11 ms·

A wake up call, you say? As in, no one could have seen this coming? Not even all the railroad workers and unions who said this was bound to happen due to the ab

A wake up call, you say? As in, no one could have seen this coming? Not even all the railroad workers and unions who said this was bound to happen due to the absurdity of the schedules and requirements forced on them by their employers? This is the most obvious outcome of the US government stepping in to break the railroad worker's strike, it was just a matter of when - not if. We're lucky it didn't happen in downtown Pittsburgh. The worst part is that the costs of these entirely foreseeable and preventable catastrophes will be nationalized. Meanwhile the railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year. Mission accomplished.

matt123456789 4y ago
The worst part of this disaster in particular is the entirely local effects including cancer, pain, suffering, and death caused by the release of these chemicals. But yes, the worst part of this pattern of behavior from the US leadership is that catastrophes like this will continue to happen all over.
- mandmandam 4y ago
  I think OP's point is that since no heads will roll for this, despite it being known that this would happen sooner or later, it will keep happening in other local areas. If Northern Southern were to feel this incident in their pocket book, they might stop lobbying to gut safety regulations... However, it's very clear that neither legislative, judicial, executive or media positions give a flying fuck to stop this; in fact, they'll go to extreme lengths such as breaking strikes and media coordination to keep the status quo. So it will happen again, and again, until one day it actually does fuck up a major city - and even then, the people responsible will probably be insulated from consequences.
  - matt123456789 4y ago
    Yeah, on rereading, it seems like you are spot on. I edited my comment to reflect that.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  There were no hospitalizations reported and the chemicals released are not really carcinogens. The risk from this particular chemical spill was acute injury, but fortunately that was avoided.
  - lordnacho 4y ago
    Isn't vinyl chloride a carcinogen?
    - LarryMullins 4y ago
      Hell yes, and burning it is sure to create dioxins which are carcinogenic too.
      - xadhominemx 4y ago
        You can get dioxins when burning vinyl chloride polymers (“poly vinyl chloride”), but not the vinyl chloride monomer, if my chemistry degree serves me correctly.
        LarryMullins 4y ago
        [flagged]
        xadhominemx 4y ago
        Well like I said I used to be a chemist so I was exposed to organic vapors every day. if the dioxins are there they will be very easy to measure.
        LarryMullins 4y ago
        For starters, you could acknowledge that a train explosion is already well outside normal lab conditions for vinyl chloride. Don't pretend you know what compounds were formed in this accident. Modeling this incident as a low exposure (see: your dismissal of the carcinogenic nature of vinyl chloride) to the pure substance is absurd. Put your life where your mouth is and go live there.
- bsenftner 4y ago
  >The worst part of this disaster ...is the fact that nothing will change, and it is just a matter of time before this happens again, and again, and again. Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness. It may as well not exist, except for all the harm that will continue for decades. But the executives and shareholders have record profits, so everything is fantastic, absolutely no reason to change.
  - parasubvert 4y ago
    These sorts of accidents do not happen that often relative to the quantity of freight that moves. Put any economic system underneath the rail (or trucks) you want, accidents will still happen, as the demand for dangerous goods doesn't just evaporate. It requires attention to detail combined with political will to improve safety.
  - kodah 4y ago
    > Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness The national media isn't very good at representing issues outside of major cities. Events like this are largely unimportant to people living in the places they sell their stories to. In a way, you're not asking the media to change, you're asking Americans to care about those areas at all.
    - yunwal 4y ago
      The Chinese balloons weren’t in a large metropolitan area. more likely explanation is that this story has a pro-labor narrative, and that’s not what media companies are paid to push.
      - jollofricepeas 4y ago
        Let’s be fair… The media chases clicks and attention. News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.
        4y ago
- mikewarot 4y ago
  According to [1] Phil Lewis on Twitter... "Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents who were ordered to evacuate their homes, or face death" Personally, I think $25,000 per person displaced would be a good start to making restitution. Anyone forced to move should receive at least triple the market rate price of their home/farm/etc. before the accident. Serious financial implications are the only thing that will cause behavior shift in large organizations. [1] https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424 https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424
  - Jcowell 4y ago
    > Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents I read this as $25,000 in total not per person.
    - mikewarot 4y ago
      Nobody would be that insulting, that would be a "Let them eat cake" moment Yet that's what they did.
marricks 4y ago
Watch them install eye monitoring equipment to make sure drivers are paying attention before they ever give a day of unplanned sick time.
djbusby 4y ago
