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[Ecological Disaster] Ohio River Basin: How bad? Depends on who you ask!
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Social media has a lot of people posting photos and videos of shit collecting from the air outside in the surrounding area. Knowing how bad breathing can get from wildfire smoke even without it being thick enough to collect ash its gotta be bad.
https://www.wfmj.com/story/48388743/norfolk-southern-will-not-be-attending-informational-session-on-east-palestine-derailment-due-to-alleged-threats#.Y-1bVz3Xp-8.twitter
Thats a local news affiliate
Link to the footage of the trail wheel on fire
As a reminder, despite the claims by the railroad industry that PSR would lead to more efficient delivery of goods, PSR has resulted in only benefiting railroad owners themselves, while being more taxing on infrastructure, more taxing on railroad workers, and no actual marked benefits to railroad customers.
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The Paulsboro derailment in 2012 spawned a number of lawsuits about regarding long term health effects.
...no, the EU still use fucking Buffer and Chain couplers for freight, which also still use dumb air brakes (that people have called incomprehensible) compared to having more widespread use of ECP on passenger rail, and as much as PTC was a mess ERTMS implementation is a complete and utter shit show.
Geth, close the thread.
Who's excited for Like a Dragon: Ishin here in a few days, huh?
Me. The answer is me. I can't wait. I don't know how many of y'all read the chat thread or the SE++ Steam thread but the LAD (formerly Yakuza) series has brought me an immense amount of joy during a trying last couple of years and I earnestly commend those games (especially Yakuza 0, Judgment, or Like a Dragon) into the hands of anyone who thinks they might enjoy a mix of arcade brawler gameplay, noirish crime drama, and absurdist humor all undergirded with a lot of warmth and humanism.
This latest installment takes that gameplay and sets it in 1860s Japan, at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate, with Yakuza characters and face models "playing" real-life historical figures like a repertory company. You get to do badass katana stuff BUT ALSO shoot a flintlock pistol BUT ALSO chop wood in an idyllic village BUT ALSO race turtles, so.
Anyway the thread will open at some point idk
Everyone else, please find a way to discuss the thing we all agree is a tragedy and a horrific indictment of serious structural flaws in our country without somehow insinuating that the person you're talking to is getting hard from it or whatever.
Also, Like a Dragon Ishin is now on-topic for the thread.
Labor regulations, equipment requirements, mandatory inspections, whatever. At a high level, European trains suffer far fewer derailments than American ones, so might as well take a look at what the EU is doing that America can copy on that front. The proximate cause on this seems to be an axel that went bad and wasn't caught during inspection, with secondary issues being the low-tech brakes that might have mitigated the extent of the derailment. Both are items that seem straightforward regulatory fixes, relatively speaking.
Again, total number of derailments doesn't really tell you much of anything given that the severity of the derailment is what actually matters. Particularly since the US moves nearly double the percentage of goods via rail compared to the EU, and over a far more extensive rail network where conflict points can occur. A railcar coming loose at an intermodal yard just doesn't mean much outside of dry statistics and being annoying to the folks working there. It isn't comparable to what happened in Ohio. And it's not like catastrophic derailments are unheard of in Europe.
2009 Italian freight train derailment and fire that killed 32
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viareggio_train_derailment
2020 Welsh freight train derailment and fire that spilled oil necessitating an evacuation and environmental cleanup
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llangennech_derailment
If anything we should be looking to copy India for advancements in freight rail. Railroading is hard and complicated. The NTSB will find out what happened and make recommendations. Those recommendations should be followed, though I'm not as confident in that. Precision Scheduling is also bullshit, but like most self destructive MBA behavior I don't really know how you fix that. We also need to change federal/ property tax policy to encourage investment in improving the rail network rather than converting two track mainlines to single tracks because it's cheaper. Or just nationalize it so that the Feds make those decisions, but it's not like we don't underinvest for the interstate system or internal navigable waterways, either.
And I do not agree with that assumption.
I wouldn't make that assumption without more evidence. EU overall has a mess of different regulatory bodies that likely have differing reporting standards than the FRA / NTSB / DOT so I'd definitely avoid making sweeping assumptions without more information and analysis.
It is certainly possible the US is that much worse than Europe and things vary that widely, but with that stark a difference in numbers I'd lean toward there being some major differences in either how railroads operate or in how the data is collected.
It's quite possible there are simply inherent differences in that rails were added to an already established Europe compared to the US where cities and towns grew up organically around railroads. Europe also had a major rebuilding of infrastructure 80 or so years ago that may have contributed to some fundamental differences as well, but I'm not a railroad expert or in the weeds enough to really say if that would be a factor or not.
I do have a serious bone to pick with people who treat anyone curious about truths that might be less useful to the cause as some sort of villain, it's one thing to be willing to leverage ignorance and another thing entirely to proclaim ignorance righteousness and skepticism malice.
should I be looking at canceling ?
CBS news
Workers warned the company about this train.
Marietta would be the only one even potentially impacted, and I can't imagine there would still be problems by May even if it was. Conversely, if it was bad enough to mess up Cleveland somehow then the whole east coast would be swarming with zombies by May.
If you're interested in avoiding the ongoing pandemic, it would make sense to avoid travel. This shouldn't have any impact on your trip unless it turns out it was the first act of the movie and in a month Ohio's overrun by the aliens or whatever.
Sorry, I dont see the misinformation, could you point it out in less vague terms?
That's a fair position, but I'm not willing to perform an exhaustive study of derailments in the US and EU, which would be required if I don't make the assumption, because I don't have the time to do so.
It’s not like nothing happened here. There’s absolutely some folks that drank that water and got some mutagenic compound in their life.
