17 ms·

Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

436 points by sebkomianos 4y ago

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940
- jonny_eh 4y ago
  “You’ve not heard about it”
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    The previous HN comments were also filled with “the media is not covering this!”. With the HN post linking to the Guardian and the top comment I saw at the time being a link to the NYTimes. There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a completely eyeball driven enterprise.
    - rhaway84773 4y ago
      I searched for this. There are 4 pieces in the NYTimes alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-palestine-ohio.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-... https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-derailment-fire.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemicals-evacuation.html?searchResultPosition=4 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic... https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
      - SamBam 4y ago
        So people keep pointing to NYTimes stories, but I go on the Time's site at least 2-3 times daily, spread throughout the day, and I still have not seen a single story on the Time's main page. I'm not going to call it "front page" now because there are around ~130 stories there. Not one of those 130 stories there currently cover this. Ctr-F "train", "Ohio", "Palestine" etc. In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutter reviews for kettles, "The Man Who Caught Marilyn Monroe’s Skirt on Film," "Where #VanLife meets #SkiBum," the size of the surf waves, etc etc etc, but nothing on the train derailment. Have these articles been showing up on the main page and I keep missing them? Or are they permanently buried in the "US News" section where I'm sure only a small fraction of Times digital readers ever turn to?
        kredd 4y ago
        To my understanding, a huge portion of NYT works on algorithms. "Not enough hits on the news? Probably others don't either, so no need to put on front page" kinda scenario. Which, I kinda understand. The other news are more... engaging. Balloons, super bowl, thousands of people dying from another environmental catastrophe in Turkey and etc. are more engaging in daily discussions, so other stories simply get buried.
        dashundchen 4y ago
        I definitely saw in the top headlines on NYTimes.com. Wouldn't be surprised if different layouts are served. The reviews and lifestyle/art definitely fell underneath the news of the train.
        rhaway84773 4y ago
        That basically shows a lack of interest from readers. The NYTimes publishes a newspaper worth of articles and opinion pieces daily. And then they add a whole bunch of videos, cooking stuff, reviews (wire cutter), sports (athletic) online. Most of it gets surfaced largely by algorithm. And it’s evident the algorithm is not tracking any interest from readers.
      - jp_nc 4y ago
        “Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an urgent evacuation notice on Sunday night to more than 500 people who had previously declined to leave their homes and were within a one-mile radius of the derailment site.”
    - XorNot 4y ago
      I would argue this is getting covered exactly the amount it should. Because everyone seems to know about it, and no one who thinks it should be covered more seems to have anything to add to it.
      - r85804306610 4y ago
        i personally want whoopi goldberg to go over the shipping manifest <https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%20PALESTINE%20-%20derail%20list%20Norfolk%20Southern%20document.pdf https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%...> during her day time show, and eli5 to her listeners what those various substances are, what their short and long term effect on the environment are, and specifically the effects on the various ohio river tributaries where EPA has already detected some of the contaminants. i know that's too much to ask, so a passing mention would be good enough. i /suspect/ people who think it should be covered more find the situation to be horrendous enough to warrant that kind of media reaction.
        flangola7 4y ago
        She should also mention the names of top executives at the company, the names of relevant officials, and how to contact all of them.
        XorNot 4y ago
        Sure but here's the problem: all of those chemicals are biodegradable. Most information about what is happening is basically "there was a large release of a non-environmentally persistent contaminant" which just plain isn't going to hit the fears right for people. Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly. Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal. Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like. [1] https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf
- yread 4y ago
  It's also on top of reddit for like 3rd day with very psy-opsy title
- irthomasthomas 4y ago
  22 hours ago - 217 comments 2 days ago - 1 comments 7 day ago - 0 comments 1 day ago - 0 comments 1 day ago - 0 comments 9 hours ago - 291 comments This event happened February 3rd. 11 DAYS AGO. Thanks for proving OPs point.
deleted 4y ago
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waldothedog 4y ago
This isn't too far from me. Curious to hear thoughts from folks with deeper backgrounds in chemistry than I have (high school).
- tomcam 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - bruce511 4y ago
    I am intrigued by your outrage (seriously). I'm curious to know what you are hoping the world's media will accomplish there? On the one hand train derailment, chemical fire, environmental damage - it makes for a story but really not a terribly interesting one (to me). It's certainly an unwelcome event, but there doesn't seem to be anything deeper than what you see on the surface. Is there a deeper story here? Is there some ongoing malfeasance that should be spotlighted? I completely understand that for those who live in East Palestine this may be a life altering event. But shitty events routinely happen to lots of people every day. I guess I'm missing what makes this special. Of course my sympathies are with those affected by this, I'm not heartless, but I'm (honestly) not sure what you hope the world's media will achieve.
    - ticviking 4y ago
      The TL;DR of the ongoing story is the train engineers tried to strike recently over these kinds of issues and our Congress stopped them from doing so. Now it’s an massive disaster that we were warned was coming and the basic measures to fix it(like hiring more engineers and letting them have sick days) won’t happen in a sane way.
      - boppo1 4y ago
        Yeah there's a lot of peop;e asking "why isn't everyone up in arms/hasn't this been all over the news?" The answer is democrats and republicans happily cosigned this check.
      - 4y ago
refuse 4y ago
I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things. If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time). I have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered. I'd wager they're getting something better than ratings out of this.
- cyanydeez 4y ago
  Because the guilty party are ad buyers.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    Don't think Norfolk Southern is a big ad buyer.
    - DaniloDias 4y ago
      [dead]
    - blockwriter 4y ago
      Berkshire Hathaway owns 14%, and BH definitely buys ads.
    - 7speter 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure the only way I know their name is from their commercials on CNN, tbh
- bsder 4y ago
  Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly. If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago. But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway342434 4y ago
[flagged]
thwoerui234324 4y ago
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steanne 4y ago
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-ohio-train-derailment https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-ohio-train-...
aphexddb 4y ago
Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910 https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910
- slabity 4y ago
  So this train was carrying all of these various chemicals, but it wasn't classified as a High-Hazard Flammable Train?
  - ticviking 4y ago
    Talk to your local train union guys sometime. That’s basically normal
ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
Does the NTSB look into train derailments? Would be interesting to see whether the systems engineering for trains hauling large quantities of industrial chemicals is on par with that of airlines. If not, it probably should be.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  There are defect detectors on rail lines, "hot box" detectors [1] [2], that are infrared detectors used to observe and report bearing failures on a train. My understanding of the situation is that with the current rail labor configuration, railroad workers are only permitted ~90 seconds to verify the operational capacity of the wheelset on a rail car vs a previous average of 3 minutes. Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]). High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box [3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721 https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading [5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-freight-railroad-strike/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... [7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railroad-earnings/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
ChuckMcM 4y ago
I explained to my sister that this was "Bhopal[1]" level bad and she didn't believe me because "If it was that bad the news would be covering it." Sigh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  How is it Bhopal-level bad, exactly? An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths occurred in Bhopal. How many have died in Ohio so far? Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.
  - sbaiddn 4y ago
    At least two.
    - fargle 4y ago
      actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature. Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.
      - sbaiddn 4y ago
        So I didnt know what to compare for the orders of magnitude. Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet). But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data. But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(
AtomicOrbital 4y ago
Evidently this briefly hit the mass tv news cycle then went silent... This deserves wide scale attention... Pollution and toxic destruction needs to trigger a commensurate fine both for clean up and punitive damages sufficient to motivate big business to proactively avoid these events Looks like media has been told to drop this story... Or even worse to self censor anything outside it's allowed news topic criteria
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  What media? I saw it on CNN today. Fox News's website has multiple stories about this from the last hour. The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)
  - ajsnigrutin 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - bathtub365 4y ago
      Which people?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    - belltaco 4y ago
      Trivially disproved. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/111lv6d/there_were_more_toxic_chemicals_on_train_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/111lv6d/there_were_mo...
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > today > last hour It happened a week and a half ago, so...
    - 4y ago
mc32 4y ago
[flagged]
- renewedrebecca 4y ago
  To be fair, Greta is a teenager who happens to live in Europe.
  - mc32 4y ago
    Granted, but she seems to be invested in our environmental causes and had opinions on the XL pipeline, among other things.
  - JadoJodo 4y ago
    Perhaps they meant Greta Van Susteren.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    One political side seems to think she's the spokesperson for the other political side.
    - mc32 4y ago
      Does she pick and choose what environmental causes are worthy of her attention?
      - seattle_spring 4y ago
