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EPA orders Norfolk Southern to conduct all cleanup actions related to derailment

237 points by Jimmc414 4y ago

colpabar 4y ago
https://archive.ph/TkRgd https://archive.ph/TkRgd
dylan604 4y ago
what kind of protections does bankruptcy afford Norfolk Southern or other corp shenanigans can they pull to avoid having to do anything?
- anonuser123456 4y ago
  Bankruptcy protects the corporate entity, but not shareholder equity. That is, shareholders can lose all equity claims. But that doesn’t mean destroying the business. It can be sold off to new shareholders and then sale proceeds used to make creditors whole.
- sp332 4y ago
  Well, they could spin off a new company that owns the liability. That sometimes works, although notably courts did not allow Johnson & Johnson to get away with something similar recently. Details https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123567606/johnson-baby-powder-bankruptcy-lawsuits https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123567606/johnson-baby-powde... Rejection https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/business/johnson-and-johnson-talc-bankruptcy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/business/johnson-and-johnson-...
  - JamesCoyne 4y ago
    Litigator of the year https://twitter.com/AmericanLawyer/status/1595103437229735937 https://twitter.com/AmericanLawyer/status/159510343722973593...
  - ccooffee 4y ago
    > Before the bankruptcy filing, J&J faced costs from $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements, including one in which 22 women were awarded a judgment of more than $2 billion, according to bankruptcy court records. Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant. [0] https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.,the%20resilience%20of%20Johnson%20&%20Johnson https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.....
    - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
      None of this strikes me as nefarious. The point of the bankruptcy filing wasn’t to bilk creditors. It was to get them all equal payouts instead of a bunch of random jury-dependent judgment amounts.
      - vkou 4y ago
        The problem with doing something illegal is that the consequences of your actions include having to pay out a bunch of random jury-dependent judgement amounts.
        NotYourLawyer 4y ago
        Great, if you’re in the first random set of plaintiffs who get billions of dollars. Not so great if you’re a later plaintiff when the money’s all gone and the company is bankrupt for real.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    The problem in that case was the bankruptcy filing, not the spinoff. The judge said the spun-off company wasn’t bankrupt.
- colpabar 4y ago
  They could always just not do it. The release says that if this happens, the gov will do it instead and "compel" NS to pay them triple the cost, but I don't really see that happening, given that they just "compelled" the rail workers union to not strike against them. I'm hopeful that they will just clean it up, but this is a massive corporation owned by hedge funds we're talking about. The rules don't apply to them.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I'm assuming this will be a future super fund type of site
- sclarisse 4y ago
  The thing that protects them is limited liability, as it does many corporations. They can only lose everything the company has, and not more. If you, random HNer, have some holdings of this railroad in your stock portfolio, they cannot come after you for millions. Thus stock ownership is safe for non-billionaires. Bankruptcy, rather — the serious kind — erases all ownership, sells the company off to new owners, and pays outstanding debts with the proceeds, in order of priority. This tends to result in more paid debts than an uncontrolled shutdown; fewer people want to buy a stopped business and it can’t make much money.
  - akira2501 4y ago
    The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
    - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
      Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to paying dividends, but they’re less costly from a tax perspective. Are dividends also to be banned? If so, what is even the purpose of a company, and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
      - cakeface 4y ago
        I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.
        terr-dav 4y ago
        My issue is with the concentrated control of where the surplus value goes, I see the existence of dividends & stock buybacks as more of a side-effect of the system than a core-problem.
        4y ago
hanniabu 4y ago
Based on the fact that there's thousands of superfund sites that are decades old, this probably won't be cleaned up any time soon
- thrashh 4y ago
  Well based on the fact that - we’ve cleaned up 25% of sites in a system that only started in the 80s - the infrastructure bill in 2021 bringing back the superfund cleanup tax on chemical companies that expired in 1995 — at double the rate - and Congress also authorizing an extra $3.5 billion 2 years ago just for cleanups I think it’s too early to be so cynical
  - eppp 4y ago
    This is a completely broken system though. These cleanup fees should be paid for during the waste generation. Just being allowed to pollute everything and then paying out the owners and declaring bankruptcy leaving it to the tax system to clean up is nonsensical.
