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That whole disaster was terribly handled. From The sec of transportation dragging his feel by weeks, to the president being dismissive and the train company sa

• qbasic_forever 4y ago
  Also transportation sec Buttigieg just casually saying not to worry we have over 1,000 train derailments a year: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11760173/There-roughly-1-000-cases-year-train-derailing-Pete-Buttigieg-says.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11760173/There-roug... Over 1,000 derailments! Maybe we should work on getting those down before patting ourselves on the back for job well done.
  • hooverd 4y ago
    Hey, I'm sure the majority of those are trains popping off the track at low speeds.
    • mc32 4y ago
      Exactly! If he's blasé about 1000 derailments it better not be 1000 derailments of the East Palestine type per year. In any event. it's really tone deaf to say, hey, no big deal we have approx three accidents like this every day of the year, deal with it! What a wanker.
    • qbasic_forever 4y ago
      And? The system shouldn't be in a steady state of expected failures. These are enormous machines that sometimes carry hazardous materials. Failure cannot be tolerated. It's indicative of a rotten culture of safety and mismanagement that ignores the problems.
      • lazide 4y ago
        Uh, that’s completely unrealistic. No large scale system (or any system for very long) has zero downtime. What is the overall percentage any train spends derailed?
        • qbasic_forever 4y ago
          Not when the consequence of failure for spilling hazardous material is so great! What are you going to agree to next, that nuke plants are allowed a few minutes of core meltdown a year? Get real.
          • ceejayoz 4y ago
            Nuclear plants have safety incidents all the time. Someone drops a hammer on their toe. That's what most of the 1,000 derailments are; things like this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minor_Derailment_in_Brooklyn_%2850569880581%29.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Minor_Derailment_in_... or https://tdn.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/amtrak-train-suffers-minor-derailment-near-woodland-monday/article_88804f3d-bbdf-5250-afc6-6925a4687755.html https://tdn.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/amtrak-train-suf... The big problems, for both trains and nuclear plants, are rare.
          • jhugo 4y ago
            "Derailment" sounds dramatic but most of them are minor. It's unrealistic and unhelpful to pretend that all incidents are equally serious: the only way to achieve zero incidents of any severity is to not build the power plant (of any type) or the train system.
          • lazide 4y ago
            Just because the consequences are severe doesn’t mean it’s possible to avoid them - regardless of the cost. For instance, plane crashes are far more severe - and still happen relatively frequently despite all effort to stop them.
      • mhh__ 4y ago
        Failure cannot be tolerated, but mother nature cannot be fooled. Its not a realistic way of thinking about risk unless you don't run any trains. 1000 also feels roughly consistent with the rest of the world considering how big the US is.
    • newsclues 4y ago
      Most of it is non-issues in rail yards. The definition of derailment, isn't a big crash, it's when a wheel doesn't touch the rail (or something simple but not indicative of serious problems).
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • tzs 4y ago
      I expect in most of them there is no serious damage and most of the train is still on the rails. That's how the derailment I was in worked. This was an Amtrak going from the Seattle area to Los Angeles. We pulled onto a siding to let a freight train by. When our train started again it went a few feet and then there was a thud and it abruptly stopped. What happened was that the rails had separated a bit just ahead of where we had stopped on the siding, and so when the train resumed it fell off the rails. Amtrak sent a couple engines to help. One went to the back or our train, and one went to the main track in front of where the siding started. The back one was connected to the back of our train, and the derailed engine was disconnected. The back engine then pulled the rest of our train backwards onto the main track. The other engine was coupled to the front of our train, the back engine decoupled, and we were back on our way. It took around 6 hours or so from the engine derailing to the rest of the train resuming with the new engine. That was pretty annoying because we were without power most of that time, which apparently caused issues with food storage resulting in dinner being cancelled. Many of us who got on in the Seattle area had not had lunch either. The train was supposed to leave Seattle about an hour before lunch so we had planned on lunch on the train, but it actually got to Seattle after lunch.
      • SoftTalker 4y ago
        Sounds like a typical Amtrak experience. Really cannot recommend it if you need to be at your destination on time.
  • dboreham 4y ago
    Never mind derailments: trains can be a serious source of pollution when just being trains, because: money, of course. We have coal trains rumbling through town every day. They have nothing covering the coal. It's often windy. Result: the entire town is blanketed in a pall of black dust. It gets everywhere. Comes around the windows, even modern well sealed double glazing units. On patio furniture. In our lungs, one assumes too.