        No idea. Why do you think anyone here would have a deep understanding of how she operates?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Probably because it happened to a village of 200 people in the relative middle of nowhere. Remember the Flint water crisis? That was a population-dense city, with multiple school districts all being poisoned by lead and legionnaires disease. Nobody cared about it until it was turned into a political negligence story, then it was all you could see on Fox and CNN... People just don't really care about this stuff. It's novel from a social media perspective (black plume of smoke occludes forested midwestern town!) but it's not like the media has any shortage of humanitarian crises to report on.
downvotetruth 4y ago
Its sad, it really is. The word of the conductor vs manager on how far to push it. Ultimately management has to accept the blame. Where was the Atlas robot(s) to do to pump & hose work for the possibly exploding tanks? But, odds are the phosgene & HCL killed the animals & that is not a long term problem. If the Ohio EPA gets any the settlement money out of this it would be better off going towards a frack water processing facility to handle all the radioactive slush going into the injection wells & winter road "salt" in that area that makes the whole Australian find the pellet story quaint.
renewedrebecca 4y ago
A thread from Mastodon, with a few pictures: https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/109848707066272168 https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/1098487070662...
- robertoandred 4y ago
  > The local police blew it up like a beached whale, now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em This is simply a set of lies.
  - KennyBlanken 4y ago
    It's a lot of hyperbole, but yes, a reporter was knocked to the ground and handcuffed face-down and dragged out of a press conference because he continued to quietly speak into his camera as the governor started speaking...at the opposite end of a gymnasium. He was trying to wrap things up and wasn't given the chance. https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrested-east-palestine-train-derailment-press-conference/95-ed78befd-f42c-42c8-bde4-6ede243f62fc https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrest... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-during-east-palestine-press-conference-released-expected-to-face-a-judge/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-du... etc. I'm sure, of course, that the police reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity. /s
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  > now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em Unless this poster can supply some corroborating information, or perhaps a scientific definition of "megatoxin," this is more noise than signal.
TheDudeMan 4y ago
This is fine but we can't have nuclear reactors.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  "Nuclear powerplants take too long to built, if we start building them now, it'll take around 10 years to get them to produce power, and by then we'll have better alternatives!" (this is what they were telling me in the 90s.... and 2000s... and 2010s... and are still telling me now...)
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  Or maybe neither are fine and we should stop making unnecessary shit?
  - Georgelemental 4y ago
    Do you think reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels is "unnecessary"? Because that can't be done without nuclear power
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      It's neither necessary nor sufficient. Nor is it even a good strategy.
- kube-system 4y ago
  There’s a couple just a few miles down the road from this derailment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_... And fun fact, this is also where the worlds first civilian nuclear power plant was built. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_St...
- tremon 4y ago
  Would you prefer that the people in charge of this rail line operate a nuclear power plant?
epakai 4y ago
Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or the government doesn't want me to know about a thing I know about. edit: please downvote my trash, the same as this article. Go find better reporting on this event to shove in front of everybody's eyeballs. (post title has since changed, see article for relevance)
- pessimizer 4y ago
  The person who wrote this article doesn't owe you anything. And they certainly didn't beg you to read this.
  - epakai 4y ago
    If they want to make false claims and not back them up then my two-cents is more than they deserve. This article does nothing to reinforce the headline. It's just a clickbait summary that leads to myself and others flaming the article rather than the kind of discussion that's worthwhile on HN.
  - naiwenwt 4y ago
    This feels like a reply in bad faith. The point that the parent comment is making is that the title of the article isn't convincing, it's just making a provocative statement with no backing.
- sebkomianos 4y ago
  Then maybe this isn't about you, specifically? How are the mainstream media dealing with it?
  - epakai 4y ago
    [dead]
clouddrover 4y ago
> you've not heard about it False. I have heard about it.
- sebkomianos 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - clouddrover 4y ago
    What is it about? Is it about trying to construct an incoherent false narrative that it is being covered up?
    - sebkomianos 4y ago
      No, it's about the story itself. If you see a news title reading "This happened there and you haven't heard about it" but you have actually heard about it, just move on. What's the point of saying "I have actually heard about it?".
      - clouddrover 4y ago
        No, the article is trying to construct the narrative that people haven't heard about the train derailment. That claim is in the article's headline. That claim is in article's the first paragraph. And that claim is false. The truth is it's received domestic media coverage and it's even received international media coverage. It's pointless to claim otherwise.
King-Aaron 4y ago
This was posted to reddit the other day: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/footage_on_the_ground_from_east_palestine_ohio/ https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/... The footage has a lot of NSFW language, so just watch out for that. Within that thread there's some good discussion about some of the compounds that are being released into the air, and it is indeed very grim. Interestingly here in Australia, I've heard about it a lot more in traditional media than my American friends seem to be hearing.
- zrobotics 4y ago
  God, that footage is grim. Every railroader I know (BNSF & UP) has been super vocal about the working conditions for years. I know a guy who left his engineer position with the BN just due to how much the schedule sucks, this guy took a ~50% pay cut simply because the schedule and working conditions are so bad. All of this is preventable, but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    > but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses. All companies will do that. The reason rail companies can do this so ruthlessly and recklessly is complete lack of competition and exceedingly generous industry deregulation.
    - deleted 4y ago
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- Tronno 4y ago
  This footage is of regular clouds, despite the breathless commentary in the video. Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/footage_on_the_ground_from_east_palestine_ohio/j8bd0ss/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/... The derailment is, no doubt, a serious public health crisis. However, it helps no-one to spread misleading videos and commentary. The wave of panic in the thread you posted is a stark example of "fake news" in action. A sign of the times, I suppose.
awb 4y ago
Eerily similar to the recent Netflix movie "White Noise": https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320 https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320
- sebkomianos 4y ago
  I can't stop thinking about this.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It's kinda sad how the best way to get attention for serious environmental policy issues these days is to make a screwball comedy starring some Hollywood heavy hitters playing against type.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  More than eerily, it's where the crash in that film was staged. https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-town-white-noise-train-crash-filming-location/ https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-to... > Last week, in an instance of life imitating art (or vice-versa), a train carrying harmful chemicals derailed in the very same town used as filming location for White Noise‘s on-screen crash. > One resident, Ben Ratner, had the crazy experience of not only having to evacuate his own home this week, but also acted out the scenario earlier as an extra in White Noise.
fortran77 4y ago
I see a million tweets on Twitter about this story that "I haven't heard of."
- sebkomianos 4y ago
  You are able to consume and digest millions of tweets? You are a wonder!
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  Let's not forget the dozens of Reddit posts that have made it to the front page of /r/all
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    This might be hard to believe, some people don't use reddit or twitter! You bet your ass I still heard about balloons, though.
    - seattle_spring 4y ago
      This might be hard to believe, but if events are at the top of the most used social media sites, it’d be pretty ignorant to think awareness is isolated in any way to social media. You’d have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of these derailments last week.
      - DangitBobby 4y ago
        And yet, many people are talking about how no one is talking about it, presumably because the news didn't reach below the rock they are apparently living under. Funny that.
        seattle_spring 4y ago
        Or, much more likely, they're mindlessly parroting "no one is talking about it" because headlines say "no one is talking about it" to drum up discussion and controversy.
thrill 4y ago
I sure have heard a lot about how I haven't heard about it.
avalys 4y ago
Oh, in fact, I have heard of it, and all the coverage I've heard is people grimly telling me about how horrible it is and how no one is covering how terribly horrible it is. What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. But hey, those ominous black clouds sure make for good clickbait.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  I submitted this the other day and it has abundant context: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-000-200000640.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-00...
- trynewideas 4y ago
  > What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-derailment/epa-says-contaminated-soil-was-covered-to-rebuild-rail-line/ https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de... > “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation to determine if the level of vinyl chloride that was present in the soil was going to create a potential contamination threat to surface or groundwater,” said Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice who has a Ph.D. in soil science and has been working for Bennett & Williams Environmental Consultants since 1986. > Weatherington-Rice said it’s possible vinyl chloride can travel through the ground as rain and precipitation move through the soil. It then has the potential to reach groundwater and eventually hit well fields. > “It’s not a question of whether it’s going to be an issue, it will be an issue, the question is how bad of an issue is it gonna be, where is it gonna go, and how long is it gonna take to get there, and what’s gonna happen when it gets there,” Weatherington-Rice said. https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-derailment/3-additional-chemicals-discovered-on-east-palestine-train-derailment/ https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de... > “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist. > Caggiano says ethylhexyl acrylate is especially worrisome. He says it’s a carcinogen and contact with it can cause burning and irritation in the skin and eyes. Breathing it in can irritate the nose and throat and cause coughing and shortness of breath. > Isobutylene is also known to cause dizziness and drowsiness when inhaled. > “I was surprised when they quickly told the people they can go back home, but then said if they feel like they want their homes tested they can have them tested. I would’ve far rather they did all the testing,” Caggiano said. > Caggiano says it’s possible some of these chemicals could still be present in homes and on objects until you clean them thoroughly. > “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Caggiano said. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-train-derailment-report-dead-fish-chickens-rcna70378 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-tr... > Andrew Whelton, a professor of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, said it's possible the burn created additional compounds the EPA might not be testing for. > "When they combusted the materials, they created other chemicals. The question is what did they create?" he said.
