

heisenbit• 3 years ago

The acid is not the real issue. The question is how much dioxin was created, where does it end up, how much are/were people/animals exposed short term and how much in the long run - it accumulates in the food chain.

gruez• 3 years ago

The question is how much dioxin was created

Does it even generate dioxins? Somebody mentioned in a previous thread that dioxins are only produced when burning PVC (the polymer), not vinyl chloride (the precursor chemical).

mrguyorama3• 3 years ago

Anyway it's really weird how there is so little news about this incident.

This has been multiple headlines on the front page of both reddit and HN for like an entire week, how much more do I have to hear about this before people like you acknowledge there is news about this incident?

The day of and after there wasn't front page coverage about this because there was a national event happening, and it turns out local, small scale industrial accidents are pretty common and regular, and most people don't GAF.

NamTaf2• 3 years ago

Oh, the CEO gave his personal guarantee that they won't leave until everything is clean. I'm certainly convinced now!

There is absolutely no way they won't walk away from this the moment they can unless they are legally compelled to stay.

LatteLazy2• 3 years ago

/r/politicalhumour are having a field day with this.

Trump guts safety requirements

Unions object

Biden smashes Union's ability to strike etc

Unions proven right and half of Ohio have their pets die...

speed_spread2• 3 years ago

The "dying animals but no casualities" angle really gets to me. This is possibly the source of millions of future cancers in America. The damage will persist over decades. They're just downplaying it until something else comes along in the news.

shadowgovt5• 3 years ago

Vinyl chloride decays into 14-CO2 at 99 parts per 100 within 100 days.

There might be more than zero cancers resulting from the spill, but odds are low. Carcinogenic numbers for vinyl chloride are for chronic long-term exposure in plant workers because it doesn't stick around long enough for chronic short-term exposure.

heartbreak2• 3 years ago

half of Ohio have their pets die

This story has enough hysteria already.

lightedman• 3 years ago

Go tell that to Taylor Holzer, who was fairly close to the burning train and had a majority of his animals on his farm royally fucked.

kibwen• 3 years ago

"Woman who lives 10 miles away from East Palestine, Ohio finds all of her chickens dead": https://www.reddit.com/r/CrazyFuckingVideos/comments/112hi99...

AdamN5• 3 years ago

Biden was backed into that corner - it's not like he is anti-union but of course having the economy tank from a union strike would have been catastrophic for his agenda and the economy (and Democrats staying in power).

xtian• 3 years ago

What actions would you say you can’t justify with that rhetoric?

corbulo9• 3 years ago

Those people have a field day every time they take a shit

tzs• 3 years ago

Trump certainly gutted or tried to gut many safety and/or environmental requirements, often with completely absurd justification [1], but I'm not sure this particular case is such.

The safety requirements in question, mandating ECP brakes on certain trains carrying toxic cargo (I think it was trains above a certain length unless they stayed below some specified speed or something like that), were enacted under the FAST Act in 2015.

One of the requirements of that was that before their scheduled effectiveness date that the National Academy of Sciences was to investigate this and determine if the assumptions made when requiring ECP brakes were justified.

My Googling has failed to turn up a copy of the NSA report, but from the small amount that has been quoted in newspaper and magazine articles that did turn up, and from what DOT said when they announced in late 2017 that the ECP mandate would be rescinded, it sounds like the NSA was unable to come to a conclusion on the relative performance of ECP brakes compared to other brakes in emergencies.

Here's what DOT said:

In accordance with the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act (Public Law 114-94), the U.S. Department of Transportation today announced the final updated Regulatory Impact Analysis (RIA) in regard to Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes on certain trains. After careful review in accordance with the Congressional mandate contained in the FAST Act, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) and the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) will rescind the ECP mandate.
This determination was made with congressionally-mandated input from the National Academy of Sciences’ Transportation Research Board, U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) and studies by the FRA, which found that the cost-benefit analyses are not sufficient justification for mandating ECP brakes.
The National Academy of Sciences determined it was unable to make a conclusive statement regarding the emergency performance of ECP brakes relative to other braking systems. In addition, the updated RIA incorporated recommendations from audits conducted by the U.S. General Accountability Office and updated costs and benefits of the ECP brake provision based on current economic conditions. This review demonstrated that the costs of this mandate would exceed three-fold the benefits it would produce.