    - blibble 4y ago
      in cases like that: if the owners are still around (meaning: not deceased) the courts should be able to pierce the corporate veil and go after the directors for unlimited amounts
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        What the courts are allowed to do, and what Judges regularly opt to do are extremely different sets.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      > This is a completely broken system though. When "the system" is working properly, hazardous waste is contained and disposed of appropriately, and sites don't become polluted. The Superfund program exists to remediate situations where that system failed.
jmclnx 4y ago
Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference. Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  I think you’re overestimating the cost of this cleanup by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Vinyl chloride is not particularly toxic, has low environmental persistence, and does not bioaccumulate.
  - spaceguillotine 4y ago
    wait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.
    - xadhominemx 4y ago
      Which animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.
    - digdugdirk 4y ago
      The medical costs alone should be an eye popping number. Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.
      - s1artibartfast 4y ago
        What medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars. They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year. Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive. The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.
thepasswordis 4y ago
I'd like to see the head of the EPA, the transportation secretary, the executive team at NS, and anybody in the Biden administration who was involved in blocking the rail workers from striking move into East Palestine and live there, with their children. Don't want to do that because it isn't safe? Then buy these people all new homes. We can start the bidding at $1M per household. I cannot overstate the fury that I feel watching this unfold. The people living in small midwestern towns, the type of town where I grew up, and where my family lives, are not disposable, and their lives matter exactly as much as the peoples lives who live on Martha's Vinyard, or any other rich enclave. Can you imagine a tanker load of toxic chemicals spilling into the neighborhood around one of Biden's homes? Or on Mar A Lago? Do you think there would be this much feet dragging about cleaning it up? It is further demoralizing to watch our President on a tour of Ukraine, giving away tens of billions of dollars to fight a proxy war, when we are having citizens of this country lose their homes to an industrial disaster. No acceptable. If there is money to fund a proxy war, then there is money to make the people in East Palestine whole.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- InCityDreams 4y ago
  I see you got the actual point you really wanted to make right at the end, however poorly.
- ctrlaltdylan 4y ago
  I'm from the Northeast Ohio area, and also from a small town like East Palestine. The lack of response from Governor DeWine and malice to not declare a state of emergency is infuriating. This rhymes with Flink Michigan's water crisis, and Obama "drinking" the water in a publicity stunt: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/posts-distort-facts-on-obama-flint/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/posts-distort-facts-on-oba... Vote democrat and only see the elite placate the working class. Vote republican and see unions and the facade of environmental protections decimated even further. The fact this isn't covered in NYT or headlines on cable TV is insane. How is this unprecedented disaster affecting a major watershed not higher urgency than fucking balloons.
linuxftw 4y ago
> Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources. So, the EPA isn't going to identify which soils and waters were contaminated? This is going to be like a pharmaceutical company running their own safety trials. "Nothing to see here."
- galleywest200 4y ago
  The order states that Norfolk is paying for this, but the EPA is supplying the contractors. > Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources. > Reimburse EPA for cleaning services to be offered to residents and businesses to provide an additional layer of reassurance, which will be conducted by EPA staff and contractors. > Attend and participate in public meetings at EPA’s request and post information online. > Pay for EPA’s costs for work performed under this order.
thechao 4y ago
Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the train, but you can't "amortize" failure: any failed bearing would lead to a catastrophic error? To my mind this means that things like ECP (which have been removed) might've fixed the issue, but the fundamental problem is the train length, which has been discussed (in all of its negatives) here, before. In that sense, the train company is directly at fault: they are engaging in unsafe practices in order to remain profitable, and the practices are fundamentally not safe-able (to make up a word).
- hammock 4y ago
  There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    They burned off the vinyl chloride because the combustion products are relatively benign, it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks, vinyl chloride is quite volatile and acute exposure to high concentrations of vinyl chloride vapor is dangerous, and they wanted to get everyone back in their homes (and yes, get the railroad back up and running) as quickly as safely permissible.
