Almost two weeks ago, a freight train derailed near the small town of East Palestine, Ohio. The result was a chemical spill and a subsequent evacuation of the area for several days. The story was sidelined by President Xi’s foray into 18th century aerospace technology but suddenly became a national story over the weekend.
Now before we go into this, a caveat: I am not a chemist. I understand some of the basics but many of the chemicals involved in this crash are very specific and have an environmental and health impact that would take me days to figure out. So what I have written below is a summary of what I’ve been gleaning from other scientists who know this stuff.
The pictures of billowing smoke over East Palestine are a result of a controlled burn that was initiated three days after the crash. This controlled burn has been highly controversial, with people claiming that it was a coverup or that East Palestine was “nuked” and making comparisons to Chernobyl. It’s understandable: the burn was of vinyl chloride and resulted in the release of phosgene — a very poisonous gas — and hydrogen chloride — which forms hydrochloric acid on contact with water.
However … while, both chemicals are dangerous, the EPA has been monitoring the situation and neither is in concentrations that are concerning (and those concentrations are set fairly conservatively). Furthermore, burning the VC was probably the least bad option of the ones presented because there was a growing danger of an uncontrolled explosion of the chemicals. Here you can find a thread from a chemist that runs through the various chemicals released in the collision and subsequent burn. The gripping hand is that while these are dangerous, they are not around in massive quantities and pale in comparison to some of the stuff we dump in the environment on a regular basis. It’s bad for the surrounding area. But the idea that this is going to contaminate the entire Ohio River basin and poison 10% of the country is hysteria.
This kind of thing is not unprecedented. In 2005, two trains crashed in Graniteville, South Carolina, resulting in a chlorine leak that killed ten people. In 2002, a train derailed in Farragut, Tennessee, releasing sulfuric acid. And that’s just accidents involving Norfolk Southern.
If you’re going to transport dangerous chemicals by train — and our outstanding freight rail system is probably the best, cheapest and safest way to do so — you’re going to occasionally spill them. The best we can do is to clean it up as fast as possible, monitor the situation and try to make right anyone harmed. That is basically what is going on here, thank to hard work from the EPA and state authorities. Norfolk Southern has thrown in a million dollars to help the people of East Palestine but I expect the bill will explode as government agencies and lawsuits weigh in (the aforementioned Graniteville Crash ended up with over $140 million in settlements and fines). I think the main thing that needs to be done — preferably at Norfolk Southern’s expense — is continued monitoring of the health of the river and paying of any medical bills for the people of East Palestine. Long term, we can investigate how to improve rail safety (such as requiring the brake system that the Trump Admin scotched under pressure from the industry).
I don’t want to downplay what has happened here — a small town got hit with a load of dangerous chemicals and the health effects may take years to play out. This is a serious thing. And I wish the press had been more diligent in covering it. But, at this point, it’s not a scandal. It’s not a cover-up. And it’s certainly not a Chernobyl. It’s the sort of environmental mess that happens periodically and we need to be prepared to deal with.
And, to be frank, I’m not particularly interested in hearing caterwauling about this from the Republican Party that has made abolishing or crippling the EPA a priority. Many of the same judges that struck down Roe last year support using the nondelegation doctrine to strip the EPA of its regulatory power and abolish all regulation that is not enacted by Congress itself. Lawsuits are also trying to strip states like California from the ability to regulate their own environment (because it could force business in other states to comply with those rules). The Ohio River was not in a pristine state before this accident occurred and it won’t be in a pristine state anytime soon. But it’s healthier than it used to be, mostly because of the work done by environmental agencies. And those agencies are the ones are monitoring the situation, will alert us to any problems and can best advise on cleanup. They are not perfect by any means, but this sort of things is the reason we created them in the first place.
There is one aspect of this accident where a Chernobyl comparison is appropriate. When people worry about nuclear power, I sometimes point out that the alternative — fossil fuels — is like having a Chernobyl every week only more spread out. For those worried about this crash — and the concern is legitimate — I would note that we have an East Palestine on a regular basis. It’s just more spread out. We produce 13 million tons of vinyl chloride every year, 26,000 times what was released in the crash. That’s not including the vinyl chloride produced as a byproduct. Not all 13 million pounds of that are safely contained. East Palestine is a glimpse of the dirty underbelly of our industrial society and the never-ending need to keep an eye on what exactly we’re putting out there.