If the NAS really found that there wasn't enough evidence to say ECP brakes were actually better and the GAO really found that the costs exceeded benefits by 3 to 1 and they were using whatever value is normally used on human life when doing cost/benefit analysis...then this sounds like it might have been destined for repeal regardless of who was President at the time.

I'm curious about why the FAST Act required such a review in the first place. Is that normal? I'd kind of expect such review to come before, not after.

[1] E.g., their weakening of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA). The MBTA implements a treaty from the early 1900s between Canada, the US, and Mexico to protect birds that migrate between them. So for example suppose I have some land that migratory birds covered by that treaty rely on as a nesting ground, and want to say build a parking lot on that land. I'd have to do so in a way that does not harm the birds. At least that's what everyone thought for the prior 100 years, including nearly everyone involved in making or ratifying the treaty.

Trump's administration decided we've all misunderstood what it meant all those years. What it actually meant is that you could not intentionally harm the birds. So if I wanted to pave over my land to make a parking lot because I wanted to kill the birds, that would not be allowed. But if I wanted to pave over my land to make a parking lot because it would make money and killing the birds is just an unintentional side effect, that would not be covered by the treaty.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

"Cleaning up". Really? When companies say "cleaning up" they are trying to convey the idea that their environmental disaster is a bit like spilling milk in the kitchen. Sure it's unfortunate, but all will be fine after it's "cleaned up".

Just needs a bit of a wipe down and a mop and all good.

mtmail• 3 years ago

What would be a better word/phrase in this case?

agilob• 3 years ago

disaster recovery process?

uoaei3• 3 years ago

Contaminant/hazard/whatever mitigation

jdmtheNth• 3 years ago

Remediation is the word environmental cleanup companies often use. Essentially just removing the top ten or fifteen feet of soil and saying "all clean". Interestingly, all a company needs to do to demonstrate that an area is clean is provide x number of groundwater samples that show clean. What officials ignore is that there might be forty or fifty not-clean samples that are ignored in favour of the, say, five clear samples required. Dirty stuff.

chucksta4• 3 years ago

little bit of a sprucing /s

tokai3• 3 years ago

What a weird and inconsequential thing to take offense by. Nothing in the term 'cleaning up' insinuates that it will be fine or that its not a big deal. What you really should be angry over is the spill, not that after-the-fact communication.

AdamN5• 3 years ago

OP is agreeing with you. "Cleaning up" is a euphemism we should move beyond. At best, they are "mitigating" the spill and that's probably the word the media should use.

_heimdall• 3 years ago

I was interning at Exxon during the BP oil spill. Back then there was all the same talk about cleanup, but at the end of the day "cleanup" amounted to Exxon quietly recommending a coagulation agent that bound the oil into small globs and sunk it under the surface. If I remember right the oil globs would sink something like 10-15 feet, just enough that you'd see less oil oil on the surface.

I also had family on the Alabama gulf coast at the time. They were finding globs of oil on the beach for a few years after "everything was cleaned up"

legitster7• 3 years ago

For the record, the term "cleaning up" was only used in this article. The official term Norfolk Southern used in their press releases was "monitor and mitigate environmental issues" which does seem more accurate.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

This too sounds a tad euphemistic to me.

bananapub• 3 years ago

it's just surreal how disinterested the US is at doing a good job of some things these days. big weapons systems? sure. tax cuts? sure. doing basic stuff like "regulating and checking up on how people move massive quantities of toxic chemicals"? no.

api• 3 years ago

Those things are both boring and economically stolid with no chance to make big windfall returns.

How many people graduate in computers and say “now I want to go maintain 25 year old enterprise Java code for banks?” No? Same principle applies.

It’s hard to get people to maintain the boring stuff in a country with so much interesting shiny new stuff going on.

It doesn’t help that these industries are also low margin and are not attractive investment targets.