Johnny555 4y ago
One conspiracy theory floating around is that the UFO shoot downs came at a fortuitous time to keep this chemical spill off the front page.
- King-Aaron 4y ago
  Yes, and it's being mostly spread by people who are fixated on conspiracies.
  - DangitBobby 4y ago
    A very convenient line of reasoning for the conspirators ;) What would a legitimate cover up conspiracy actually look like?
  - iinnPP 4y ago
    Your comment itself is a conspiracy theory though.
    - King-Aaron 4y ago
      Conspeption
- eastbound 4y ago
  In a world where the Ukraine war ended Covid, balloons in the sky can certainly keep environmental catastrophes off the front page.
  - sebkomianos 4y ago
    Preach, brother.
  - op00to 4y ago
    It’s very interesting that news media can only handle one story at a time. I always thought they could do like 3-4 stories. Guess not.
sva_ 4y ago
Never heard about this in the past 1.5 hours...
perihelions 4y ago
Here's some data from the federal EPA (what they're measuring and where and what the numbers are), https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=15933 https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593... ("East Palestine Train Derailment")
- mortenjorck 4y ago
  This is what I was looking for, thank you. Lost in the profoundly unhelpful debate between "no one has heard of this" and "well I have" are the actual conditions in the community and whether the concentrations of either the initially released compound or the byproducts of the "controlled burn" are high enough to cause effects in humans. From the EPA link: > Feb. 13, 2023 Update Re-Entry air screenings are underway. Community air monitoring will continue operating 24 hours a day. As of yesterday evening, 291 homes have been screened. To date, no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride were identified for the completed screened homes. There are 181 homes that remain to be screened. Good news, to be sure, though this is only the very beginning of the process.
- perihelions 4y ago
  This is too confusing for me to parse: https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%20Derailment_Surface%20Water%20Analytical%20Results%20Summary_rev02.pdf https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%... Why is almost every number in sample column #2 and #3 exactly 100 times greater than in column #1? Aren't they all [μg/L]? There's a section on page 3 ("petroleum products") that's labelled as being both μg/L and mg/L.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  So the government investigates a big disaster caused in part by their actions and everything is within normal levels. A lot of time the same regulators will say the water is fine when brown stuff is coming out of the faucet.
andrewstuart 4y ago
I'd have run away fast and not come back.
taeric 4y ago
I'm curious what I'm supposed to be hearing about? If we know details, I'd love to hear them. If it is finger pointing and blaming... I'll wait for an investigation. If there has to be news coverage nonstop to get said investigation, go for it.
conspiranalyst 4y ago
"Hey, that's Ohio, that's a quarter!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0XU_3DlKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0XU_3DlKQ
barbazoo 4y ago
> Yesterday, DeWine added it’s “very understandable” that residents might want their homes tested before reentering. The state says Norfolk Southern must pay for the cleanup costs, and that “the burden is upon them to assure the public that what they do everyday is safe.” What a shitty thing to say given that the public has no direct way to deny them what they do if they don't deem it safe.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  "Investigations are expensive and we will not show them the slightest mercy in asking the suspect to run their own."
s5300 4y ago
This is going to sound exceptionally crass… But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river. But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives. How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking. There is none. That generation simply has to die out, and I very truly hope that most of their children are able to make it out to greener pastures & receive some form of education that may lead them to stop voting for the absolute sociopaths that peddle policies making large-scale environmental disasters a possibility. I unfortunately have the personal experience of knowing not very many people get the opportunities to GTFO this area into greener pastures. I don’t know what to feel other than deep & genuine sadness - there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help the fact, & now that I’m a couple thousand miles away, I just delusionally hope that things are getting better while I’m gone. But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen Spewing outright hatred & death threats to their fellow countrymen who try to tell them there may be a path to a better life, the ability to make meaningful change. They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago. Some of them, a few I’ve already personally seen, will have the realization. But it’s far too late. The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being. I can only hope they have the humility to tell the younger people they know that they were dead wrong, & that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD) /endddrunkrant
wnevets 4y ago
I got to know, do the pro nuclear crowd really want to live down wind of a nuclear power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?
- alanbernstein 4y ago
  I got to know, do the pro coal crowd really want to live down wind of a coal power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?
  - wnevets 4y ago
    Coal is dying on it's own, the free market has decided. I have zero problem living down wind of solar panels and wind turbines
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Coal is only "dying" in areas with access to cheap natural gas. It's currently not being replaced by renewables. Developing countries still build a lot of coal plants. Total global electricity generation from coal has nearly doubled since year 2000. In absolute terms the amount of new coal based electricity from coal increased by almost 5TWh from 2000 to 2021, about twice as much as wind+solar combined. (Also natural gas based electricity grew by 3.5TWh in the same period). As long as Russia is being sanctioned and Canada refuses to export their NG, I expect coal to continue to grow. Maybe someday in the future, wind+solar can provide stable electricity supply without relying on fossil fuels for the non-windy cloudy days (and nights). Like nuclear has been able to since the 70s. Nobody knows exactly when, though. But simply based on the mining capacity of critical minerals, it's really unlikely to happen within 20 years at a large scale. The world is simply not planning enough mines.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    The 'pro nuclear' crowd that say idiotic shit like this are the pro coal crowd.
remote_phone 4y ago
It’s funny how much coverage rich people in jets get, but this destructions of the lives of tens of thousands from an environmental catastrophe gets very little media coverage and outrage. This should never have happened and tens of thousands will die from the after effects. It’s disgusting.
asix66 4y ago
Holy crap. Is this a real life version of the film White Noise[0]? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)
bfrog 4y ago
This really should be part of the EPA doing an honest and thorough scientific investigation.
trenning 4y ago
April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends. A lot of armchair experts on here wrote him off when it was posted to hn. I worked with a former locomotive engineer at the time who echoed the concerns reported here. He left the industry after about 10 years because of the grueling schedule and conditions. It is interesting and alarming how it is essentially an open secret among industry workers that trains are run such that they are always in an elevated risk of derailment and danger. https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-people-are-leaving/ https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-pe...
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  >April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends. It's not just purely length. A long train can easily have mountains in between the ends.
- gorgoiler 4y ago
  These trains are over 3 miles long. This is to amortise the overhead of staffing? The locomotives and their cost scale linearly with the train, but the engineers do not?
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    that's part of it but not the main reason. the main reason is that if you make the cargo train too big to fit into the pull off on single tracked rail, then passenger trains have to yield to the cargo trains.
    - tremon 4y ago
      I have a grudging admiration for the sociopath that came up with that solution. Still, it has an easy fix: make it illegal to run a train that does not fit into the pull off.
creato 4y ago
On my mainstream media outlet of choice, I’m pretty sure there has been a front page headline about the derailment at least half of the days since it occurred. This “quietly” “they don’t want you to know” meme is just bullshit superiority cynicism and/or clickbait.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  Did they mention the president's recent strikebreaking? https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden-unions-freight-railroads-averted-strike https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden... I'm guessing they didn't.
- iinnPP 4y ago
  The story here is less about the train and more about the lack of response. Which is why it took a while to get where it is. People said it was unsafe. Officials disagreed. Proof is provided. Nobody has pie on their face. The story is about a lack of pie.
thepasswordis 4y ago
To those in the meta talking about how people are talking about this: congratulations on being extremely online. As of now: https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 2 results) https://www.foxnews.com/ https://www.foxnews.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 1 result / 'trump' 2 results) https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 4 results) https://www.msnbc.com/ https://www.msnbc.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 2 results / 'trump' 9 results!)
- vGPU 4y ago
  It almost feels like the bots are out in force to gaslight us. I’ve seen very little coverage of the topic and didn’t find out about it until several days after it happened, and yet almost every single comment on these threads is “everyone knows, shut up already, oh look ufo/drumpf/football”.
foogazi 4y ago
I saw pictures on reddit and was surprised I haven’t seem more coverage of it in major news outlets
euroderf 4y ago
If this had happened in the USSR, we would have blamed it on an an irretrievably broken economic system and an utterly corrupt political system. So how about that USA huh.