    - hammock 4y ago
      >the combustion products are relatively benign Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades. I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though
pookha 4y ago
Apparently there are something like 1K derailments a year in the US? Had no idea...Seems pretty high. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/train-derailment-statistics-safety-damages/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...
- fh973 4y ago
  Indeed... the EU has a similar network size and there it's less than 100: https://twitter.com/HerrNaumann/status/1626342809438502918 https://twitter.com/HerrNaumann/status/1626342809438502918 Edit: less than 100 (Entgleisungen).
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    How much less than 1000 (my German is pretty rusty)? e.g. 900 vs 1100 is not really statistically different, and doesn't suggest a systemic problem. Especially given the heavy focus on shipping for the US rail network versus passengers in the EU. Tracks in the US that are used for passengers are maintained better than shipping-only tracks, for sure.
    - fr0sty 4y ago
      Some light googling gives me 390B kilometer-tonnes[1] in Europe and 1.6T ton-miles[2] in the US for 2019. So that is 6x the freight movement. The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km). [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Railway_freight_transport_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freight-railroads-revenue-ton-miles-of-freight-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh... [3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-american-and-european-rail-systems/ https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a...
      - piva00 4y ago
        I believe this dataset per quarter [0] is more accurate, it adds up to some ~1.8-2b ton-kilometres for the EU-27. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=549004 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
thearn4 4y ago
I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?
- max937 4y ago
  I feel the same way. Are the people who stay in East Palestine gonna develop serious health issues or not?
- Rimintil 4y ago
  Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?
  - thearn4 4y ago
    I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this. But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
    - ng12 4y ago
      I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.
      - phpisthebest 4y ago
        That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril. As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions." Their bungling of the response is completely predictable, extending a long long history of bungled responses to emergencies. Of course the predicable reaction to this bungling is not to simply acknowledge the reality of government incompetence, no.. it will be as it always is a mix of not enough money, not enough power, and capitalism / lack of regulation that will be to blame. Government agencies are always pure as the driven snow, and with out fault Government is always measured by their intentions, never their results.
joe_the_user 4y ago
Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents? News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go. Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Why do you think the EPA has trailers or is responsible for housing people? This seems to be the role of a disaster management organization
  - joe_the_user 4y ago
    Shouldn't it be obvious I'm speaking of the Federal Government generally? What's more important? Stopping people being harmed or getting agencies functions right?
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      It was not obvious to me. You clearly said one thing calling out the EPA in an thread about the EPA. How am I supposed to infer you didn't mean the EPA.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  That seems like something that FEMA would be better prepared to do. I think FEMA should be in the role of protecting the individuals, evacuating people and providing food, water, heating and shelter. EPA should have more focus on directing the cleanup of the area, and making the area safe for residents to return to. And the railroad should be billed every penny of the costs of both.
  - Alex3917 4y ago
    > That seems like something that FEMA would be better prepared to do. Given that FEMA is perhaps best known for poisoning people with toxic chemicals, who would really be the audience for this? https://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-toxic-katrina-trailers-and-they-likely-have-no-idea/ https://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-...
magwa101 4y ago
[dead]
jhallenworld 4y ago
The problem is that the EPA has no credibility. They demonstrably lied after 9/11 about the air quality in Manhattan. Maybe you could say that it was a necessary lie to encourage people to clean up, join the rescue effort, get back to work, etc. But now why should I trust the EPA to not lie about Palestine? All of the same arguments for a good lie apply. The people in charge today are only going to worry about the immediate short term risk, and definitely will not care about long term risk- by the time you get cancer, they will have been long out of power.