To my understanding we don’t even really know enough about vinyl chloride exposure via this method or the long term effects of it to know just how badly this will effect folks. Similarly I’m not sure the volumes at which exposure to this carcinogen is equivalent to say second hand cigarette smoke or car exhaust. Like are we at having a cigarette, way below, blown right past it Holy fuck everyone’s getting lymphoma? Nor do I know what volume the folks drinking the water, or using it to make pasta, are gonna catch. I am unsure how long this stuff mucks up the ground water. My understanding is that the River basin should be able to pass the toxin the way rivers do, but I also don’t know exactly how long that takes. I would bet this isn’t the only unfortunate chemical leaching into this river though (humans have really super fucked just about every River they’ve ever gone near).
I have come to understand that those unknowns are Influenced and reduced in their severity by burning off a bunch of it to keep it from further leaching into water sources. It is also however my understanding that the outcome of that burn is other poisonous carcinogenic compounds and acid in the atmosphere. Though ones we know the effects of, and know should dissipate quickly in the atmosphere. That is if Ohio’s silly weather didn’t trap the burn cloud. Which I’m guessing that a whole bunch of acid in the atmosphere leads to acid rain? I’m not sure if that bit is correct though.
So like to recap a whole bunch of people got exposed to some volume of carcinogenic compound that’s leached in some volume into their drinking water supplies, and the best answer to prevent that problem from getting worse was to loft acid and other poisonous gases into the sky. Ignoring any direct human cost of death or injury, of which I’m sure there will be at least a few related. In the immediately surrounding region, at the very least, every home owner has been robbed of property value. Probably a lot of it. Think about it, would you be buying a house in this town right now?. So these folks are potentially financially trapped living in a place with water that is of questionable safety for an unknown amount of time. Houses some of them aren’t even allowed to be in right now if I’m recalling correctly.
Also Anyone trying to actually investigate this directly, to record the animals dying outside, or to ask questions, or go anywhere near the toxic dump is getting arrested. For semi defensible reason, because it is a toxic waste dump that will hurt some of these folks trying to go near it. However that means all the reporting is second hand statements from organizations and the corp responsible for this.
So far the evidence indicates that this catastrophe is likely to come down to inspection failure. A problem directly predictably related to staffing issues created by a completely insane corporate strategy to maximize profits. A strategy that was directly enabled via bipartisan action in the federal government when they forced workers into conditions that will always produce shitty work.
That’s my current understanding of this situation.
So for me it really comes down to the answers to just how carcinogenic it is and in what doses, and just how many people got dosed with how much carcinogen. Unfortunately we probably won’t have the exact answers on that for like 30 years. Also I guess the whole property value thing should probably get the folks so injured more than a few dollars each.
https://nj.gov/health/eoh/rtkweb/documents/fs/2001.pdf
That’s inhaled if I’m not mistaken.
Like yeah anyone in the area probably just got an inhaled dose like they’d worked a factory for a recognizable amount of time.
The bigger problem here is drinking water contaminated with it if I’ve gleaned anything properly from the chemists talking earlier. Drinking is a different exposure method that will have different tolerances. As well different results from exposure to other organs.
And there’s not been any extensive study of the long term results of even limited exposure. Like if my high school gave me mesothelioma I won’t know it for probably another decade or two.
I'm looking at the reporting requirements for rail accidents (first link is the general doc, second is more detailed on what needs to be reported), and the three categories are death/injury, highway-rail grade crossing, and 'rail equipment'. The first is obvious, second seems to mean you hit a not-train, and third basically anything that causes damages that breach a certain cost threshold. EU regulations classify derailments as accidents, and as far as I can tell require an investigation of all accidents.
Unless you've got better information, the laws read like the US doesn't necessarily need to report all derailments, while the EU does.
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Concerns regarding chronic exposure to VC, including in water
https://iris.epa.gov/static/pdfs/1001tr.pdf
Concerns regarding VC persistence in the environment, air and water
https://cdn.who.int/media/docs/default-source/wash-documents/wash-chemicals/vinylchloride.pdf?sfvrsn=8e19c6cd_4
The levels of concern, and the ability of the material to persist in the environment make a few things pretty clear
1) Beyond the immediate area at the time of the crash, airborne contamination or contamination of surfaces from VC is not relevant
2) Beyond the immediate area, for a day or two post crash, surface water contamination is not relevant
3) Contamination of groundwater MAY be relevant for those who drink well water, if the local groundwater is an isolated aquifer. If the local aquifer experiences a lot of volume exchange with larger ones, contamination levels aren't high enough.
4) Standard water purification techniques used in all water treatment plants will fully degrade all VC
5) The burn was the right thing to do for the local area (minimizing known groundwater contamination concerns by destroying the vast majority of the VC), but may have come at the cost of a slightly elevated risk to remote communities (from partial burn products in the smoke plume)
Concerns remain about the persistance and health effects of the burn products of VC, and quite how long the VC will hang out in local groundwater. In terms of general health risk to a large section of the nation, the amount of contaminants produced, and the overall risk profile is orders of magnitude below the smoke from the massive forest fires we have experienced in the west over the last 5-10 years. Those were very bad, people did die, but, they did not trigger some giant wave of death and illness despite producing VASTLY more compounds with scary names than this fire.
I have questions
Ohio 555 from Zanesville to the WV border - the Triple Nickel - is maybe #2 in the nation for motorcycle rides, and I've already done #1
and if Ohio doesn't know what BBQ is Michigan really doesn't
We noted before that multiple train derailments happen every day in the US, and this has been the case for forever essentially. Is this one worse than most, or just a lot of attention is being paid to them now?
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It’s the latter, but labor is going to call this out more, as they need to in the ongoing information war with capital, and not just with trains