#ohio train derailment

[mysharona1987]

Afroman - Will You Help Me Repair My Door (OFFICIAL MUSIC VIDEO)

I am ashamed I did not hear about this classic until now.

[mindblowingscience]

Headaches and lingering chemical smells from a fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, have left residents worried about their air and water—and misinformation on social media hasn't helped.

State officials offered more details of the cleanup process and a timeline of the environmental disaster during a news conference on Feb. 14, 2023. Nearly a dozen cars carrying chemicals, including vinyl chloride, a carcinogen, derailed on the evening of Feb. 3, and fire from the site sent up acrid black smoke. Officials said they had tested over 400 nearby homes for contamination and were tracking a plume of spilled chemicals that had killed 3,500 fish in streams and reached the Ohio River.

However, the slow release of information after the derailment has left many questions unanswered about the risks and longer-term impact. We put five questions about the chemical releases to Andrew Whelton, an environmental engineer who investigates chemical risks during disasters.

Continue Reading

[jessica-marie-baumgartner]

[parttimereporter]

NOW REVEALED:

Seven US government investigators briefly fell ill in early March while studying the possible health impacts of a toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed to CNN on Thursday.

The investigators’ symptoms included sore throats, headaches, coughing and nausea – consistent with what some residents experienced after the February 3 train derailment that released a cocktail of hazardous chemicals into the air, water and soil.

[gaiawisdom]

Erin goes off!

“Because someone’s not answering their questions!! And this community, like all communities, deserves MORE RESPECT from their local, state and federal leaders! STEP UP TO THE PLATE!! If you don’t know you need to tell them that! Otherwise you leave them defenseless!! They don’t even know how to protect themselves! THEY ARE RELYING ON YOU TO DO THAT FOR THEM!! It’s just a kick in the gut! And then, another community discovers, ONCE AGAIN, that YEAH!! our local, state and federals leaders DON’T HAVE OUR BACKS!! They should be listening to the ones that are ON THE GROUND, living it, breathing it, the ones that are EXPOSED to it, experiencing it!”

Erin Brockovitch, heroine activist, on the ground in East Palestine, Ohio, in an interview with Jordan Charition of STATUS COUP Podcast.  

[uboat53]

Science time? How about science and government? Government scientists, that is. Time for a SHORT RANT (TM).

A few weeks ago, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, releasing toxic chemicals. Officials burned off the chemicals because they were afraid that, if they didn't, the train would simply explode and scatter those chemicals off in a far less controlled manner. So this raises the question:

If you're a government scientist, probably at the EPA, what should you tell the residents of the nearby town?

Well, in mid-February, the EPA told residents that it was safe to return to their homes. Once there, residents described symptoms ranging from rashes to headaches to nausea. In early March, scientists found high levels of hazardous chemicals in the air around the town.

Does this mean the EPA scientists, government scientists, got it wrong? Did they give inaccurate information to the public?

Well, the best answer I was able to find came in an NPR interview with Peter DeCarlo, a professor of Environmental Health and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

He pointed out in the interview on February 16th, after the EPA had said it was safe, that they hadn't done proper measurement. Instead of sampling the air for the specific chemicals at issue and determining what the concentration was, they'd used handheld devices that don't measure any chemicals specifically and don't have the sensitivity to measure concentrations accurately.

In addition, when the EPA had done proper sampling, where air is collected and then taken to a lab where chemical concentrations can be measured, it hadn't done it at the accident site or downwind from the derailment. In other words, there was no way the EPA could have known, from the data they had, whether or not it was safe for residents to return.

In other words, based on the information we have, I'd say the answers to my questions, in reverse order are "no", "yes", and "we cannot say whether it is safe to return".

So why did EPA/government scientists say it was safe? Well, I think it's time to talk about uncertainty. Specifically, how most people, especially in politics these days, seem to be unable to admit it.

You see, in science, when something isn't certain, we're supposed to say so. "I don't know" is an accurate and perfectly acceptable answer. But if you're in government, "I don't know" is a good way to get ignored and, if you say it too often, completely sidelined. In fact, it's the perfect way to get your budget cut. That's likely why, instead of honestly answering "I don't have enough data to say" when asked if it was safe to return to East Palestine, the EPA told residents it was safe based purely on the fact that they didn't have enough data to say it was unsafe.

"How do we improve that?" you may ask. Well that's tough.

There's a huge incentive in the direction of saying things are safe. Unsafe places are bad for business and cost money. More importantly, they also drive negative news cycles which are bad for the politicians that government scientists work for.

