What's Going on in East Palestine?
The Train Derailment and Chemical Fire in Ohio is Getting Little Media Attention
I peruse twitter regularly and click on trending terms especially when I don’t know why they are trending or what they mean. Perhaps a week ago I saw East Palestine Fire trending. I figured out quickly that this was related to a train derailment and subsequent chemical fire. I also assumed that perhaps this environmental disaster had happened on the other side of the world, perhaps literally in East Palestine or perhaps in a city somewhere in the Middle East with that name.
Imagine my surprise when I realized the news was from my home state of Ohio, in the good old US of A. Jeff Childers explained the story in this morning’s Coffee and Covid:
Each of the fourteen chemical cars carried 25,000 to 33,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. That’s close to a half million gallons, or millions and millions of pounds of the chemical. From Encyclopedia Brittanica:
Vinyl chloride, also called chloroethylene, [is] a colourless, flammable, toxic gas belonging to the family of organohalogen compounds and used principally in making polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a widely used plastic with numerous applications… Vinyl chloride can cause liver damage, and it is classified as a known human carcinogen.
A spill of carcinogens would be remarkably bad timing if a population had somehow injured their cancer-fighting immune responses. Just spitballing.
OSHA considers vinyl chloride dangerous at 1 part per million (PPM). Here is the NJ Department of Health emergency responder reference for vinyl chloride spills, which says burning the chemical can cause an explosion, among other alarming facts.
So, reading between the lines of the Journal’s February 5th article, we can visualize baffled, gas-masked EPA bureaucrats standing there in East Palestine, peering dazedly at 141 derailed train cars, watching the chemicals gushing into local streams and, presumably, soaking into the town’s ground water, and wondering what to do. They knew East Palestine’s streams connect to the Ohio River, which feeds the Mississippi River, which dumps into the Gulf of Mexico through a vast delta system.
The bureaucrats almost certainly felt a keen sense of urgency to do … something. But what? A massive cleanup operation, as described in New Jersey’s Emergency Responder Quick Reference, would have been expensive, time-consuming, and even more damning, would have gotten a lot of bad media coverage of something you’d expect to see in the Third World, not in America’s breadbasket. No. They needed something … quicker.
On February 6th, the Journal’s headline read “Ohio Train Derailment Prompts Explosion Concerns, Evacuation Order.” The headline suggests the train could have spontaneously exploded, but the more nuanced truth appears in the sub-headline: “Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday instructed residents of East Palestine, Ohio, to stay away from their homes as officials planned to release chemical gas from five derailed tanker cars.”
Ah. So, before it all “exploded,” they planned to deliberately release the chemicals. Why?
The answer appears in an “update” on Norfolk Southern’s website and in a second article about the chemical train derailment published in the Journal on the same day, February 6th, which included this initial paragraph:
A team of experts released a chemical from five tanker cars and ignited it Monday afternoon to prevent a potentially catastrophic explosion following a train derailment Friday along the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
They “ignited it.” In contrast, the Norfolk Southern update said they planned to ‘vent’ the chemicals, and admitted they knew it would catch on fire:
The Journal cited the use of “experts.” They called in the experts! Thank goodness experts were on the scene. I bet knowing the government’s experts were working the job made those fretful East Palestinians feel a lot better. And so the experts came up with a carefully-designed plan with a lot of moving parts: lighting the chemicals on fire, “to prevent a POTENTIALLY catastrophic explosion.”
It was a plan my military-obsessed 12-year old son would come up with on his first try.
The plan must have been terrific, since experts designed it. So what do you suppose happened next? Remember: the GOVERNMENT’S experts were deciding what to do. Ohio’s EPA is packed with diversity hires and nepotistic appointments. And they were being advised by FEDERAL experts and officials as well as the chemical industry’s public relations damage-control team. So we are NOT talking the country’s best and brightest, who were all laid off for not taking the jabs anyway.
As the headline explained, the plan to stop the chemicals from quickly draining into the Ohio river, sorry, I mean to “PREVENT a catastrophic explosion,” the government’s bumbling, industry-captured experts wound up CAUSING a catastrophic explosion.
New Jersey’s Fact Sheet says burning vinyl chloride makes it into hydrogen chloride, which easily binds with water to make hydrochloric acid, and phosgene, a deadly gas, the use of which is a war crime. Hydrogen chloride is not much fun either, as the Encyclopedia Brittanica points out:
Exposure to 0.1 percent by volume hydrogen chloride gas in the atmosphere may cause death in a few minutes. Concentrated hydrochloric acid causes burns and inflammation of the skin.
On February 6th, the same day the experts detonated the chemicals, CBS News ran a story reporting dead fish appearing in creeks up to five miles away. The sub-headline read, “A couple who live about five miles from where the train derailed spotted dead fish in Leslie Run on Sunday night and Monday morning; KDKA’s Erica Mokay reports.”
The Ohio River is only fifteen miles from the site of the accident.
On February 7th, two days after experts blew up the vinyl chloride, the Journal reported a mandatory evacuation in East Palestine was underway. Note that they didn’t evacuate folks BEFORE they blew up the chemicals.* In other words, they didn’t predict the fallout.
This story is apparently being heavily downplayed by the media, even though the environmental impact of this event appears to be potentially catastrophic. It’s not like corporations would ever downplay the risks of something they might be liable for, now would they?
Of course they would.
Potential impact zones were posted on twitter:
This is an image from an airplane that was above the cloud level of the chemical fire burning a hole in the atmosphere
Contrary to what Jeff Childers wrote I was able to find some fairly credible reports regarding animals and chickens dying. Here is one:
Some people on the ground seem rather upset by this. A warning for excessive use of profanity:
Ahh corporations, the same as it ever was. Never forget how replaceable you are to them. I found a video explaining that Norfolk Southern train inspection time was recently reduced to 90 seconds from 3 minutes. To save on labor costs or something.
Of course everybody is distracted with stories about spy balloons:
And maybe just maybe those are actually Alien UFOs!
Jeff Childers summarizes the dilemma well:
The entire country is headed down the wrong track, and if it crashes the disaster will make what’s happening in Ohio look like an early movie trailer. Nor should we forget how the pandemic created this disaster, through understaffing caused by vaccine layoffs and by over-stressed supply chains. In a sense, the Ohio accident is just one more injury directly attributable to our overpaid, over-fed public health expert class.
We need to fire them all and start over.
This whole story...I hadn’t heard about it AT ALL until late last night...is so disturbing. It shows they truly and most literally do not care about the typical citizen (you know, the one who pays the taxes they waste and use on themselves). Disgusting. People are going to be dying, developing horrific cancers from this. They’ll deny it has anything to do with the spill.
Some random bits I’ve picked up:
There have been observations that the fallout affects a significant amount of Amish territory, so the contaminating control group suggestion has been going around (think Dr Rose asking at one point.)
Ohio river I think nearly sourced there, runs SOUTH from there, traversing the entire wiggly Ohio/Kentucky… borders into the Mississippi and out to Ocean. Not a big deal. Maybe it will all flush out with runoff.
Happened on Feb 3, … think detonated? on Feb 6? SOTU mentioning victorious win intel chip factory IN OHIO on Feb 7, CNN article finally on Feb 11. I’m sure it was just chance they didn’t mention an ongoing environmental catastrophe in Ohio where that chip factory… no. Balloons and aliens were clearly more critical.