The railroads have recently reported record profits. I have an idea how to pay for cleanup.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  .5% above inflation. They should still absolutely pay for everything, using a very liberal assessment of a model used to predict any plausible expenses for the next 1000 years converted to 2023 dollars. Today. Because it has to stop being the next person's problem.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    .5% above inflation for this one year. What about the past 50 years while their employee pay has flatlined and scheduling deteriorated to the point that employees cannot have a life outside work?
    - iinnPP 4y ago
      You said recent. The employees are reported to have received a 14% raise recently. The record profits were 7% higher than 2021 with inflation for the same period at 6.5%. All of this is in the linked article. I am not defending the actions. I have noted a problem with the term "record profits" and engage where possible to limit what I see as a problem with that language. I'm not arguing any of your points outside of the use of the term record profits without any hard numbers. The reasoning being that record profits is the goal and normal as far as I'm concerned. A 0.5% increases should be clearly labeled due to the loaded nature of the term( In my opinion.)
themitigating 4y ago
How do you know this is due to overworked employees?
- paulmd 4y ago
  It's not, per se. It's due to rail lines preferring to run longer trains with lower staffing, and the long trains are less safe and operate much closer and even past the physical safety limits of the train hardware and rail infrastructure. These are relatively recent changes, not something that's been this way for a long time. It's part of the changeover to "precision scheduled railroad" as the rail lines like to call it. Rail workers being overworked is just another aspect of the this change. The rail companies don't want to maintain FTEs and have cut that to the point where people can't even get unpaid days off scheduled, and are being asked to run schedules without concern to sleep etc. And that has led to some other accidents already. But the core of the issue is this change to precision-scheduled-railroad, and the longer trains / reduced staffing that go along with it.
toss1 4y ago
>>railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year Yup. What is worse is that, from what I've read, this could have been prevented by simply observing the train earlier in its journey. The cause is initially thought to be a problem with one of the wheelsets, and there was apparently a video of it going through a town 20 miles earlier shedding a shower of sparks. Simply rigging up a series of cameras on the train for the engineer/driver to observe, and they could have stopped in time to drop the failing car for repair. Instead, they drove on blindly, straight to the inevitable wreck. Of course, what will then happen is that rail crews will be pressured to ignore "minor" problems seen on the videos, and then get blamed when the inevitable happens.
- paulmd 4y ago
  They did observe it actually - they have "hotbox cameras" that watch for hot axles. They are often miscalibrated or erroneous so they ignored it and let it proceed to the next camera, which also confirmed it, but by that point it was too late. The brakes are no longer sufficient to stop trains that long/heavy and the derailleurs can no longer derail trains this long/heavy safely. So by the second camera it was too late. Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution? Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office. They aren't actually motivated by the dead kids in the same way, it's more of an abstract, purely theoretical motivation, like loving your neighbor, or caring for the least among us. "Revealed preference" is the economic term for it. Anyway, we have to get back to ongoing coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers. (and fyi if anything as of a couple days ago biden/buttigieg (omg its MAYOR PETE FROM WEST BEND INDIANA!!!) were looking at further loosening of safety regulations and brake requirements... as is every single republican.)
dylan604 4y ago
Yes, it's such an obvious thing that it has been used in plots for movies/books for a long long time. Maybe the particular thing that causes the derailment or the specific thing that released is slightly different, but it's not like nobody has ever thought this as idea. In fact, some version of the plot that proves the idea is so believable is that they stage an accident and tell people it is hazardous to get people to evacuate to not see what's really going on. The fact that someone could say this was unforeseen with a straight face should immediately put them in the nominees for whatever acting award show of your choice.
- lm28469 4y ago
  You couldn't be closer from the truth with your example: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-white-noise/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailm...
  - rbanffy 4y ago
    Maybe there will be a UFO landing nearby and they needed to evacuate the area…
- soco 4y ago
  There's this movie "White noise" (2022) with Adam Driver, which depicts almost this incident. And I'm sure there are more such movies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)
  - jhpaul 4y ago
    I watched this film last night and hadn't seen the news in a couple days. Was strange to wake up to this coverage
hn92726819 4y ago
> A wake up call, you say? Yes...? A wake up call is for people who don't realize something is a big deal. In quite literally every wake up call situation, someone thinks it's obvious. "Wake up" meaning "it's been in front of you this whole time, and you can't see it". The article is not targeting railroad workers, its for lawmakers, constituents, or anyone who will listen and Isn't thinking about it
- uoaei 4y ago
  The point being made above is, I believe, that the wake-up call was two months ago during the rail strike. It is all too clear to those who were paying attention during the strike how hard the Biden admin tried to suppress any public understanding about the actual concerns of the rail workers.
rhaway84773 4y ago
It’s not even that expensive to make the changes needed to prevent such disasters.