Real change would require changing politician's mindsets with regard to science and, to do that, you have to change how they're rewarded and punished. The fact is that probably not a single politician is going to lose their job or even lose a significant amount of votes because of what happened in East Palestine.

Voters aren't paying close enough attention to know that the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce are the ones with oversight over the EPA or that Michael S. Regan is the EPA Administrator and, more importantly, their news sources aren't providing them with this information. They have no idea who is responsible, it's just nameless, faceless government bureaucrats to them, so how are they supposed to hold anyone responsible for a major screw-up like this?

So I'll be honest, I don't see it getting better anytime soon. In the future, if you're deciding whether something is safe or not, you're probably best off trying to find the opinion of an independent scientist, preferably a university professor with no financial ties to the issue at hand, than blindly trusting government scientists.

If you're interested, here are some resources if you're interested in learning more about what I've described above:

I wish I had better news on this front but I don't. If you have any thoughts on the matter I'd love to hear them, particularly if they're more optimistic than mine.

[downmystreeandupyours]

Bank Bail Outs. The handling of the Ohio derailment exemplifies this administration's seemingly aloof attitude toward anything affecting non-elites, the border being another such situation where just making a show

[shy-bi-notatallfly]

No thanks, random Tumblr ad. I think right now is a bad time to be on the Ohio River 😬

[martyr-mayhem]

In case you missed it, a criminal was appointed as the Communications Director for Ohio's Sixth District congressman in January 2025.

After a series of train derailments in 2023 caused by unsafe railway maintenance at Norfolk Southern, Mike Peppel started a charity to provide safe drinking water to the community. However, no one received safe drinking water from Mike Peppel's charity because Peppel kept the money he raised in his own pocket.

Peppel settled a lawsuit for his scam. But, recently, there were lawsuits against Norfolk Southern. The suits claimed that the train derailments caused massive chemical destruction and health issues for residents of Ohio. These lawsuits have been dismissed, and to this day, there have been no actions taken by Northfolk Southern to improve railway safety.

But that's not all! A decade prior, in 2013, Peppel was sentenced to 2 years in prison for money laundering and fraud. He's been a known fraudster and criminal for over a decade, and now he has a new job in Congress.

Soooo, what fraud is Elon Musk investigating again?

[20th-century-railroading]

WRECKAGE ALONG THE MAIN LINE by Roger Bee Via Flickr: Baltimore & Ohio 4495 and two helpers slowly pass the scrap metal of a recent train wreck on the northwest edge of Harpers Ferry, West Virginia on 05-03-1966. Built in 1950, this EMD F7A looks to be in its original as delivered colors.

[follow-up-news]

The decision to blow up five tanker cars loaded with toxic chemicals following the fiery derailment of a train in East Palestine, Ohio, last year was unjustified, federal investigators concluded Tuesday. The freight train cars full of vinyl chloride, a cancer-causing chemical used to make plastic, were burned three days after the train careened off the tracks and released massive plumes of toxic smoke into the sky. As incident commander, East Palestine fire chief Keith Drabick ultimately gave Norfolk Southern, the train’s operator, the green light to torch the cars. He told federal investigators last year that Norfolk Southern and its contractors presented intentional burning as the only viable and safe option, and gave him 13 minutes to make the decision — a request that he said left him “blindsided.” Norfolk Southern has repeatedly defended the move, citing the purported risk of the tanker cars suddenly exploding. But the National Transportation and Safety Board threw cold water on that narrative Tuesday during a hearing on the findings of the agency’s lengthy investigation into the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment. Investigators said there was no imminent sign of the chemical reaction, known as polymerization, that would’ve cause tank cars to explode. They said Norfolk Southern and its contractors “misinterpreted and disregarded evidence” in advocating for what’s known as a vent and burn operation, which involved blasting holes in tanker cars, draining the vinyl chloride into pits in the ground and setting it on fire. “Norfolk Southern and its contractors continued to assert the necessity of a vent and burn, even though available evidence should have led them to re-evaluate their initial conclusions,” Paul Stancil, a hazardous materials investigator at the NTSB, said Tuesday.

[rjzimmerman]

Pollution from East Palestine train derailment rained down in 16 states, study says. (Washington Post)

On Feb. 3, 2023, a train carrying toxic chemicals crashed in northeastern Ohio, sending up a large black cloud over Ohio and Pennsylvania after officials decided to burn off the hazardous materials. As the chemicals lofted into the air, the pollution spread as far as 16 states, according to a new study.

“I didn’t expect to see an impact this far out,” said David Gay, lead author of the study. “There’s more going on here than most people would have guessed, including me.”