436 points by sebkomianos 4y ago

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34772687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34759611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34676114 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34762965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34770772 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34783940

jonny_eh 4y ago
“You’ve not heard about it”
- rhaway84773 4y ago
  The previous HN comments were also filled with “the media is not covering this!”. With the HN post linking to the Guardian and the top comment I saw at the time being a link to the NYTimes. There may be legitimate arguments about whether it should get more coverage relative to other news, but it isn’t a conspiracy. It’s simple. People don’t want read/hear about this stuff in the US and US news, unfortunately, is a completely eyeball driven enterprise.
  - rhaway84773 4y ago
    I searched for this. There are 4 pieces in the NYTimes alone. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-palestine-ohio.html?searchResultPosition=3 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/train-derailment-fire-... https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-derailment-fire.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000008756189/ohio-train-... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemicals-evacuation.html?searchResultPosition=4 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/06/us/ohio-derailment-chemic... https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?searchResultPosition=2 https://www.nytimes.com/article/ohio-train-derailment.html?s...
    - SamBam 4y ago
      So people keep pointing to NYTimes stories, but I go on the Time's site at least 2-3 times daily, spread throughout the day, and I still have not seen a single story on the Time's main page. I'm not going to call it "front page" now because there are around ~130 stories there. Not one of those 130 stories there currently cover this. Ctr-F "train", "Ohio", "Palestine" etc. In those 130 articles there are the Wirecutter reviews for kettles, "The Man Who Caught Marilyn Monroe’s Skirt on Film," "Where #VanLife meets #SkiBum," the size of the surf waves, etc etc etc, but nothing on the train derailment. Have these articles been showing up on the main page and I keep missing them? Or are they permanently buried in the "US News" section where I'm sure only a small fraction of Times digital readers ever turn to?
      - kredd 4y ago
        To my understanding, a huge portion of NYT works on algorithms. "Not enough hits on the news? Probably others don't either, so no need to put on front page" kinda scenario. Which, I kinda understand. The other news are more... engaging. Balloons, super bowl, thousands of people dying from another environmental catastrophe in Turkey and etc. are more engaging in daily discussions, so other stories simply get buried.
      - dashundchen 4y ago
        I definitely saw in the top headlines on NYTimes.com. Wouldn't be surprised if different layouts are served. The reviews and lifestyle/art definitely fell underneath the news of the train.
      - rhaway84773 4y ago
        That basically shows a lack of interest from readers. The NYTimes publishes a newspaper worth of articles and opinion pieces daily. And then they add a whole bunch of videos, cooking stuff, reviews (wire cutter), sports (athletic) online. Most of it gets surfaced largely by algorithm. And it’s evident the algorithm is not tracking any interest from readers.
    - jp_nc 4y ago
      “Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio issued an urgent evacuation notice on Sunday night to more than 500 people who had previously declined to leave their homes and were within a one-mile radius of the derailment site.”
  - XorNot 4y ago
    I would argue this is getting covered exactly the amount it should. Because everyone seems to know about it, and no one who thinks it should be covered more seems to have anything to add to it.
    - r85804306610 4y ago
      i personally want whoopi goldberg to go over the shipping manifest <https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%20PALESTINE%20-%20derail%20list%20Norfolk%20Southern%20document.pdf https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%...> during her day time show, and eli5 to her listeners what those various substances are, what their short and long term effect on the environment are, and specifically the effects on the various ohio river tributaries where EPA has already detected some of the contaminants. i know that's too much to ask, so a passing mention would be good enough. i /suspect/ people who think it should be covered more find the situation to be horrendous enough to warrant that kind of media reaction.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        She should also mention the names of top executives at the company, the names of relevant officials, and how to contact all of them.
      - XorNot 4y ago
        Sure but here's the problem: all of those chemicals are biodegradable. Most information about what is happening is basically "there was a large release of a non-environmentally persistent contaminant" which just plain isn't going to hit the fears right for people. Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly. Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal. Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like. [1] https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf
yread 4y ago
It's also on top of reddit for like 3rd day with very psy-opsy title
irthomasthomas 4y ago
22 hours ago - 217 comments 2 days ago - 1 comments 7 day ago - 0 comments 1 day ago - 0 comments 1 day ago - 0 comments 9 hours ago - 291 comments This event happened February 3rd. 11 DAYS AGO. Thanks for proving OPs point.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

