Train Derailments and Chemical Spills

“The third (count ’em!) science story to catch my attention in recent months!”

Fair warning: this is a lengthy post. Once I started writing about it, I just couldn’t stop, which was actually quite an enjoyable exercise for me. But, uh, maybe make yourself some coffee before getting into this one.

On February 3rd, 2023, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio. By all accounts, this should have been small news potatoes. After all, some 1,000 train accidents and derailments happen every year in the United States. And yet, in the some three weeks since then, it has come to dominate a not-insignificant portion of news media coverage across the political spectrum. This is because, of course, this wasn’t just any train derailment; this train was carrying dozens of tanker cars of hazardous chemical materials, including vinyl chloride and butyl acrylate, and those names mean nothing to anyone without a chemistry degree so who knows what the hell they’ll do to your body.

The town of East Palestine was evacuated for several days during and after the controlled burning of these chemical substances by federal and corporate emergency response units. This burn caused massive black clouds to fill the skies over Ohio. “Birds fell dead out of the skies, the rivers clogged with poisoned fish, the entire Ohio river watershed is suddenly at risk of dangerous pollution, this is Chernobyl 2.0, reporters are being arrested for trying to report on the issue, all these weather balloons are a false flag maneuver to distract the public, and the government is covering it all up.“ This is scary shit. This is literally out of a movie. No wonder it gained such media publicity.

Except only part of that is true. The rest is part of a weird echo chamber of TikTok newsfeeds and confused public discourse that has lead to misinformation and conspiracy theories. Let’s try and unpack some of it.

In case you haven’t picked up on it yet, everything in that sentence within quotation marks is patently untrue or massively overblown. I want to get that out of the way quickly, because I’m not in the market of peddling falsehoods (unlike certain other folks), and I feel icky just writing things that I know with reasonable certainty are factually wrong.

And yet, these are all things that I have heard or read online in the three weeks since the initial derailment. In fact, I believed some of them, initially. The government is covering up a massive, unprecedented environmental disaster and arresting reporters on the scene? Well, yeah, that seems reasonable, I already believe we live in a corporate police state, so why not? I mean, the timing is too perfect with all this bullshit about shooting down balloons, like we’re all playing some twisted version of Animal Crossing, but instead of using slingshots to shoot down balloons and collect furniture we’re using multi-million dollar weaponized aircraft to scream through the skies and obliterate anything with more corners than a sphere. Next thing you know, birthday party clowns will be publically executed for constructing the recently-criminalized giraffe balloon animal. Seems like a reasonable cover-up story to me.

This is perhaps another exercise of taking my own ego down a notch and realizing that, as always, no one is immune to propaganda, and this is equally true of conspiracy theories. I’m certainly not immune, and if I’m not, then what hope do any of you yokels have? I do mean that as a joke, of course, we are all equally capable of independent research/susceptible to underhanded thought control tactics. But it might as well not be a joke because some people do literally think that way. That’s the other thing that struck me about this whole train wreck; it’s been weirdly politicized on the fringe of both American parties, sometimes rightly so, but often in such awful, tone-deaf ways. Ways that make my sad little socialist heart die inside every time I read (recently deleted) tweets like “New Palestine disaster filling the Ohio river with dangerous chemicals, poisoning the water of yokel central. Gee, that’s too bad. Perhaps they’ll reevaluate their voting patters a bit! (They won’t)”. Even though it’s deleted, I saw this tweet. It showed up in my feed. I know it existed. This is one of the worst possible leftist take of the situation. And these people wonder why everyone hates them. You are literally giving them ammo to shoot you with.

What’s interesting about that larger article, though, is that it conveniently captures that fringe politicization from both sides of the aisle in easy, archetypal examples. There’s the dumbass “elite” on the left tweeting about how those “maroon moron MAGAfuckers” in Ohio are too stupid to vote in their own best interest and that this disaster is somehow their fault or the fault of the GOP as a whole. I’ll admit, I hold no love for Trump, his cronies, or right-wing nationalism in general. I have probably, somewhere, said some things in the past that border on this kind of patronizing shit. But at least I’m not blaming several thousand average everyday people for a train wreck that turned their town into Silent Hill. But then on the right, you have the shysters in Fox News and the conservative hollows of TikTok that claim that this whole thing is a government coverup, that no one cares about Ohio, and that the Democrats are really the ones to blame for the wreck of a train owned by a private company. I wouldn’t even say the particular Newsweek article I chose is a particularly egregious example of this; I think it’s pretty even-handed, given the circumstances. But it does delve into some inaccuracies, such as that there’s no media coverage of this or the government isn’t doing anything about it. But what the hell is the truth, then?

Personally, I blame everyone, but we’ll get into that later. For now, let’s lay out the best facts that I can find. My sources will be coming from left-leaning news sites (primarily Vox), so, you know, make your own conclusions and do your own research, I guess, but I think we can come to agree on at least a few things.

So, first. The train derailed. Several tankers worth of chemicals collided with each other, left the rails, and spilled into the environment. These chemicals included vinyl chloride, as mentioned earlier. Fires start, and the risk of explosion from un-popped tankers is real. Cleanup crews begin to assess the situation, and both the government of Ohio and Norfolk Southern, the train company that was running this freight, show up in East Palestine. Since it’s unclear exactly how much hazardous liquid has escaped into the ground, air, and water, this part’s speculative, but based on the fact that twenty of the loaded cars in the train were carrying chemicals, and that the average tanker can hold somewhere between 7,000 and 30,000 gallons of liquid, we could safely assume that hazardous materials released are somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 gallons. That is a lot of liquid. Although my estimations may be totally off, because I don’t really know how trains work, an undoubtedly large amount of chemicals have been released into the environment.