  • Aunche 4y ago
    > Also transportation sec Buttigieg just casually saying not to worry we have over 1,000 train derailments a year That this is what people care about is why nothing gets done. A politician can't even say a fact without the news media or another opportunistic politician spinning it in the worst way possible. Imagine if this was how your company handled postmortems. Given that half the time politicians majority of time politicians spend is on optimizing their sound bites, it should be no surprise that they outsource the actual policy making part to the lobbyists.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      You're quite correct regarding the culture of handling postmortems. I had the privilege of attending a NASA talk one year where we discussed the blameless postmortem culture in software engineering and the approach of logging reports and making them open company-wide. A kind NASA engineer thanked us for our time, but noted that there's a lot of what we do in software that can't be applied to the NASA approach because, ultimately, their bosses are Congress and Congress is... somewhere between "dumb" and "an actively hostile agent." Words must be carefully chosen and information can't be widely-shared internally until the message is crafted because about half of Congress is incentivized to look for the worst possible interpretation of data collected and weaponize it.
  • bandyaboot 4y ago
    Come on. He wasn’t “casually saying not to worry”. He literally called it a horrible situation. His point was to suggest that this particular incident was being turned into a a political football. That being said, I think his complaint is, at best, trivial considering the incident has deserved all the attention is has gotten.
• drewda 4y ago
  USDOT does have an important role to play. But the link (which I admittedly didn't follow) has a headline about the CDC. EPA is also an important agency, maybe the most important one for this clean-up. All that to say I'm somewhat skeptical when criticism focuses on Pete Buttigieg in particular...
  • mc32 4y ago
    I dunno, he's the face of the Feds. He sets the tone --this is his purview. He needed to go over there, check it out, figure out the magnitude on the ground and call in the cavalry (EPA, FEMA, etc.) as he saw necessary. But no, it took him two weeks to show his face.
    • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      I wish we, as people, would pay less attention to figureheads and more attention to what's happening behind the curtain. I also wish said figureheads, and the media that comment on them, would report more of what does, doesn't, and should go on behind the curtain.
      • willcipriano 4y ago
        The media is the curtain.
        • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
          No. They're the Munchkins.
          • SoftTalker 4y ago
            They’re the flying monkeys
    • DSMan195276 4y ago
      Err that's not his job. Literally, the NTSB exists as an independent entity from the DOT and is tasked with investigating disasters like this one.
• anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  What's the last solely environmental catastrophe a president has visited? People died in Katrina. There were no immediate deaths from this environmental catastrophe.
  • serf 4y ago
    How was Katrina not an environmental catastrophe -- the casual definition that I find repeatedly is "An environmental disaster or ecological disaster is defined as a catastrophic event regarding the natural environment that is due to human activity." Given that criteria, Katrina was most definitely an environmental catastrophe. Now, if you mean "When was the last time a president visited a catastrophe that involved chemical/biological/radiological factors?" -- well, that's a bit more rare; but I presume that it's done not as a matter of appearing placid by the society at large, but as a form of damage mitigation before all the facts are presumed known. it's essentially a rite of passage for the president to hug people in some tornado ravaged state for photos. I presume the risks outweigh the positive P.R. in actual danger zones. tl;dr : it's easier to declare a hurricane or flood site to be safe enough for presidential passage, so it represents a fairly easy to coordinate photo-op. Things are shakier when the facts about the danger present are not done rolling in. p.s. I feel the need to clarify something: what I mean to remind by calling Katrina an environmental catastrophe was the significant role that society had in amplifying the damage of the event through both careless engineering, careless maintenance, and careless planning -- which was then exacerbated by careless response.
    • anonymouskimmer 4y ago
      You read what I wrote too fast and missed, or misunderstood, at least one word ("solely").
    • SoftTalker 4y ago
      President Carter visited Three Mile Island.
      • Mountain_Skies 4y ago
• noah_buddy 4y ago
  This is a rose tinted look at how GWB handled Katrina. He so bungled the response that people’s opinions of him dropped precipitously afterwards. The excuse for why he didn’t act sooner was that he was on a month long vacation. He was disconnected and praised FEMA which was universally considered to have bungled the recovery. I mean, knowing nothing else, one of the most memorable pieces of pop culture in the last twenty years was “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”
  • thallium205 4y ago
    Kanye says the darndest things doesn’t he.