With the elephant-sized exception of global warming, every environmental indicator for the United States has improved over the last five decades. We no longer have rivers that catch fire and you can usually breath the air in Los Angeles. The situation in East Palestine is how bad things used to be in far too many parts of the country (and, in many part of the world, how bad things still are). It’s a sign of progress that we now rightly consider that situation unacceptable and that hearings, fines and lawsuits are sure to come in its wake. I welcome ongoing concern about the environment and chemicals being spilled therein. But we also need to take a step back and realize that this is a long struggle and that dealing it will require a functional robust EPA of the type that many people think shouldn’t exist.
A useful (but perhaps not welcome) thing to point out is that this kind of situation is what those pipelines that were going to be Environmental Disasters were meant to avoid.
Yes, David, I can see you typing, I know this isn’t the same chemicals that specific pipeline was meant to carry, and I know it isn’t the place where that specific pipeline was meant to go, the point is that pipelines don’t have to worry about derailments.Report
Very true. Just ruptures. and lack of maintenance. But not derailments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pipeline_accidents_in_the_United_States_in_2022Report
Wow, six? Seems like a lot. I wonder how many train derailments there were that year? Oh, 1044 and that’s down from previous years? Hm. Seems like the kind of number you should have checked before posting.Report
You are comparing apples to ice cubes man. That derailment figure includes every rail operation from the Class 1’s – like NS – to the Regionals, shortlines, ports and industrial lines. If you narrow down to Class 1’s, NS had 112 derailments last year. That’s still not good, but a closer comparison.
Also note your derailments figure doesn’t say how many spilled hazardous materials. Every pipeline rupture did.
Here’s the reality – there is NO SAFE WAY to transport hazardous materials. None. And given that railroads hauled cargo over 534 million railroad miles (meaning moving a unit of cargo one mile by rail) its still the statistically safest way to move this stuff.Report
“You are comparing apples to ice cubes man. ”
…maybe government employees aren’t able to follow conversations more than two sentences long, but right there in the first comment I wrote “pipelines don’t have to worry about derailments”, so the statistics on “number of derailments in a year” seem awfully damn germane.
Or maybe you’re trying to say “yeah but not every derailment is super bad” and you’re right, but not every pipe leak is super bad either!
“[Y]our derailments figure doesn’t say how many spilled hazardous materials.”
You know, you’re right. Let’s see if we can find some numbers.
“[I]n 2022 alone, rail operators reported 337 hazardous material leaks or spills…[r]ailroad derailments counted for 1 in 10 hazmat wrecks in the last decade – and 1 in 4 of those incidents last year[.]”
Welp, so that’s eighty-four derailments resulting in hazardous material spills in 2022. I guess you’re right that it’s not “a thousand”, but it’s still more than ten-to-one in favor of the trains.Report
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From Today’s Washington Post:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/02/17/train-derailment-statistics-safety-damages/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F392707e%2F63efb5ff1b79c61f879897d1%2F59738e7cade4e21a848fe4b9%2F25%2F72%2F63efb5ff1b79c61f879897d1&wp_cu=5471d46db8b7f35fdd491ffd33791772%7C2AE372BEC443EE5DE050007F01004171Report
*shrug* if you want to provide data showing that the number of pipeline incidents is not larger than the number of hazmat spills from train derailments, go right ahead, I’m certainly not going to stop you from supporting my argument.Report
The following came out nastier than I intended. Apology in advance…
So, build a vinyl chloride pipeline network? Does it have to be dedicated to that? Or are there things that can also be pushed through that pipeline, the way a variety of petroleum products share an individual pipeline, with different products requiring some degree of separation at the receiving end? There are at least dozens of chemicals shipped in large volumes by rail. How many of them can safely come into contact with each other? How many pipelines?Report
(points to the part of the comment that says “I can see you typing, I know this isn’t the same chemicals that specific pipeline was meant to carry, and I know it isn’t the place where that specific pipeline was meant to go, the point is that pipelines don’t have to worry about derailments.”)Report
I don’t dispute that. I’m disputing your implicit claim that pipelines can deliver the same large-scale transportation service of hundreds/thousands of industrial chemicals that customers demand and that rail provides.