Toxic chemicals rained down from South Carolina to Wisconsin to New England following the accident, according to the new analysis in the Environmental Research Letters journal. Overall, the pollution spread over 540,000 square miles, or 14 percent of U.S. land area.

People closer to the accident reported rashes, nausea and headaches — but Gay said the low chemical concentrations farther away from the accident weren’t “toxic, but are pretty unusual at a lot of places.” Many of those pollutants can run off and affect marine and plant life.

The accident occurred around 9 p.m. on Feb. 3 near East Palestine, a town of almost 5,000 residents on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. The train, operated by Norfolk Southern, experienced a mechanical issue that caused more than 50 cars to derail. Some of the trains were carrying hazardous materials, including a known human carcinogen called vinyl chloride.

In an emergency decision, officials authorized a controlled burn of the hazardous chemicals to prevent a catastrophic explosion. But as the vinyl chloride burned, it broke into separate chloride and hydrogen ions in the atmosphere that got carried by the wind to other locations.

When it began to rain in various places, the pollutants were pushed from the air and deposited on the ground. The National Atmospheric Deposition Program, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, collects these ground depositions weekly across 260 sites across North America. Gay, who serves as coordinator of the program, routinely analyzes the data to monitor air pollutants.

He and his team analyzed ground depositions from the week of and following the train accident (Jan. 31 to Feb. 14), and then compared them to the previous decade or so. Many samples taken during the week of the accident in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Massachusetts, Wisconsin and New York were flagged for contamination, showing soot, ash and dirt.

Initially, Gay expected to see only a few abnormally high chloride signals nearby in Pennsylvania, but the impact was much higher than he anticipated. High chloride concentrations spanned as far as Virginia, South Carolina and Wisconsin. The highest concentrations were located near the Canada-New York border, which was downwind of East Palestine.

The pollutants disappeared within two to three weeks after the accident.

[tomorrowusa]

Republicans are like 4-year-olds who just learned a bad word and can’t stop saying it.

All Republicans do nowadays is scream “WOKE!” whenever they see something they don’t like. It’s true that woke is a dumb sounding word – that may be why most progressives haven’t used it much since this SNL fake commercial from 2017.

The Trump administration indulged in an orgy of deregulation which led to disasters like the four recent derailments in Ohio to the recent failure of the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Screaming “WOKE!” is their way of evading responsibility without having to provide explanations for their deregulation policies.

As soon as it was clear that Silicon Valley Bank would not survive the weekend, conservative influencers and Republican politicians had a culprit in sights.

Wokeness.

“They were one of the most woke banks,” Representative James Comer, the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, said during a segment on Fox News.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, also spoke to Fox about the collapse of the bank, and he also blamed the bank’s diversity programs. “I mean, this bank, they’re so concerned with D.E.I. and politics and all kinds of stuff. I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” he said.

 Being Republican means you never have to back up your claims.

It is unclear whether these conservatives are working from the same memo or just share the same narrow obsession. Regardless, there is no evidence that D.E.I. or any other diversity initiative is responsible for the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. It is nonsense. And while it shouldn’t be taken seriously on its own terms, this deflection is worth noting for what it represents: the relentless effort to mystify real questions of political economy in favor of endless culture war conflict.

The real story behind the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has much more to do with the political and economic environment of the previous decade than it does with “wokeness,” a word that signifies nothing other than conservative disdain for anything that seems liberal.

The failure of the SVB was essentially caused by poor bets by the bank.

“Flush with cash from high-flying start-ups,” my newsroom colleague Vivian Giang explains, Silicon Valley Bank “did what most of its rivals do: It kept a small chunk of its deposits in cash and it used the rest to buy long-term debt like Treasury bonds.” As long as interest rates stayed low, those bonds promised safe returns.

Interest rates did not stay low. To fight inflation and reduce the price of consumer goods, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates seven times in 2022. With each increase, Silicon Valley Bank lost money on its bonds. Worse, the interest rate surge affected venture capital firms and the entire world of tech start-ups, harming the bank’s portfolio as those companies shed value and reduced deposits. Clients started to withdraw money to meet their liquidity needs, and last week, in order to fund these redemptions, Silicon Valley Bank announced it had sold $21 billion in bonds, at a loss of $1.8 billion. The bank then let it be known that it would sell $2.25 billion in shares to cover the loss.

Worried clients began to withdraw more money, which spooked investors, a development that pushed more clients to withdraw even more money. (Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund reportedly called for its start-ups to pull their cash while they still could.) On Friday, as the bank run gained steam, California’s financial regulatory agency announced that it had taken possession of the bank and placed it under the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Remember how in the aftermath of the Bush financial collapse of 2008 the Obama administration under Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner initiated stress tests on banks to see if they were financially viable? Donald Trump and the GOP 115th Congress did away with those tests.

