from Hacker News

Ohio train derailment: environmental disaster quietly unfolding

by sebkomianos on 2/14/23, 1:37 AM with 322 comments

  • by refuse on 2/14/23, 1:58 AM

    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.

  • by trenning on 2/14/23, 4:01 AM

    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-pe...

  • by epakai on 2/14/23, 2:07 AM

    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)

  • by toomuchtodo on 2/14/23, 1:53 AM

  • by avalys on 2/14/23, 2:22 AM

    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.

  • by thepasswordis on 2/14/23, 5:14 AM

    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/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 2 results)

    https://www.foxnews.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 1 result / 'trump' 2 results)

    https://www.nytimes.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 0 results / 'trump' 4 results)

    https://www.msnbc.com/ (ctrl-f 'ohio' - 2 results / 'trump' 9 results!)

  • by AtomicOrbital on 2/14/23, 2:05 AM

    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

  • by aphexddb on 2/14/23, 2:00 AM

    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

  • by perihelions on 2/14/23, 2:32 AM

    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=1593... ("East Palestine Train Derailment")

  • by King-Aaron on 2/14/23, 2:11 AM

    This was posted to reddit the other day: 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.

  • by downvotetruth on 2/14/23, 2:06 AM

    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.

  • by awb on 2/14/23, 2:11 AM

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

  • by renewedrebecca on 2/14/23, 2:07 AM

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

  • by ravel-bar-foo on 2/14/23, 2:05 AM

    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.

  • by waldothedog on 2/14/23, 1:58 AM

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

  • by TheDudeMan on 2/14/23, 2:20 AM

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

  • by steanne on 2/14/23, 2:00 AM

  • by barbazoo on 2/14/23, 2:49 AM

    > 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.

  • by taeric on 2/14/23, 2:37 AM

    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.

  • by asix66 on 2/14/23, 3:52 AM

    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)

  • by sva_ on 2/14/23, 2:23 AM

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

  • by remote_phone on 2/14/23, 3:41 AM

    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.

  • by creato on 2/14/23, 4:10 AM

    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.

  • by conspiranalyst on 2/14/23, 2:46 AM

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

  • by euroderf on 2/14/23, 10:24 AM

    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.

  • by thrill on 2/14/23, 2:21 AM

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

  • by foogazi on 2/14/23, 6:28 AM

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

  • by bfrog on 2/14/23, 3:53 AM

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

  • by fortran77 on 2/14/23, 2:19 AM

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

  • by ChuckMcM on 2/14/23, 2:05 AM

    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

  • by andrewstuart on 2/14/23, 2:35 AM

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

  • by clouddrover on 2/14/23, 2:09 AM

    > you've not heard about it

    False. I have heard about it.

  • by s5300 on 2/14/23, 3:03 AM

    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

  • by Johnny555 on 2/14/23, 2:23 AM

    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.

  • by wnevets on 2/14/23, 3:11 AM

    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?