237 points by Jimmc414 4y ago

https://archive.ph/TkRgd https://archive.ph/TkRgd

what kind of protections does bankruptcy afford Norfolk Southern or other corp shenanigans can they pull to avoid having to do anything?

anonuser123456 4y ago
Bankruptcy protects the corporate entity, but not shareholder equity. That is, shareholders can lose all equity claims. But that doesn’t mean destroying the business. It can be sold off to new shareholders and then sale proceeds used to make creditors whole.
sp332 4y ago
Well, they could spin off a new company that owns the liability. That sometimes works, although notably courts did not allow Johnson & Johnson to get away with something similar recently. Details https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123567606/johnson-baby-powder-bankruptcy-lawsuits https://www.npr.org/2022/09/19/1123567606/johnson-baby-powde... Rejection https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/business/johnson-and-johnson-talc-bankruptcy/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/30/business/johnson-and-johnson-...
- JamesCoyne 4y ago
  Litigator of the year https://twitter.com/AmericanLawyer/status/1595103437229735937 https://twitter.com/AmericanLawyer/status/159510343722973593...
- ccooffee 4y ago
  > Before the bankruptcy filing, J&J faced costs from $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements, including one in which 22 women were awarded a judgment of more than $2 billion, according to bankruptcy court records. Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant. [0] https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.,the%20resilience%20of%20Johnson%20&%20Johnson https://www.jnj.com/:~:text=NEW%20BRUNSWICK,%20N.J.,%20Sept.....
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    None of this strikes me as nefarious. The point of the bankruptcy filing wasn’t to bilk creditors. It was to get them all equal payouts instead of a bunch of random jury-dependent judgment amounts.
    - vkou 4y ago
      The problem with doing something illegal is that the consequences of your actions include having to pay out a bunch of random jury-dependent judgement amounts.
      - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
        Great, if you’re in the first random set of plaintiffs who get billions of dollars. Not so great if you’re a later plaintiff when the money’s all gone and the company is bankrupt for real.
- NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  The problem in that case was the bankruptcy filing, not the spinoff. The judge said the spun-off company wasn’t bankrupt.
colpabar 4y ago
They could always just not do it. The release says that if this happens, the gov will do it instead and "compel" NS to pay them triple the cost, but I don't really see that happening, given that they just "compelled" the rail workers union to not strike against them. I'm hopeful that they will just clean it up, but this is a massive corporation owned by hedge funds we're talking about. The rules don't apply to them.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I'm assuming this will be a future super fund type of site
sclarisse 4y ago
The thing that protects them is limited liability, as it does many corporations. They can only lose everything the company has, and not more. If you, random HNer, have some holdings of this railroad in your stock portfolio, they cannot come after you for millions. Thus stock ownership is safe for non-billionaires. Bankruptcy, rather — the serious kind — erases all ownership, sells the company off to new owners, and pays outstanding debts with the proceeds, in order of priority. This tends to result in more paid debts than an uncontrolled shutdown; fewer people want to buy a stopped business and it can’t make much money.
- akira2501 4y ago
  The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
  - NotYourLawyer 4y ago
    Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to paying dividends, but they’re less costly from a tax perspective. Are dividends also to be banned? If so, what is even the purpose of a company, and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
    - cakeface 4y ago
      I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.
      - terr-dav 4y ago
        My issue is with the concentrated control of where the surplus value goes, I see the existence of dividends & stock buybacks as more of a side-effect of the system than a core-problem.
      - 4y ago

hanniabu 4y ago

Based on the fact that there's thousands of superfund sites that are decades old, this probably won't be cleaned up any time soon