It’s not as if no one thought this collapse could happen. “The failure of Silicon Valley Bank is a direct result of an absurd 2018 bank deregulation bill signed by Donald Trump that I strongly opposed,” Senator Bernie Sanders said in a statement on Sunday. Senator Elizabeth Warren made a similar point in an essay published in The Times on Monday, in which she also mentioned the failure of New York-based Signature Bank in the immediate aftermath of S.V.B.’s collapse: “Had Congress and the Federal Reserve not rolled back the stricter oversight, S.V.B. and Signature would have been subject to stronger liquidity and capital requirements to withstand financial shocks.”

You’ll never guess which Florida congressman voted for bank deregulation.

[I]f you want to understand the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, you have to understand the political environment that led Congress to loosen regulations on regional banking institutions. You have to understand the interests involved, the ideologies involved and the personalities involved, like DeSantis, who voted for the deregulation bill as a congressman.

😮 😳 🙀

The people who blame “wokeness” for the collapse of a bank do not want you to understand or even think about the political economy of banking in the United States. They want to deflect your attention away from the real questions and turn it toward a manufactured cultural conflict. And the reason they want to do this is to obscure the extent to which they and their allies are complicit in — or responsible for — creating an environment in which banks collapse for lack of appropriate regulation.

Yep, as a House member, Ron “Choke on Woke” DeSantis voted to weaken safeguards on the banking system. If he keeps screaming “WOKE! WOKE! WOKE!” constantly then he thinks he won’t have to answer for his vote back in 2018.

So if you hear GOP MAGA zombies and others on the far right screaming “wokeness” about some disaster, don’t argue with them – they don’t care anyway. Just scream back, “DEREGULATION!” instead. Put them on the defensive. Nobody wins by playing defense 100% of the time.

[pen-to-paper15]

to cope with the fact that where i live keeps getting fucked i’ll read some copia fics before bed 😌

[sighinastorm]

It was four years ago, and also a hoax.

Oh my god, I've just seen this story on instagram about this guy that filled his bathtub with waterbead...except he didn't think about how he was going to empty it.

So he unplugged the bathtub which was apparently the worst idea he could possibly have because this happened

So he panicked and started asking people on the internet what he should do. Which was also a bad idea.

First suggestion: flush the toilet

This caused a smelly overflow that flooded the whole bathroom.

Second suggestion: vaccum the beads

His vaccum caught fire.

At this point it had actually spread to the neighborhood and people came to ask question but he denied knowing anything about it. He then discovered that it's invaded the whole sewer system.

And yet, he continued to take suggestion from the internet.

Third suggestion: put salt in

It actually worked. Well, until.

Poop apprently started flooding his house.

And then the streets.

It all happened yesterday so we're still waiting on an update on the situation but I hadn't laugh like this in a while.

You should go and watch the whole story (it's in 4 parts)

It's in french, but you get it even if you don't speak it and his screams of panic are hilarious

Word of warning: don't fill your bathtub with waterbeads. Just don't.

[motorclit]

If anyone wants to know how the victims of East Palestine, OH are doing, please watch this.

I know there's a lot of stuff going on right now in the news, but I don't want people to forget what happens and continues to happen several miles north of where I live. My area got lucky with the wind direction that day. (There's also speculation that Pittsburgh experienced some acid rain from it, but I haven't found anything that confirmed it.)

(Unfortunately, an oil pad (likely fracking) is just over the hill here on my parents' farm. So I've got that to worry about, too!)

This is important to talk about because this shit can (and will) happen ANYWHERE in the US. Fuck, we've got several active freight tracks in my area that I wouldn't be surprised if we experience it at some point. In fact, something similar happened not long ago in Atlanta, GA and I'm not hearing shit about it in the news. (Again: lots going on right now, so I don't know if I'm not looking hard enough and only seeing a few vague clips outside of Status Coup News and first-hand accounts of people living there or what.)

If you're young, have a knack for science, and don't know what to do with your life but want to go to college for something, I suggest shooting for majors that would get you into the EPA, and then understand it might be best to not get into the EPA since they're not doing shit. (I was trying this as someone in my 30s but I'm fucked for choice in terms of colleges near me that have relevant programs and I can't afford to move. Best I can do is purchase secondhand college textbooks or borrow relevant books from the library as well as watch relevant YouTube videos.)

Like I said, I know there's a lot going on right now this year, but please please please do not forget about the communities that are hit with pollution and chemical-related disasters that are basically being left to die. I am begging you. Don't let them get buried in history.