waldothedog 4y ago

This isn't too far from me. Curious to hear thoughts from folks with deeper backgrounds in chemistry than I have (high school).

tomcam 4y ago
[flagged]
- bruce511 4y ago
  I am intrigued by your outrage (seriously). I'm curious to know what you are hoping the world's media will accomplish there? On the one hand train derailment, chemical fire, environmental damage - it makes for a story but really not a terribly interesting one (to me). It's certainly an unwelcome event, but there doesn't seem to be anything deeper than what you see on the surface. Is there a deeper story here? Is there some ongoing malfeasance that should be spotlighted? I completely understand that for those who live in East Palestine this may be a life altering event. But shitty events routinely happen to lots of people every day. I guess I'm missing what makes this special. Of course my sympathies are with those affected by this, I'm not heartless, but I'm (honestly) not sure what you hope the world's media will achieve.
  - ticviking 4y ago
    The TL;DR of the ongoing story is the train engineers tried to strike recently over these kinds of issues and our Congress stopped them from doing so. Now it’s an massive disaster that we were warned was coming and the basic measures to fix it(like hiring more engineers and letting them have sick days) won’t happen in a sane way.
    - boppo1 4y ago
      Yeah there's a lot of peop;e asking "why isn't everyone up in arms/hasn't this been all over the news?" The answer is democrats and republicans happily cosigned this check.
    - 4y ago

refuse 4y ago

I've heard about this, but it is surprising how little coverage it gets compared to other things. If you were to tally up how much airtime each news story gets, plotted against the general tone of the coverage, you'd probably come up with something resembling the news room agenda (you'd also have to weigh it against other stories developing at around the same time). I have to wonder why a story of environmental disaster (and presumably, negligence) making a small town uninhabitable isn't being milked for every drop of sensation that can be mustered. I'd wager they're getting something better than ratings out of this.

cyanydeez 4y ago
Because the guilty party are ad buyers.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Don't think Norfolk Southern is a big ad buyer.
  - DaniloDias 4y ago
    [dead]
  - blockwriter 4y ago
    Berkshire Hathaway owns 14%, and BH definitely buys ads.
  - 7speter 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure the only way I know their name is from their commercials on CNN, tbh
bsder 4y ago
Because if the media starts covering it hard, way more than half the population of the US will plug their ears and start saying "LA LA LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" really loudly. If this gets coverage, suddenly lots of inconvenient questions start popping up around monopoly, safety regulations and OSHA, and union workers warning about this 2 months ago. But, hey, everybody got their Amazon packages by Christmas, so if a piece of shit town in Ohio has to pay the price that's just the way it goes, knowwhatimean?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

throwaway342434 4y ago

[flagged]

thwoerui234324 4y ago

[flagged]

steanne 4y ago

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-ohio-train-derailment https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/the-ohio-train-...

aphexddb 4y ago

Some of the best reporting on this with actual data is coming from social media (as usual), versus from official sources. Here is someone reviewing the manifest of chemicals and number of spilled train cars: https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910 https://www.tiktok.com/@nickdrom/video/7199486059212868910

slabity 4y ago
So this train was carrying all of these various chemicals, but it wasn't classified as a High-Hazard Flammable Train?
- ticviking 4y ago
  Talk to your local train union guys sometime. That’s basically normal

ravel-bar-foo 4y ago

Does the NTSB look into train derailments? Would be interesting to see whether the systems engineering for trains hauling large quantities of industrial chemicals is on par with that of airlines. If not, it probably should be.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
There are defect detectors on rail lines, "hot box" detectors [1] [2], that are infrared detectors used to observe and report bearing failures on a train. My understanding of the situation is that with the current rail labor configuration, railroad workers are only permitted ~90 seconds to verify the operational capacity of the wheelset on a rail car vs a previous average of 3 minutes. Also, more importantly, someone at a railroad indicated "crews are no longer notified of the defects. The dispatch makes that call and then notifies the crew", which means train operators might not even be aware they have a dangerous car in operation (and the data indicates a bearing can fail outright within minutes of being observed as being "hot" [3]). High level, this is a result of "Precision Railroading" [4], which is just a fancy term of running a railroad with just enough labor to continue to operate. Congress voted to prevent union railroad labor from striking [5], so what actions take place after this incident remain to be seen. The Purpose Of The System Is What It Does [6], and as designed, this system is configured to extract billions of dollars in profits from rail freight operations [7] while avoiding liability for any damages caused or labor costs that can be avoided. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defect_detector [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_box [3] https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721 https://doi.org/10.1080/23248378.2019.1636721 [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_railroading [5] https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-freight-railroad-strike/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/02/business/railway-labor-act-fr... [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha... [7] https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railroad-earnings/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/24/business/union-pacific-railro...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ChuckMcM 4y ago

I explained to my sister that this was "Bhopal[1]" level bad and she didn't believe me because "If it was that bad the news would be covering it." Sigh. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster

CamperBob2 4y ago
How is it Bhopal-level bad, exactly? An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths occurred in Bhopal. How many have died in Ohio so far? Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.
King-Aaron 4y ago
Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.
- sbaiddn 4y ago
  At least two.
  - fargle 4y ago
    actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature. Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.
    - sbaiddn 4y ago
      So I didnt know what to compare for the orders of magnitude. Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet). But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data. But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(

AtomicOrbital 4y ago

Evidently this briefly hit the mass tv news cycle then went silent... This deserves wide scale attention... Pollution and toxic destruction needs to trigger a commensurate fine both for clean up and punitive damages sufficient to motivate big business to proactively avoid these events Looks like media has been told to drop this story... Or even worse to self censor anything outside it's allowed news topic criteria