thrashh 4y ago
Well based on the fact that - we’ve cleaned up 25% of sites in a system that only started in the 80s - the infrastructure bill in 2021 bringing back the superfund cleanup tax on chemical companies that expired in 1995 — at double the rate - and Congress also authorizing an extra $3.5 billion 2 years ago just for cleanups I think it’s too early to be so cynical
- eppp 4y ago
  This is a completely broken system though. These cleanup fees should be paid for during the waste generation. Just being allowed to pollute everything and then paying out the owners and declaring bankruptcy leaving it to the tax system to clean up is nonsensical.
  - blibble 4y ago
    in cases like that: if the owners are still around (meaning: not deceased) the courts should be able to pierce the corporate veil and go after the directors for unlimited amounts
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      What the courts are allowed to do, and what Judges regularly opt to do are extremely different sets.
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    > This is a completely broken system though. When "the system" is working properly, hazardous waste is contained and disposed of appropriately, and sites don't become polluted. The Superfund program exists to remediate situations where that system failed.

jmclnx 4y ago

Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference. Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.

xadhominemx 4y ago
I think you’re overestimating the cost of this cleanup by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Vinyl chloride is not particularly toxic, has low environmental persistence, and does not bioaccumulate.
- spaceguillotine 4y ago
  wait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.
  - xadhominemx 4y ago
    Which animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.
  - digdugdirk 4y ago
    The medical costs alone should be an eye popping number. Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      What medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars. They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year. Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive. The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.

thepasswordis 4y ago

I'd like to see the head of the EPA, the transportation secretary, the executive team at NS, and anybody in the Biden administration who was involved in blocking the rail workers from striking move into East Palestine and live there, with their children. Don't want to do that because it isn't safe? Then buy these people all new homes. We can start the bidding at $1M per household. I cannot overstate the fury that I feel watching this unfold. The people living in small midwestern towns, the type of town where I grew up, and where my family lives, are not disposable, and their lives matter exactly as much as the peoples lives who live on Martha's Vinyard, or any other rich enclave. Can you imagine a tanker load of toxic chemicals spilling into the neighborhood around one of Biden's homes? Or on Mar A Lago? Do you think there would be this much feet dragging about cleaning it up? It is further demoralizing to watch our President on a tour of Ukraine, giving away tens of billions of dollars to fight a proxy war, when we are having citizens of this country lose their homes to an industrial disaster. No acceptable. If there is money to fund a proxy war, then there is money to make the people in East Palestine whole.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
InCityDreams 4y ago
I see you got the actual point you really wanted to make right at the end, however poorly.
ctrlaltdylan 4y ago
I'm from the Northeast Ohio area, and also from a small town like East Palestine. The lack of response from Governor DeWine and malice to not declare a state of emergency is infuriating. This rhymes with Flink Michigan's water crisis, and Obama "drinking" the water in a publicity stunt: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/posts-distort-facts-on-obama-flint/ https://www.factcheck.org/2019/03/posts-distort-facts-on-oba... Vote democrat and only see the elite placate the working class. Vote republican and see unions and the facade of environmental protections decimated even further. The fact this isn't covered in NYT or headlines on cable TV is insane. How is this unprecedented disaster affecting a major watershed not higher urgency than fucking balloons.

linuxftw 4y ago

> Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources. So, the EPA isn't going to identify which soils and waters were contaminated? This is going to be like a pharmaceutical company running their own safety trials. "Nothing to see here."

galleywest200 4y ago
The order states that Norfolk is paying for this, but the EPA is supplying the contractors. > Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources. > Reimburse EPA for cleaning services to be offered to residents and businesses to provide an additional layer of reassurance, which will be conducted by EPA staff and contractors. > Attend and participate in public meetings at EPA’s request and post information online. > Pay for EPA’s costs for work performed under this order.

thechao 4y ago

Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the train, but you can't "amortize" failure: any failed bearing would lead to a catastrophic error? To my mind this means that things like ECP (which have been removed) might've fixed the issue, but the fundamental problem is the train length, which has been discussed (in all of its negatives) here, before. In that sense, the train company is directly at fault: they are engaging in unsafe practices in order to remain profitable, and the practices are fundamentally not safe-able (to make up a word).