• ceejayoz 4y ago
  > At least GWB, though a contemptible fellow otherwise, took his frat attitude up in a chopper to survey Katrina. What? Bush’s handling of Katrina was so bad “this is so-and-so’s Katrina” entered the political lexicon as a term for mishandling disasters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_response_to_Hurricane_Katrina https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...
  • WillPostForFood 4y ago
    The point is the double standard, Bush was there for a flyover on day 3, and on the ground day 5, and it was the worst response ever. So what is the East Palestine response in comparison?
    • fastaguy88 4y ago
      After Katrina, almost 1400 people died, and 80% of the city of New Orleans (population ~400,000) was flooded for weeks. No one died in the East Palestine incident. Hard to see the equivalence.
      • haswell 4y ago
        > No one died in the East Palestine incident. Hard to see the equivalence. It seems very premature to draw such a conclusion. If people start dying of cancer in high numbers a few years down the line, any early claims about the non-impact of this spill will age poorly. Regarding Katrina, we have the benefit of hindsight and enough time passing to have gotten a handle on the impact and it’s worth noting that those 1,400 deaths did not occur overnight. If you made an assessment of Katrina’s impact prematurely, such an assessment would be unlikely to capture the true impact of the event. A premature assessment wouldn’t have even considered including ~300-400 of the people who eventually died in health care facilities after the fact.
        • cma 4y ago
          How much worse is burning this stuff than a vinyl siding apartment complex fire? Back of the envelope they burned about 2 orders of magnitude more material than in a large one of those, but were maybe in a 2 orders of magnitude less dense population area than those often take place in. Does the vinyl chloride precursor burn into much worse stuff than the polyvinyl version, for equal masses? I get that it might cross some threshold for acute effects for people right near by that the other fires may never cause even for direct neighbors.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  I can't imagine what any authority could have said to calm the populace. They've basically been truthful this whole time, but nobody wants to hear "This disaster was scary-looking but ultimately not very harmful." They want scary to equal dangerous. Real chemical disasters look like Love Canal, or the quiet fire that eventually ate Centralia, but people want to believe "train on fire" equals "generational trauma" and in this case it doesn't. A Bhopal or Chernobyl or Deepwater Horizon is rare, and most chemical disasters are scary-looking-but-contained. (... and that's before you factor in the work of foreign agents trying to inflate the story as a wedge issue. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2023/03/20/ohio-train-derailment-east-palestine-pro-russia-twitter-accounts-elon-musk/70027849007/ https://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2023/03/20/ohio-train-... )
  • grosswait 4y ago
    I just read the Cincinnati article you posted and it reads like mainstream misinformation. “Claimed without evidence” and throwing “elon musk’s new rating system” in there to boot. It says some things were demonstrably false, but read through other comments here with links to citations and it becomes pretty clear this “news” story is a PR piece without any evidence of its own.
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      Having been here a long time, I'll trust "mainstream misinformation" before I'll trust the sleuthing abilities of HN every day of the week. Seriously, what cited information in these threads should I be looking at? The "status coup" blog? The poster who is alleging some kind of conspiracy to kill people investigating industrial accidents in Ohio?
• cwkoss 4y ago
  It's deeply concerning to me that democratic party insiders are still acting like Pete Buttigieg could be a future presidential nominee after his horrible handling of this disaster. Further horrifying to think that some of these people may rationalize minimizing and hiding evidence of harm from this disaster because they believe it would serve their political goals.
  • kube-system 4y ago
    I am fairly certain most mainstream Americans of any political leaning rolls their eyes when Pete makes a statement on TV. He has had quite the number of mishaps to be commenting on, and I think people are beginning to expect that there will be more under his watch.
    • cwkoss 4y ago
      I don't disagree, but am pretty cynical about the DNCs willingness to change course based on mainstream American opinions 80% of Dems support universal healthcare, but the lobbyists who control the party kept it out of the 2020 platform. Biden was losing the nomination until the party whipped the other candidates to endorse him so he wouldnt be polling worse than Bernie
  • gurumeditations 4y ago
    [flagged]