Rebelgecko 4y ago
What media? I saw it on CNN today. Fox News's website has multiple stories about this from the last hour. The only place where the train stuff seems underrepresented is on some of the big subreddits (which are echo chambers already, so not surprising)
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - bathtub365 4y ago
    Which people?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - belltaco 4y ago
    Trivially disproved. https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/111lv6d/there_were_more_toxic_chemicals_on_train_that/ https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/111lv6d/there_were_mo...
- Izkata 4y ago
  > today > last hour It happened a week and a half ago, so...
  - 4y ago

mc32 4y ago

[flagged]

renewedrebecca 4y ago
To be fair, Greta is a teenager who happens to live in Europe.
- mc32 4y ago
  Granted, but she seems to be invested in our environmental causes and had opinions on the XL pipeline, among other things.
- JadoJodo 4y ago
  Perhaps they meant Greta Van Susteren.
- seattle_spring 4y ago
  One political side seems to think she's the spokesperson for the other political side.
  - mc32 4y ago
    Does she pick and choose what environmental causes are worthy of her attention?
    - seattle_spring 4y ago
      No idea. Why do you think anyone here would have a deep understanding of how she operates?
smoldesu 4y ago
Probably because it happened to a village of 200 people in the relative middle of nowhere. Remember the Flint water crisis? That was a population-dense city, with multiple school districts all being poisoned by lead and legionnaires disease. Nobody cared about it until it was turned into a political negligence story, then it was all you could see on Fox and CNN... People just don't really care about this stuff. It's novel from a social media perspective (black plume of smoke occludes forested midwestern town!) but it's not like the media has any shortage of humanitarian crises to report on.

downvotetruth 4y ago

Its sad, it really is. The word of the conductor vs manager on how far to push it. Ultimately management has to accept the blame. Where was the Atlas robot(s) to do to pump & hose work for the possibly exploding tanks? But, odds are the phosgene & HCL killed the animals & that is not a long term problem. If the Ohio EPA gets any the settlement money out of this it would be better off going towards a frack water processing facility to handle all the radioactive slush going into the injection wells & winter road "salt" in that area that makes the whole Australian find the pellet story quaint.

renewedrebecca 4y ago

A thread from Mastodon, with a few pictures: https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/109848707066272168 https://oldbytes.space/@swordsjew@mstdn.social/1098487070662...

robertoandred 4y ago
> The local police blew it up like a beached whale, now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em This is simply a set of lies.
- KennyBlanken 4y ago
  It's a lot of hyperbole, but yes, a reporter was knocked to the ground and handcuffed face-down and dragged out of a press conference because he continued to quietly speak into his camera as the governor started speaking...at the opposite end of a gymnasium. He was trying to wrap things up and wasn't given the chance. https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrested-east-palestine-train-derailment-press-conference/95-ed78befd-f42c-42c8-bde4-6ede243f62fc https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/local/ohio/reporter-arrest... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-during-east-palestine-press-conference-released-expected-to-face-a-judge/ https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/reporter-arrested-du... etc. I'm sure, of course, that the police reaction had nothing whatsoever to do with his ethnicity. /s
mortenjorck 4y ago
> now megatoxins are Chernobyling Ohio and there's a news blackout and the police are beating reporters and camera people and dragging em Unless this poster can supply some corroborating information, or perhaps a scientific definition of "megatoxin," this is more noise than signal.

TheDudeMan 4y ago

This is fine but we can't have nuclear reactors.

ajsnigrutin 4y ago
"Nuclear powerplants take too long to built, if we start building them now, it'll take around 10 years to get them to produce power, and by then we'll have better alternatives!" (this is what they were telling me in the 90s.... and 2000s... and 2010s... and are still telling me now...)
Schroedingersat 4y ago
Or maybe neither are fine and we should stop making unnecessary shit?
- Georgelemental 4y ago
  Do you think reducing our reliance on burning fossil fuels is "unnecessary"? Because that can't be done without nuclear power
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    It's neither necessary nor sufficient. Nor is it even a good strategy.
kube-system 4y ago
There’s a couple just a few miles down the road from this derailment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_Valley_Nuclear_Power_... And fun fact, this is also where the worlds first civilian nuclear power plant was built. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Station https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_St...
tremon 4y ago
Would you prefer that the people in charge of this rail line operate a nuclear power plant?

epakai 4y ago

Frankly getting tired of hearing about how I haven't heard about it, and nobody wants me to hear about it. If you want to write about news, write about it. If you want to point out instances of news media not covering this story where they might have covered other stories go for it, cite instances. All I've been convinced of so far is some people have an axe to grind, and part of their narrative is how the media or the government doesn't want me to know about a thing I know about. edit: please downvote my trash, the same as this article. Go find better reporting on this event to shove in front of everybody's eyeballs. (post title has since changed, see article for relevance)

pessimizer 4y ago
The person who wrote this article doesn't owe you anything. And they certainly didn't beg you to read this.
- epakai 4y ago
  If they want to make false claims and not back them up then my two-cents is more than they deserve. This article does nothing to reinforce the headline. It's just a clickbait summary that leads to myself and others flaming the article rather than the kind of discussion that's worthwhile on HN.
- naiwenwt 4y ago
  This feels like a reply in bad faith. The point that the parent comment is making is that the title of the article isn't convincing, it's just making a provocative statement with no backing.
sebkomianos 4y ago
Then maybe this isn't about you, specifically? How are the mainstream media dealing with it?
- epakai 4y ago
  [dead]

clouddrover 4y ago

> you've not heard about it False. I have heard about it.

sebkomianos 4y ago
[flagged]
- clouddrover 4y ago
  What is it about? Is it about trying to construct an incoherent false narrative that it is being covered up?
  - sebkomianos 4y ago
    No, it's about the story itself. If you see a news title reading "This happened there and you haven't heard about it" but you have actually heard about it, just move on. What's the point of saying "I have actually heard about it?".
    - clouddrover 4y ago
      No, the article is trying to construct the narrative that people haven't heard about the train derailment. That claim is in the article's headline. That claim is in article's the first paragraph. And that claim is false. The truth is it's received domestic media coverage and it's even received international media coverage. It's pointless to claim otherwise.

King-Aaron 4y ago

This was posted to reddit the other day: https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/footage_on_the_ground_from_east_palestine_ohio/ https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/... The footage has a lot of NSFW language, so just watch out for that. Within that thread there's some good discussion about some of the compounds that are being released into the air, and it is indeed very grim. Interestingly here in Australia, I've heard about it a lot more in traditional media than my American friends seem to be hearing.

zrobotics 4y ago
God, that footage is grim. Every railroader I know (BNSF & UP) has been super vocal about the working conditions for years. I know a guy who left his engineer position with the BN just due to how much the schedule sucks, this guy took a ~50% pay cut simply because the schedule and working conditions are so bad. All of this is preventable, but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses.
- akira2501 4y ago
  > but the railroads would rather chase higher profits and cut down on salary expenses. All companies will do that. The reason rail companies can do this so ruthlessly and recklessly is complete lack of competition and exceedingly generous industry deregulation.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Tronno 4y ago
This footage is of regular clouds, despite the breathless commentary in the video. Details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/footage_on_the_ground_from_east_palestine_ohio/j8bd0ss/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/110nlai/... The derailment is, no doubt, a serious public health crisis. However, it helps no-one to spread misleading videos and commentary. The wave of panic in the thread you posted is a stark example of "fake news" in action. A sign of the times, I suppose.