hammock 4y ago
There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)
- xadhominemx 4y ago
  They burned off the vinyl chloride because the combustion products are relatively benign, it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks, vinyl chloride is quite volatile and acute exposure to high concentrations of vinyl chloride vapor is dangerous, and they wanted to get everyone back in their homes (and yes, get the railroad back up and running) as quickly as safely permissible.
  - hammock 4y ago
    >the combustion products are relatively benign Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades. I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though

pookha 4y ago

Apparently there are something like 1K derailments a year in the US? Had no idea...Seems pretty high. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/train-derailment-statistics-safety-damages/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/tra...

fh973 4y ago
Indeed... the EU has a similar network size and there it's less than 100: https://twitter.com/HerrNaumann/status/1626342809438502918 https://twitter.com/HerrNaumann/status/1626342809438502918 Edit: less than 100 (Entgleisungen).
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  How much less than 1000 (my German is pretty rusty)? e.g. 900 vs 1100 is not really statistically different, and doesn't suggest a systemic problem. Especially given the heavy focus on shipping for the US rail network versus passengers in the EU. Tracks in the US that are used for passengers are maintained better than shipping-only tracks, for sure.
  - fr0sty 4y ago
    Some light googling gives me 390B kilometer-tonnes[1] in Europe and 1.6T ton-miles[2] in the US for 2019. So that is 6x the freight movement. The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km). [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Railway_freight_transport_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freight-railroads-revenue-ton-miles-of-freight-since-2009/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh... [3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-american-and-european-rail-systems/ https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a...
    - piva00 4y ago
      I believe this dataset per quarter [0] is more accurate, it adds up to some ~1.8-2b ton-kilometres for the EU-27. [0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=549004 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

thearn4 4y ago

I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?

max937 4y ago
I feel the same way. Are the people who stay in East Palestine gonna develop serious health issues or not?
Rimintil 4y ago
Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?
- thearn4 4y ago
  I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this. But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
  - ng12 4y ago
    I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.
    - phpisthebest 4y ago
      That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril. As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions." Their bungling of the response is completely predictable, extending a long long history of bungled responses to emergencies. Of course the predicable reaction to this bungling is not to simply acknowledge the reality of government incompetence, no.. it will be as it always is a mix of not enough money, not enough power, and capitalism / lack of regulation that will be to blame. Government agencies are always pure as the driven snow, and with out fault Government is always measured by their intentions, never their results.

joe_the_user 4y ago

Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents? News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go. Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.

s1artibartfast 4y ago
Why do you think the EPA has trailers or is responsible for housing people? This seems to be the role of a disaster management organization
- joe_the_user 4y ago
  Shouldn't it be obvious I'm speaking of the Federal Government generally? What's more important? Stopping people being harmed or getting agencies functions right?
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    It was not obvious to me. You clearly said one thing calling out the EPA in an thread about the EPA. How am I supposed to infer you didn't mean the EPA.
ncallaway 4y ago
That seems like something that FEMA would be better prepared to do. I think FEMA should be in the role of protecting the individuals, evacuating people and providing food, water, heating and shelter. EPA should have more focus on directing the cleanup of the area, and making the area safe for residents to return to. And the railroad should be billed every penny of the costs of both.
- Alex3917 4y ago
  > That seems like something that FEMA would be better prepared to do. Given that FEMA is perhaps best known for poisoning people with toxic chemicals, who would really be the audience for this? https://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-toxic-katrina-trailers-and-they-likely-have-no-idea/ https://grist.org/politics/people-are-still-living-in-femas-...

magwa101 4y ago

[dead]

jhallenworld 4y ago

The problem is that the EPA has no credibility. They demonstrably lied after 9/11 about the air quality in Manhattan. Maybe you could say that it was a necessary lie to encourage people to clean up, join the rescue effort, get back to work, etc. But now why should I trust the EPA to not lie about Palestine? All of the same arguments for a good lie apply. The people in charge today are only going to worry about the immediate short term risk, and definitely will not care about long term risk- by the time you get cancer, they will have been long out of power.