AdamN5• 3 years ago

Buffet is a big investor in railroads and they are cash flow machines. It is true that they use very mature technology but plenty of people are train people and would get into it if there was money. Because the 4 big freight companies in the US are so large though (and have dual duopolies meaning investment isn't rewarded), only safety/environmental regulations will drive big projects and spending.

sophacles• 3 years ago

Net profit margin for 2022 was ~25%. That's on par with the oil industry.

breakpointalpha2• 3 years ago

It's easy to interest people in maintenance if you pay them.

A quick search shows Bank of America turned a net profit in '23 of $6.9B. It would be trivial for them to pay a fleet of engineers $250k/yr+ for Java maintenance.

Ignoring maintenance is always a company choice, not a personal one.

corbulo9• 3 years ago

Don't mistake media braintrust opinions for Americans opinions.

Local environmental hazards like this have unanimous bipartisan support for being thorough and transparent, thats how we got legislation like the Clean Air Act. How greased hands and coverup agents feel about it is a separate matter.

neogodless• 3 years ago

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/arizona-truck-spill-toxic-a...

PopAlongKid• 3 years ago

Reminds me of the well-known toxic spill in the Sacramento River in 1991. "The chemical plume left a 41-mile wake of destruction, from the spill site to the entry point of the river into Shasta Lake"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunsmuir,_California#Californi...

There continue to be derailments at that site, although there is now a barrier to prevent cars from tumbling into the river.

legitster7• 3 years ago

So, keep in mind that this story is over two weeks old at this point. Most of the residents are back home and the chemicals are not showing up even in trace tests anymore.

The reason this story is still picking up traction is because Chinese state media made a concerted push starting on Friday to make this a Big Deal, along with the idea that you shouldn't trust our media, agencies, etc.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64633990

VagueMag• 3 years ago

So, your thesis is that this is showing up in Western media because China is trying to distract from the very crucial super important balloon issue by pointing to something trivial like a large industrial accident with still unknown downstream effects? Did Reuters decide to run a story on it yesterday to placate the Chinese?

along with the idea that you shouldn't trust our media, agencies, etc.

Imagine that. Although, I'm more accustomed to the idea people only ever think this sort of thing because of those dastardly Russian disinfo campaigns.

legitster7• 3 years ago

No, but when this story ran the first time two weeks ago the downstream effects were very well documented and understood: https://www.npr.org/2023/02/06/1154760911/ohio-train-derailm... Again, this was an intentional burn coordinated by 3 separate agencies.

Reuters article is only a reiteration of material we already know to placate demand on social media.

I understand that locals will continue to have health concerns, but any official reports that this is an "unprecedented environmental disaster" or an intentional cover up all originated from Chinese state media weeks after the fact: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202302/1285450.shtml?id=11

advisedwang3• 3 years ago

Or maybe the story has interest (and hence coverage) because people are scared and want updates on a potential environmental hazard? One closely related to a recent nation-wide labour dispute?

Most people care more about their health than a balloon that - even if it is a nefarious - has no impact on their lives.

jareklupinski• 3 years ago

Between someone trying to cover up the balloon story with this toxic spill story,

and someone trying to cover up this toxic spill story with the balloon story,

I'm wondering what I really missed in the "turmoil"...

breakpointalpha2• 3 years ago

Imagine the millions of dollars of destroyed property value in the area around the site.

At a minimum the rail company should have to buy out all the land at the day-before market value. You broke it, you buy it.

jollyllama2• 3 years ago

This is confusingly worded. The large clouds from the burnoff were called the plume. They should have come up with a different term for the material in the river to avoid ambiguity.

downvotetruth2• 3 years ago

like seepage - it did not directly spill into the river or the groundwater

jollyllama2• 3 years ago

I'm thinking "spill" would have been better.

Edit: to match parent comment edit

Ok, spill is innacurate, but it's still less confusing than plume. Just by the headline, or someone talking about a plume, you don't know if the article is talking about something that ended a week ago vs something that is ongoing, which is of importance to people in the affected areas.

Ohio cleaning up toxic train derailment as pollution 'plume' moves downstream

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