awb 4y ago

Eerily similar to the recent Netflix movie "White Noise": https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320 https://www.netflix.com/title/81317320

sebkomianos 4y ago
I can't stop thinking about this.
anigbrowl 4y ago
It's kinda sad how the best way to get attention for serious environmental policy issues these days is to make a screwball comedy starring some Hollywood heavy hitters playing against type.
zimpenfish 4y ago
More than eerily, it's where the crash in that film was staged. https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-town-white-noise-train-crash-filming-location/ https://decider.com/2023/02/13/train-derailment-ohio-same-to... > Last week, in an instance of life imitating art (or vice-versa), a train carrying harmful chemicals derailed in the very same town used as filming location for White Noise‘s on-screen crash. > One resident, Ben Ratner, had the crazy experience of not only having to evacuate his own home this week, but also acted out the scenario earlier as an extra in White Noise.

fortran77 4y ago

I see a million tweets on Twitter about this story that "I haven't heard of."

sebkomianos 4y ago
You are able to consume and digest millions of tweets? You are a wonder!
seattle_spring 4y ago
Let's not forget the dozens of Reddit posts that have made it to the front page of /r/all
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  This might be hard to believe, some people don't use reddit or twitter! You bet your ass I still heard about balloons, though.
  - seattle_spring 4y ago
    This might be hard to believe, but if events are at the top of the most used social media sites, it’d be pretty ignorant to think awareness is isolated in any way to social media. You’d have to have been living under a rock to not have heard of these derailments last week.
    - DangitBobby 4y ago
      And yet, many people are talking about how no one is talking about it, presumably because the news didn't reach below the rock they are apparently living under. Funny that.
      - seattle_spring 4y ago
        Or, much more likely, they're mindlessly parroting "no one is talking about it" because headlines say "no one is talking about it" to drum up discussion and controversy.

thrill 4y ago

I sure have heard a lot about how I haven't heard about it.

avalys 4y ago

Oh, in fact, I have heard of it, and all the coverage I've heard is people grimly telling me about how horrible it is and how no one is covering how terribly horrible it is. What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. But hey, those ominous black clouds sure make for good clickbait.

anigbrowl 4y ago
I submitted this the other day and it has abundant context: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-000-200000640.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-00...
trynewideas 4y ago
> What I haven't seen is any actual reporting. You know, talking to an expert, someone who has any actual knowledge about what steps are being taken, what the threat is, what steps should be taken but aren't, etc. https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-derailment/epa-says-contaminated-soil-was-covered-to-rebuild-rail-line/ https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de... > “I think it was not in the best interest of human health and welfare and the environment to simply cover it up and keep going without at least a preliminary evaluation to determine if the level of vinyl chloride that was present in the soil was going to create a potential contamination threat to surface or groundwater,” said Dr. Julie Weatherington-Rice who has a Ph.D. in soil science and has been working for Bennett & Williams Environmental Consultants since 1986. > Weatherington-Rice said it’s possible vinyl chloride can travel through the ground as rain and precipitation move through the soil. It then has the potential to reach groundwater and eventually hit well fields. > “It’s not a question of whether it’s going to be an issue, it will be an issue, the question is how bad of an issue is it gonna be, where is it gonna go, and how long is it gonna take to get there, and what’s gonna happen when it gets there,” Weatherington-Rice said. https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-derailment/3-additional-chemicals-discovered-on-east-palestine-train-derailment/ https://www.wkbn.com/news/local-news/east-palestine-train-de... > “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” said Sil Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist. > Caggiano says ethylhexyl acrylate is especially worrisome. He says it’s a carcinogen and contact with it can cause burning and irritation in the skin and eyes. Breathing it in can irritate the nose and throat and cause coughing and shortness of breath. > Isobutylene is also known to cause dizziness and drowsiness when inhaled. > “I was surprised when they quickly told the people they can go back home, but then said if they feel like they want their homes tested they can have them tested. I would’ve far rather they did all the testing,” Caggiano said. > Caggiano says it’s possible some of these chemicals could still be present in homes and on objects until you clean them thoroughly. > “There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,” Caggiano said. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-train-derailment-report-dead-fish-chickens-rcna70378 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/residents-ohio-tr... > Andrew Whelton, a professor of environmental and ecological engineering at Purdue University, said it's possible the burn created additional compounds the EPA might not be testing for. > "When they combusted the materials, they created other chemicals. The question is what did they create?" he said.

Johnny555 4y ago

One conspiracy theory floating around is that the UFO shoot downs came at a fortuitous time to keep this chemical spill off the front page.

King-Aaron 4y ago
Yes, and it's being mostly spread by people who are fixated on conspiracies.
- DangitBobby 4y ago
  A very convenient line of reasoning for the conspirators ;) What would a legitimate cover up conspiracy actually look like?
- iinnPP 4y ago
  Your comment itself is a conspiracy theory though.
  - King-Aaron 4y ago
    Conspeption
eastbound 4y ago
In a world where the Ukraine war ended Covid, balloons in the sky can certainly keep environmental catastrophes off the front page.
- sebkomianos 4y ago
  Preach, brother.
- op00to 4y ago
  It’s very interesting that news media can only handle one story at a time. I always thought they could do like 3-4 stories. Guess not.

sva_ 4y ago

Never heard about this in the past 1.5 hours...

perihelions 4y ago

Here's some data from the federal EPA (what they're measuring and where and what the numbers are), https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=15933 https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=1593... ("East Palestine Train Derailment")

mortenjorck 4y ago
This is what I was looking for, thank you. Lost in the profoundly unhelpful debate between "no one has heard of this" and "well I have" are the actual conditions in the community and whether the concentrations of either the initially released compound or the byproducts of the "controlled burn" are high enough to cause effects in humans. From the EPA link: > Feb. 13, 2023 Update Re-Entry air screenings are underway. Community air monitoring will continue operating 24 hours a day. As of yesterday evening, 291 homes have been screened. To date, no detections of vinyl chloride or hydrogen chloride were identified for the completed screened homes. There are 181 homes that remain to be screened. Good news, to be sure, though this is only the very beginning of the process.
perihelions 4y ago
This is too confusing for me to parse: https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%20Derailment_Surface%20Water%20Analytical%20Results%20Summary_rev02.pdf https://response.epa.gov/sites/15933/files/East%20Palestine%... Why is almost every number in sample column #2 and #3 exactly 100 times greater than in column #1? Aren't they all [μg/L]? There's a section on page 3 ("petroleum products") that's labelled as being both μg/L and mg/L.
encryptluks2 4y ago
So the government investigates a big disaster caused in part by their actions and everything is within normal levels. A lot of time the same regulators will say the water is fine when brown stuff is coming out of the faucet.

andrewstuart 4y ago

I'd have run away fast and not come back.

taeric 4y ago

I'm curious what I'm supposed to be hearing about? If we know details, I'd love to hear them. If it is finger pointing and blaming... I'll wait for an investigation. If there has to be news coverage nonstop to get said investigation, go for it.