matt123456789 4y ago

The worst part of this disaster in particular is the entirely local effects including cancer, pain, suffering, and death caused by the release of these chemicals. But yes, the worst part of this pattern of behavior from the US leadership is that catastrophes like this will continue to happen all over.

mandmandam 4y ago
I think OP's point is that since no heads will roll for this, despite it being known that this would happen sooner or later, it will keep happening in other local areas. If Northern Southern were to feel this incident in their pocket book, they might stop lobbying to gut safety regulations... However, it's very clear that neither legislative, judicial, executive or media positions give a flying fuck to stop this; in fact, they'll go to extreme lengths such as breaking strikes and media coordination to keep the status quo. So it will happen again, and again, until one day it actually does fuck up a major city - and even then, the people responsible will probably be insulated from consequences.
- matt123456789 4y ago
  Yeah, on rereading, it seems like you are spot on. I edited my comment to reflect that.
xadhominemx 4y ago
There were no hospitalizations reported and the chemicals released are not really carcinogens. The risk from this particular chemical spill was acute injury, but fortunately that was avoided.
- lordnacho 4y ago
  Isn't vinyl chloride a carcinogen?
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    Hell yes, and burning it is sure to create dioxins which are carcinogenic too.
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      You can get dioxins when burning vinyl chloride polymers (“poly vinyl chloride”), but not the vinyl chloride monomer, if my chemistry degree serves me correctly.
      - LarryMullins 4y ago
        [flagged]
        xadhominemx 4y ago
        Well like I said I used to be a chemist so I was exposed to organic vapors every day. if the dioxins are there they will be very easy to measure.
        LarryMullins 4y ago
        For starters, you could acknowledge that a train explosion is already well outside normal lab conditions for vinyl chloride. Don't pretend you know what compounds were formed in this accident. Modeling this incident as a low exposure (see: your dismissal of the carcinogenic nature of vinyl chloride) to the pure substance is absurd. Put your life where your mouth is and go live there.
bsenftner 4y ago
>The worst part of this disaster ...is the fact that nothing will change, and it is just a matter of time before this happens again, and again, and again. Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness. It may as well not exist, except for all the harm that will continue for decades. But the executives and shareholders have record profits, so everything is fantastic, absolutely no reason to change.
- parasubvert 4y ago
  These sorts of accidents do not happen that often relative to the quantity of freight that moves. Put any economic system underneath the rail (or trucks) you want, accidents will still happen, as the demand for dangerous goods doesn't just evaporate. It requires attention to detail combined with political will to improve safety.
- kodah 4y ago
  > Our media barely report, and then under report the seriousness The national media isn't very good at representing issues outside of major cities. Events like this are largely unimportant to people living in the places they sell their stories to. In a way, you're not asking the media to change, you're asking Americans to care about those areas at all.
  - yunwal 4y ago
    The Chinese balloons weren’t in a large metropolitan area. more likely explanation is that this story has a pro-labor narrative, and that’s not what media companies are paid to push.
    - jollofricepeas 4y ago
      Let’s be fair… The media chases clicks and attention. News reading Americans rather read about “Is it China or aliens?”, the war in Ukraine, earthquake in Middle East and the Super Bowl than small-town Ohio.
      - 4y ago
mikewarot 4y ago
According to [1] Phil Lewis on Twitter... "Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents who were ordered to evacuate their homes, or face death" Personally, I think $25,000 per person displaced would be a good start to making restitution. Anyone forced to move should receive at least triple the market rate price of their home/farm/etc. before the accident. Serious financial implications are the only thing that will cause behavior shift in large organizations. [1] https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424 https://twitter.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/1624749208174567424
- Jcowell 4y ago
  > Norfolk Southern, the railway company responsible for an apocalyptic plume of gas rose over East Palestine, Ohio, has offered a $25,000 donation to assist the area’s nearly 5,000 residents I read this as $25,000 in total not per person.
  - mikewarot 4y ago
    Nobody would be that insulting, that would be a "Let them eat cake" moment Yet that's what they did.

