4 ms·

In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labe

In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labels indicating the nature of the chemical threat and what firefighters need to do to address it; otherwise, it's as important to people as what's in the tractor-trailer in front of them on the highway. It might be worth having a discussion about the fact that the way train right-of-ways came into being give municipalities little recourse if they feel the trains shouldn't be cutting through their towns in general, but given that they do, they're basically privately-owned highways and it's up to the owner what's on them.

rcme 4y ago
> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labels indicating the nature of the chemical threat and what firefighters need to do to address it What part of the hazard warning indicates what's required for environmental remediation? In order to properly remediate, you need to know what you're dealing with.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  In general, no environmental remediation is necessary because the chemical doesn't spill. If it spills, of course there should be disclosure. Parent appeared to be expressing surprise there was no disclosure until an incident occurred; of course there wasn't. (Disclosure takes more time than we assume it should because freight is actually kinda disorganized relative to what most of us would expect given our information-saturated jobs; when a shipment leaves the depot and arrives, you can just check the contents of the train, but when it fails to arrive, you have to piece together the contents from multiple manifest sources and cross-check to make sure there weren't errors in that data).
  - rcme 4y ago
    That's not how I read the original comment: > This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded "list of toxic chemicals" was not public prior to Sunday. The accident happened on February 3rd. And the chemicals started being released on the 6th. Sunday was the 12th. That's a long time to wait to disclose the types of chemicals you're releasing in a town.
ClumsyPilot 4y ago
[flagged]
LarryMullins 4y ago
> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public Fitting username, I didn't realize you were a novelty account.
- shadowgovt 4y ago
  The username actually refers to an old They Might Be Giants song. They lyrics of the song tell the tale of a man who goes through life being paranoid about a massive, organized government operation spying on him personally. In the end, he's murdered and disappeared by his town's local mayor because he's inconvenient, the mayor's just a thug, and there is no shadowy overarching organization watching over him. People believe in conspiracies because they feel the alternative (disorder, ad-hoc metastability, and a world full of people with short-term views making short-term moves to benefit their short-term ends impacting other folks with no particular plan, just simple, stupid apathy) is scarier. But most evil (and good) in the world is done by regular folks with partial knowledge doing their damnedest to survive, and we perceive patterns because we're pattern-perceiving creatures.
  - LarryMullins 4y ago
    It's certainty a fitting username for somebody who thinks the government should keep people in the dark. > "In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public."
    - shadowgovt 4y ago
      The government doesn't generally know the list of chemicals, so it's not keeping people in the dark because it has no information to divulge. We could certainly make it a rule that chemical manifests be lodged with such-and-such organization (the FRA, I'd assume), but we don't because that's not the history of how rail happened in this country. And in general, the US government tends to operate under a rule of "Ain't no problem, ain't no problem" regarding data collection, with rare exception (Americans get very jumpy about over-collection of data by the government, after all; "Why do you need to know how many firearms I own? It's my right to own them", etc.). ... I could certainly see an argument for changing this rule, but I can also see an argument for not; much as Americans are, broadly speaking, comfortable living in homes where lines of toxic volatile chemicals are plumbed directly into those homes (50,000 hospitalizations and 430 deaths due to CO poisoning annually; in 2020, 10 natural gas explosions and 0 train chemical spills) and comfortable operating private individual vehicles on roadways (38,000+ deaths in crashes in 2020) and comfortable with non-licensed ownership of firearms (carrying requires a license, ownership does not; 24,000+ suicides by gun in 2020), most people are most of the time comfortable with train loads of God-knows-what rattling down the old main street. And they're comfortable with it because accidents like this, while not nearly as rare as they should be, are far rarer than other risks Americans tolerate every single day. Risk-tolerance for convenience is just kind of an American tradition. ... like I said else-thread, I'm likelier to suffer from the lead in my pipes living in this part of the country than the train fire.

rcme 4y ago

> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public. In the event of emergency, every container is stamped with one or two standard labels indicating the nature of the chemical threat and what firefighters need to do to address it What part of the hazard warning indicates what's required for environmental remediation? In order to properly remediate, you need to know what you're dealing with.

shadowgovt 4y ago
In general, no environmental remediation is necessary because the chemical doesn't spill. If it spills, of course there should be disclosure. Parent appeared to be expressing surprise there was no disclosure until an incident occurred; of course there wasn't. (Disclosure takes more time than we assume it should because freight is actually kinda disorganized relative to what most of us would expect given our information-saturated jobs; when a shipment leaves the depot and arrives, you can just check the contents of the train, but when it fails to arrive, you have to piece together the contents from multiple manifest sources and cross-check to make sure there weren't errors in that data).
- rcme 4y ago
  That's not how I read the original comment: > This is anodyne phrasing that omits the lede, which is that this information was not previously disclosed. This expanded "list of toxic chemicals" was not public prior to Sunday. The accident happened on February 3rd. And the chemicals started being released on the 6th. Sunday was the 12th. That's a long time to wait to disclose the types of chemicals you're releasing in a town.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago

[flagged]

LarryMullins 4y ago

> In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public Fitting username, I didn't realize you were a novelty account.

shadowgovt 4y ago
The username actually refers to an old They Might Be Giants song. They lyrics of the song tell the tale of a man who goes through life being paranoid about a massive, organized government operation spying on him personally. In the end, he's murdered and disappeared by his town's local mayor because he's inconvenient, the mayor's just a thug, and there is no shadowy overarching organization watching over him. People believe in conspiracies because they feel the alternative (disorder, ad-hoc metastability, and a world full of people with short-term views making short-term moves to benefit their short-term ends impacting other folks with no particular plan, just simple, stupid apathy) is scarier. But most evil (and good) in the world is done by regular folks with partial knowledge doing their damnedest to survive, and we perceive patterns because we're pattern-perceiving creatures.
- LarryMullins 4y ago
  It's certainty a fitting username for somebody who thinks the government should keep people in the dark. > "In general, there's no particular need to make the list of chemicals public."
  - shadowgovt 4y ago
    The government doesn't generally know the list of chemicals, so it's not keeping people in the dark because it has no information to divulge. We could certainly make it a rule that chemical manifests be lodged with such-and-such organization (the FRA, I'd assume), but we don't because that's not the history of how rail happened in this country. And in general, the US government tends to operate under a rule of "Ain't no problem, ain't no problem" regarding data collection, with rare exception (Americans get very jumpy about over-collection of data by the government, after all; "Why do you need to know how many firearms I own? It's my right to own them", etc.). ... I could certainly see an argument for changing this rule, but I can also see an argument for not; much as Americans are, broadly speaking, comfortable living in homes where lines of toxic volatile chemicals are plumbed directly into those homes (50,000 hospitalizations and 430 deaths due to CO poisoning annually; in 2020, 10 natural gas explosions and 0 train chemical spills) and comfortable operating private individual vehicles on roadways (38,000+ deaths in crashes in 2020) and comfortable with non-licensed ownership of firearms (carrying requires a license, ownership does not; 24,000+ suicides by gun in 2020), most people are most of the time comfortable with train loads of God-knows-what rattling down the old main street. And they're comfortable with it because accidents like this, while not nearly as rare as they should be, are far rarer than other risks Americans tolerate every single day. Risk-tolerance for convenience is just kind of an American tradition. ... like I said else-thread, I'm likelier to suffer from the lead in my pipes living in this part of the country than the train fire.