conspiranalyst 4y ago

"Hey, that's Ohio, that's a quarter!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0XU_3DlKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf0XU_3DlKQ

barbazoo 4y ago

> Yesterday, DeWine added it’s “very understandable” that residents might want their homes tested before reentering. The state says Norfolk Southern must pay for the cleanup costs, and that “the burden is upon them to assure the public that what they do everyday is safe.” What a shitty thing to say given that the public has no direct way to deny them what they do if they don't deem it safe.

whatshisface 4y ago
"Investigations are expensive and we will not show them the slightest mercy in asking the suspect to run their own."

s5300 4y ago

This is going to sound exceptionally crass… But as somebody who’s from the outright poorest part of Ohio, with generations of coal workers in the family… I’m sitting here, in the West Coast sun, laughing about this. I’ve also spent significant amounts of time in the general region of this disaster It’s awful. The situation is absolutely awful, that town & everything in a radius around it is genuinely fucked, and from what I’ve heard but not completely personally confirmed, it’s already contaminating downstream into the Ohio river. But. I don’t know what to say. Other than… these people have been voting against their best interests. Their entire damn lives. How can you possibly have any wake-up call for a populace so deep into hatred & corporate bootlicking. There is none. That generation simply has to die out, and I very truly hope that most of their children are able to make it out to greener pastures & receive some form of education that may lead them to stop voting for the absolute sociopaths that peddle policies making large-scale environmental disasters a possibility. I unfortunately have the personal experience of knowing not very many people get the opportunities to GTFO this area into greener pastures. I don’t know what to feel other than deep & genuine sadness - there’s absolutely nothing I can do to help the fact, & now that I’m a couple thousand miles away, I just delusionally hope that things are getting better while I’m gone. But, again. I do not know what to say. For decades, so many of these people have voted for those that pass laws to make corporations not even slightly accountable & strike down reforms aiming to regulate these industries - regulate so that they’re forced to take up safety measures so shit like this cannot happen Spewing outright hatred & death threats to their fellow countrymen who try to tell them there may be a path to a better life, the ability to make meaningful change. They got what was coming to them. I don’t know how many this catastrophe will wake up to the fact they’ve been swindled all this time, that the political party they’ve sworn their lives to have already sold their souls for pennies on the dollar, so long ago. Some of them, a few I’ve already personally seen, will have the realization. But it’s far too late. The damage is done, and they will die before they ever see a better community - politicians that care for their well being. I can only hope they have the humility to tell the younger people they know that they were dead wrong, & that the politicians they’ve been voting for as long as they’ve been able have sold out their entire livelihoods for the most meager amounts of $USD Appalachia is such an unfortunate place - so beautiful, but abandoned by modern first world society. (okay, northern ohio is technically slightly out of Appalachia proper - GOMD) /endddrunkrant

wnevets 4y ago

I got to know, do the pro nuclear crowd really want to live down wind of a nuclear power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?

alanbernstein 4y ago
I got to know, do the pro coal crowd really want to live down wind of a coal power plant when they will be run by the same business processes and deregulation that lead to this disaster, Fukushima, the BP oil rig disaster, etc?
- wnevets 4y ago
  Coal is dying on it's own, the free market has decided. I have zero problem living down wind of solar panels and wind turbines
  - trashtester 4y ago
    Coal is only "dying" in areas with access to cheap natural gas. It's currently not being replaced by renewables. Developing countries still build a lot of coal plants. Total global electricity generation from coal has nearly doubled since year 2000. In absolute terms the amount of new coal based electricity from coal increased by almost 5TWh from 2000 to 2021, about twice as much as wind+solar combined. (Also natural gas based electricity grew by 3.5TWh in the same period). As long as Russia is being sanctioned and Canada refuses to export their NG, I expect coal to continue to grow. Maybe someday in the future, wind+solar can provide stable electricity supply without relying on fossil fuels for the non-windy cloudy days (and nights). Like nuclear has been able to since the 70s. Nobody knows exactly when, though. But simply based on the mining capacity of critical minerals, it's really unlikely to happen within 20 years at a large scale. The world is simply not planning enough mines.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  The 'pro nuclear' crowd that say idiotic shit like this are the pro coal crowd.

remote_phone 4y ago

It’s funny how much coverage rich people in jets get, but this destructions of the lives of tens of thousands from an environmental catastrophe gets very little media coverage and outrage. This should never have happened and tens of thousands will die from the after effects. It’s disgusting.

asix66 4y ago

Holy crap. Is this a real life version of the film White Noise[0]? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(2022_film)

bfrog 4y ago

This really should be part of the EPA doing an honest and thorough scientific investigation.

trenning 4y ago

April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends. A lot of armchair experts on here wrote him off when it was posted to hn. I worked with a former locomotive engineer at the time who echoed the concerns reported here. He left the industry after about 10 years because of the grueling schedule and conditions. It is interesting and alarming how it is essentially an open secret among industry workers that trains are run such that they are always in an elevated risk of derailment and danger. https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-people-are-leaving/ https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/it-is-getting-worse-pe...

ChickenNugger 4y ago
>April 2022 a locomotive engineer wrote an open letter to the STB about the dangers of Precision Scheduled Railroad trains that are so long radio communication doesn’t even reach both ends. It's not just purely length. A long train can easily have mountains in between the ends.
gorgoiler 4y ago
These trains are over 3 miles long. This is to amortise the overhead of staffing? The locomotives and their cost scale linearly with the train, but the engineers do not?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  that's part of it but not the main reason. the main reason is that if you make the cargo train too big to fit into the pull off on single tracked rail, then passenger trains have to yield to the cargo trains.
  - tremon 4y ago
    I have a grudging admiration for the sociopath that came up with that solution. Still, it has an easy fix: make it illegal to run a train that does not fit into the pull off.

creato 4y ago

On my mainstream media outlet of choice, I’m pretty sure there has been a front page headline about the derailment at least half of the days since it occurred. This “quietly” “they don’t want you to know” meme is just bullshit superiority cynicism and/or clickbait.

ChickenNugger 4y ago
Did they mention the president's recent strikebreaking? https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden-unions-freight-railroads-averted-strike https://www.npr.org/2022/12/02/1140265413/rail-workers-biden... I'm guessing they didn't.
iinnPP 4y ago
The story here is less about the train and more about the lack of response. Which is why it took a while to get where it is. People said it was unsafe. Officials disagreed. Proof is provided. Nobody has pie on their face. The story is about a lack of pie.

thepasswordis 4y ago

To those in the meta talking about how people are talking about this: congratulations on being extremely online. As of now: https://www.cnn.com/ https://www.cnn.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 2 results) https://www.foxnews.com/ https://www.foxnews.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 1 result / 'trump' 2 results) https://www.nytimes.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 4 results) https://www.msnbc.com/ https://www.msnbc.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 2 results / 'trump' 9 results!)

vGPU 4y ago
It almost feels like the bots are out in force to gaslight us. I’ve seen very little coverage of the topic and didn’t find out about it until several days after it happened, and yet almost every single comment on these threads is “everyone knows, shut up already, oh look ufo/drumpf/football”.

foogazi 4y ago

I saw pictures on reddit and was surprised I haven’t seem more coverage of it in major news outlets

euroderf 4y ago

If this had happened in the USSR, we would have blamed it on an an irretrievably broken economic system and an utterly corrupt political system. So how about that USA huh.