marricks 4y ago

Watch them install eye monitoring equipment to make sure drivers are paying attention before they ever give a day of unplanned sick time.

djbusby 4y ago

The railroads have recently reported record profits. I have an idea how to pay for cleanup.

iinnPP 4y ago
.5% above inflation. They should still absolutely pay for everything, using a very liberal assessment of a model used to predict any plausible expenses for the next 1000 years converted to 2023 dollars. Today. Because it has to stop being the next person's problem.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  .5% above inflation for this one year. What about the past 50 years while their employee pay has flatlined and scheduling deteriorated to the point that employees cannot have a life outside work?
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    You said recent. The employees are reported to have received a 14% raise recently. The record profits were 7% higher than 2021 with inflation for the same period at 6.5%. All of this is in the linked article. I am not defending the actions. I have noted a problem with the term "record profits" and engage where possible to limit what I see as a problem with that language. I'm not arguing any of your points outside of the use of the term record profits without any hard numbers. The reasoning being that record profits is the goal and normal as far as I'm concerned. A 0.5% increases should be clearly labeled due to the loaded nature of the term( In my opinion.)

themitigating 4y ago

How do you know this is due to overworked employees?

paulmd 4y ago
It's not, per se. It's due to rail lines preferring to run longer trains with lower staffing, and the long trains are less safe and operate much closer and even past the physical safety limits of the train hardware and rail infrastructure. These are relatively recent changes, not something that's been this way for a long time. It's part of the changeover to "precision scheduled railroad" as the rail lines like to call it. Rail workers being overworked is just another aspect of the this change. The rail companies don't want to maintain FTEs and have cut that to the point where people can't even get unpaid days off scheduled, and are being asked to run schedules without concern to sleep etc. And that has led to some other accidents already. But the core of the issue is this change to precision-scheduled-railroad, and the longer trains / reduced staffing that go along with it.

toss1 4y ago

>>railroads will forgo necessary maintenance and infrastructure investments, continue to blame individual employees for the events, and reap record profits year over year Yup. What is worse is that, from what I've read, this could have been prevented by simply observing the train earlier in its journey. The cause is initially thought to be a problem with one of the wheelsets, and there was apparently a video of it going through a town 20 miles earlier shedding a shower of sparks. Simply rigging up a series of cameras on the train for the engineer/driver to observe, and they could have stopped in time to drop the failing car for repair. Instead, they drove on blindly, straight to the inevitable wreck. Of course, what will then happen is that rail crews will be pressured to ignore "minor" problems seen on the videos, and then get blamed when the inevitable happens.