Heck, despite the volume of ethanol that needs to move between different parts of the country, no one can justify the cost of dedicated pipelines to move it (with small local exceptions).Report
(points to the part of the comment that says “I can see you typing, I know this isn’t the same chemicals that specific pipeline was meant to carry, and I know it isn’t the place where that specific pipeline was meant to go, the point is that pipelines don’t have to worry about derailments.”)
like
the point of this is not the engineering design for a pipe carrying the specific chemicals that were on the train between the two specific points that the train was connecting
the point is that people take it as given that Pipelines Are Horribly Dangerous And Damaging And Always Have Spills And Problems without mentioning that all the other ways have more problemsReport
I’m not particularly interested in hearing caterwauling about this from the Republican Party
Actually, I’m eager to see this accident hyped by Fox and the rightwing wurlitzer, with screaming reports all day every day, endless profiles of weeping people holding their dying dogs, and interviews with fearful people shrieking whattaboutthechildren.
The more they terrify the public, the more it gets cemented into the public consciousness that industrial safety is a Big Concern and Something Must Be Done.Report
You know what this reminds me of, a little?
The Jackson Mississippi Water Crisis.Report
How so?Report
It ties into the whole “we’re forgetting how to do things” thing that I worry at from time to time.
Like… let’s say that you’ve got a complex system that requires a great deal of expertise to keep it oiled and running effectively.
What does this expertise going away look like?Report
We aren’t “forgetting” how to do anything. We still know HOW to do it. In t he case of Jackson – a majority black Democratic voting city in a largely white GOP voting state – the water system has been consistently underfunded at the state level on purpose for decades. NS has decided that keeping its profits up meant firing a third of its workforce over the last ten years, reducing track maintenance expenditures as far as the law allows, and then creating ever longer trains to move more freight so that they could demolish and sell off classification yards to further goose profits.
None of that was forgetting. It was volitional decisions made in service of goals that don’t benefit the majority of the population.Report
Of course. Of course, of course.Report
Technically, these things happen all the time.
Report
Surely someone will come along to give us context. Or at least more than 18 seconds.
Though to judge from the Twitter replies, it won’t matter.
I’m going to take a shower now.Report
If you want to watch the whole clip, you can do so here (sadly, they don’t make it easy to embed).Report
The link doesn’t go to, or have links that go to, whatever PB said, other than the anodyne stuff that was quoted in the text. I did manage to click through to the railroad derailment statistics, and it does seem that in the past 3 years they have been around 1,000 a year, down from the 1,200 in 2019. (Though it’s hard to tell how bad that is, given the amount of rail traffic. Probably someone, somewhere has calculated that.) And there are some useful links to regulatory moves that would likely have reduced derailments, all scuttled when TFG came into office.Report
Sorry about only being able to find you articles quoting him. I’m having trouble finding the full clip of what he said on Yahoo Finance.
They’re reporting that they interviewed him and including his quotations, they tweet out footage…
But I can’t find the full clip.
That’s malpractice on their part, if you ask me.Report
There’s plenty of malpractice to go around.Report
Agreed.Report
Some of it is resulting in 1000 derailments a year!Report
Railway Age is a railroad trade publication, but it does a decent job of summarizing the business side of this accident:
Interestingly for an industry publication, the author throws Tucker Carlson and MTG under the train . . .
https://www.railwayage.com/freight/class-i/ns-ohio-derailment-under-investigation/Report
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/21/1158453029/buttigieg-railroad-safety-east-palestine-derailment-hazardous-chemicalsReport
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/02/21/east-palestine-train-derailment-tucker-carlson-jd-vance-fox-news/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most&carta-url=https%3A%2F%2Fs2.washingtonpost.com%2Fcar-ln-tr%2F392f4a1%2F63f4fdc21b79c61f87a0371f%2F59738e7cade4e21a848fe4b9%2F17%2F72%2F63f4fdc21b79c61f87a0371f&wp_cu=5471d46db8b7f35fdd491ffd33791772%7C2AE372BEC443EE5DE050007F01004171Report
The NTSB preliminary report is out. Its four pages make clear the initial events.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/Documents/RRD23MR005%20East%20Palestine%20OH%20Prelim.pdfReport
The Ohio AG has filed a lawsuit:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/14/us/ohio-norfolk-southern-lawsuit/index.htmlReport