Ohio River basin
There was this derailment in Ohio last week…the one that spilled a whole lot of vinyl chloride. It’s gone bizarrely or suspiciously under-reported. I looked for reporting a few hours ago and the only major news outlet that turned up was, of all things, Fox News. Where the hell are the other majors?
The short version is it’s bad. Really really bad.
Since the news outlets are looking fixedly in the opposite direction for some reason it’s going to have to be some tweets, sorry.
Nina Turner is a former Ohio state senator.
New York Times? Washington Post? Anything? Hello? Is this thing on?
Not only does it affect all those states, it will eventually dump into the ocean. This could have very long lasting consequences. And the media is derelict in their duty – as is the government.
There is an article in The Washington Post, dateline yesterday, but it’s well hidden both online and in the physical copy. The focus is mostly on whether it’s safe for residents to return to their homes, with “authorities” saying they can and the residents a bit dubious.
But the main page is all about balloons being shot down and the Super Bowl and such more urgent topics.
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a durable plastic widely used for sewer and drain pipes. It takes advantage of the fact that, being a synthetic human chemical creation, so far no decompositon organisms have evolved biochemical pathways to deal with it to their own advantage. The vinyl chloride molecular building blocks for synthesis of PVC are environmental nasties. “Vinyl chloride exposure is associated with an increased risk of a rare form of liver cancer (hepatic angiosarcoma), as well as primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia.”*
I gather that environmentally, it is similar to DDT. It will most likely hang around for centuries, contrasting neatly with the short-term thinking and priorities of the politicians and officials dealing with it.
*https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/substances/vinyl-chloride#:~:text=Vinyl%20chloride%20exposure%20is%20associated,cancers%2C%20lymphoma%2C%20and%20leukemia.
See also: https://reactome.org/content/detail/R-HSA-76354
One of my sisters is a microbiologist. For years her research was on bacteria that she collected from the floor of the Pacific, off the coast of Mexico; that involved pleasant boat trips with the occasional visit to the bottom of the ocean in Alvin.
Then for some reason that money dried up and the only funding she could get was from BP, to go to the Gulf and investigate bacteria that could potentially consume and break down oil.
I can see where her next funding stream will come from.
Cory Doctorow wrote about it yesterday. I hadn’t heard about the disaster before then, but then I don’t follow US news all that closely.
Frankly, the ‘media isn’t covering it’ is right-wing spin that is starting to get traction. A Google search for East Palestine train derailment turns up dozens of news stories from every outlet you can name. Bizarrely, the Trump wing’s take on it seems to be becoming a story – Taylor-Greene for example, completely ignoring the fact that she has attacked Biden administration rules to tighten up rail transport safety requirements (if that train had been carrying LNG, East Palestine would be gone).
Well a search for “Ohio train derailment” and a couple of other phrases that didn’t include “East Palestine” turned up zero news stories from major media except Fox News on the front page. I’m not right-wing and I’m not hostile to non-right-wing news outlets, but the major media seem to me to be doing a crappy job on this.
Dateline today, NYT: What We Know About the Train Derailment in Ohio. Finally.
Ya I just read that. Maybe they overslept…
Vinyl chloride is a flammable gas. I would not be surprised if it’s an irritant to eyes or the respiratory system.
From the NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards:
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/npgd0658.html
More to come after I take a look at a safety data sheet (SDS) for it.
Article in Chemical and Engineering News
cen.acs.org/safety/Safety-questions-remain-Ohio-train/101/i6
I didn’t bookmark the link and Post.News has terrible search in beta, but I’m pretty sure it was Saturday morning NZDT when I read about it on Post. I think that would still have been Friday US Eastern?
Ophelia – to be clear, I was not suggesting that you were right-wing. What I was pointing to, however, is that the nutcase right has been jumping on this this week, in particular trying to spin the ‘lack of media coverage’ story. Consider MTG, for example (https://t.co/RULoF1oKJQ).
This wasn’t a big story when it initially happened (February 3), because derailments happen all the damn time, just not usually with something this bad. When it was a neighbourhood size fire, it didn’t break on national news. These slowly escalating environmental accident disasters never get early notice (even Deepwater Horizon took a good while). It started getting prominent coverage after the decision to use a fire to prevent an explosion started producing a phosgene gas cloud. Somehow various conspiracy theory nutjobs have been trying to suggest that people were told it was safe (hmm, then why the emergency evacuation?). It is a bizarre story for Taylor-Greene to try to get political mileage out of, considering her voting (or absenteeism) record on environmental issues. She was recently attacking Biden’s effort to repeal the Trump-era rule allowing rail transport of LNG, which would produce a much larger explosion.
The real story here is not a cover-up. Maybe there is a story about how crap the modern media is at covering stuff like this, but Trump is a better example of that than East Palestine. The real story is that American rail infrastructure is crap. Near-obsolete lines carrying old cars all using FDR era technology, transporting materials they were never meant to transport under less stringent regulation. There has been a decades long fight over the need to modernize regulation of it, specifically the part that caries potentially toxic cargo, and really all that has happened is the regulations have lost teeth. The result is the freight companies like Norfolk Southern are getting richer, stressing their systems more and more, knowing that a catastrophic accident was waiting to happen but that they would not be held responsible and would be allowed to carry on as normal once someone else paid the consequences of their crash.
Karen – when combusted, vinyl chloride becomes phosgene gas – which was used as a chemical weapon during WW1. It is unquestionably toxic. This was very much the best choice of a really terrible set of options in an emergency situation
Suddenly I’m not so happy to live very near the tracks.
Naif @13:
Yep. The article in Chemical and Engineering News mentions phosgene. Hydrogen chloride can also be produced when vinyl chloride burns. That is not fun to breathe. Agree about the options. Controlled burn vs uncontrolled explosion – glad I don’t have to make those kind of decisions.
I was at a park in eastern Nebraska a few years ago, watching a coal train snake along the track right next to the Platte River. All I could think of is if the train derailed, all that coal would tumble into the river and create havoc for the ecosystem as it broke down…and eventually make it into the Missouri river (we were quite close to the confluence) and then into the Mississippi.
I think train transport is probably better than most others, but at the same time, as Naif said, the aging infrastructure is problematic at best. We throw money at highways and airlines, but yawn at trains. Why? The voters don’t want tax money going to trains, they want it going to their own driving habits.
The tracks here run right beside Puget Sound once they’re north of the ship canal – as in that photo I posted a few days ago. Oil cars are a very frequent cargo.
A quick thought that is not especially useful, but which I feel compelled to share anyway:
Humanity, on the whole, is really quite evil.
Agent Smith was right.
We are the disease. We are the virus.
We’re the bad guys in the story of Earth.
Follow up to #10:
Vinyl chloride can be an irritant – eye, skin, respiratory tract. That can be an issue with acute exposure. And it would be dose dependent.