paulmd 4y ago
They did observe it actually - they have "hotbox cameras" that watch for hot axles. They are often miscalibrated or erroneous so they ignored it and let it proceed to the next camera, which also confirmed it, but by that point it was too late. The brakes are no longer sufficient to stop trains that long/heavy and the derailleurs can no longer derail trains this long/heavy safely. So by the second camera it was too late. Like yeah you could pull the lever every time you see a potentially hot axle but that would send the trolley headed straight into norfolk southern's profit margin. It's really unforeseeable and there's definitely not a union that has been screaming about safety issues and was just slapped down a few months ago in bipartisan fashion, nothing that can be done about this says only nation where this happens regularly. Thoughts and prayers. /s Like, the people of ohio have made it real clear that being open for business is what they want politically. They definitely don't want the unions to score a win, even if it might increase the risk of their kids dying it's obviously worth it because people keep voting this way. There is a firm 50% of congress that is a guaranteed "fuck unions and fuck anything that threatens industry, we want jobs and we want em now" and the rest of the legislature is divided anyway. What do you do if you're democrats? Deathmatch SCOTUS over people who don't even want you to, and get your regulatory authority taken away entirely because the founders never said anything about trains in the constitution? Like, just name a single ohio republican who wouldn't have leapt on the "biden favors unions over america and christmas" two months ago. Complete loser of an issue politically, people want their amazon packages and any hint of a return to the supply-chain chaos of 2020 is gonna make people lose their shit. This is how people actually vote, dead kids sounds bad but threaten my amazon packages and people will line the fuck up to get you out of office. They aren't actually motivated by the dead kids in the same way, it's more of an abstract, purely theoretical motivation, like loving your neighbor, or caring for the least among us. "Revealed preference" is the economic term for it. Anyway, we have to get back to ongoing coverage of the war on LGBT, that's what plays with the voters in Ohio. Sorry about your kids, thoughts and prayers. (and fyi if anything as of a couple days ago biden/buttigieg (omg its MAYOR PETE FROM WEST BEND INDIANA!!!) were looking at further loosening of safety regulations and brake requirements... as is every single republican.)

dylan604 4y ago

Yes, it's such an obvious thing that it has been used in plots for movies/books for a long long time. Maybe the particular thing that causes the derailment or the specific thing that released is slightly different, but it's not like nobody has ever thought this as idea. In fact, some version of the plot that proves the idea is so believable is that they stage an accident and tell people it is hazardous to get people to evacuate to not see what's really going on. The fact that someone could say this was unforeseen with a straight face should immediately put them in the nominees for whatever acting award show of your choice.

lm28469 4y ago
You couldn't be closer from the truth with your example: https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-white-noise/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailm...
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Maybe there will be a UFO landing nearby and they needed to evacuate the area…
soco 4y ago
There's this movie "White noise" (2022) with Adam Driver, which depicts almost this incident. And I'm sure there are more such movies... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)
- jhpaul 4y ago
  I watched this film last night and hadn't seen the news in a couple days. Was strange to wake up to this coverage

hn92726819 4y ago

> A wake up call, you say? Yes...? A wake up call is for people who don't realize something is a big deal. In quite literally every wake up call situation, someone thinks it's obvious. "Wake up" meaning "it's been in front of you this whole time, and you can't see it". The article is not targeting railroad workers, its for lawmakers, constituents, or anyone who will listen and Isn't thinking about it

uoaei 4y ago
The point being made above is, I believe, that the wake-up call was two months ago during the rail strike. It is all too clear to those who were paying attention during the strike how hard the Biden admin tried to suppress any public understanding about the actual concerns of the rail workers.

rhaway84773 4y ago

It’s not even that expensive to make the changes needed to prevent such disasters.