What happens next probably seems bizarre. Officials, to prevent the chemicals from leaching into the ground and to (somehow?) reduce the risk of further explosions, determine that the best course of action is to begin a controlled burn of the chemicals at the site. This controlled burn is actually what ends up creating those huge black clouds, and releases hydrogen chloride and phosgene into the atmosphere, which is largely what people will end up smelling for the next three weeks. You would think that this is a terrible decision, and would only make things worse, but, honestly, it’s the best of several very bad options. The worst is to do nothing or clean up slowly and risk a massive explosion, another terrible option being to try and siphon out the chemicals once they reach the water table, and what’s let is maybe the best option, given the circumstances; burning them.

I want to emphasize that burning the chemicals was largely done to avoid an explosion of the tankers, and this was the fastest way to do it. If there wasn’t an explosion risk, I like to think they would have cleaned it up without the huge plumes of smoke. But despite that, it might not have been the absolute worst decision, environmentally. Burning the chemicals is a kind of crude oxidation process, a tactic that is used by actual environmental remediation specialists to remove chemicals from the environment. Of course, in controlled settings this is done through chemical oxidation, but in this emergency setting, burning the chemicals will prevent them from getting into the water and instead release the (slightly less) harmful byproducts into the air. It is infinitely easier for chemicals to disperse and dissipate in the atmosphere than it is in ground or surface water. I mean, think about how much more air there is in, well, the sky than there is water in the dinky streams running through Ohio. It’s a matter of scale. The emergency response also begins liquid chemical control, digging trenches, damming water ways, using boom floats to trap chemicals in the water, and collecting contaminated soil for treatment. But none of these are perfect processes.

Hence you get the massive cloud of chemical pollutants that filled the town, causing people’s eyes and lungs to burn, folks to have asthma attacks, and foxes and chickens to apparently die. Here’s where some of the first falsehoods start to creep up. Birds did not fall from the sky (I made that one up, actually). Though there are reports of animals, including people’s pets, getting sick and, in some cases, dying. At least 3,500 fish have been reported dead, which is to be expected when you pour tens of thousands of gallons of petroleum products into a stream. That is an undeniably large amount of fish. However, it isn’t as apocalyptic as the stories going around might have you believe. That’s because while however much of chemicals were spilled, it apparently wasn’t that much, according to the EPA.

Besides burning the chemicals off and collecting what they can, the Ohio EPA, who had hopefully been on the site from the beginning, with the backing of Ohio’s state government, decided that chemicals that escaped containment would be so diluted by the regional water sources as to pose no threat to residents. Yes, residents were evacuated for several days during the chemical burn. Could this be because they’re covering up the scale of it? I suppose so, but then again, it could also be because the train really contained the alien from Super 8. More likely it’s a precautionary measure because, unfortunately, how these chemicals affect people is poorly understood. And we know even less about how they affect people when you mix dozens of chemicals together. People were allowed to return to their homes several days later, though many reported, and will likely continue to report, that it smells like nail polish remover and their eyes burn.

I’m not saying that I understand what it’s like to have your entire town gassed out by a government-initiated burn of hazardous chemicals, but I tried to cook fried chicken with olive oil one time. Did you know that olive oil’s vaporization temperature is about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, about a hundred and fifty degrees less than regular vegetable oil? And that it turns into a suite of dangerous volatile organic chemicals when it vaporizes? I didn’t know that. So when I opened up the dutch oven I was using to heat the oil, a massive plume of blue smoke poured out and burned my eyebrows off. I dropped the lid, covered my eyes, and started coughing because I couldn’t breathe. The smoke alarm went off, Cheyenne ran in screaming, and I had to turn off the stove, put the cover back on the chemical weapon I had created, and run the still boiling pot of oil to my patio, where I let it sit, still covered, to cool off. That didn’t change the fact that my kitchen now had more smoke than Cheech and Chong’s car, and this shit wasn’t getting me high, it was burning my eyes and skin. So we opened up all the windows, set up fans all around the house, and locked my cats in the farthest, most ventilated room we had. Since smoke rises and they are gravity-bound by their fat bodies to the lowest possible state, they were fine. Then we went and got Culvers, because fuck that fried chicken.

The point of this story is that the smell of that burning oil loitered in the kitchen for two weeks. Every time I turned on the oven hood fan, I’d get a backdraft of olive oil smoke. The dutch oven still smells like VOCs. It doesn’t matter how many times I clean the damn thing. So when, after they’ve been burning off petroleum hydrocarbons that make olive oil look like baby’s first chemistry set, and the government tells you to clean your house? That shit ain’t going away. East Palestine is going to stink for the next few weeks. And that really, really sucks. But it is also, very likely, safe.

Residents were allowed to return to East Palestine after the EPA confirmed that, first of all, the air quality was safe and below any threshold levels for dangerous chemicals. So, even if the chemicals were detectable in the air, the EPA determined levels to below what is dangerous to humans. Second, they confirmed the same thing with the water. The EPA said that East Palestine’s municipal drinking water was safe to drink, thanks to the city-scale water filtration systems in place. The reason they likely said to not drink the water if you’re on a well system is that they don’t really know yet how far this stuff is going to move. Hopefully not far at all, but I mean, if you’re on well water and there probably isn’t but we can’t rule it out is a slow-moving chemical monster under your home, wouldn’t you want to test first, too?

This is where the major difficulty of the whole thing comes in. Although the Ohio EPA’s tests have confirmed that the town is now safe for residents, and has been for quite a while, we don’t know enough about these chemicals or what’s escaped containment to say for sure about the long-term health risks. We know the municipal water is safe to drink and that chemical levels are below acceptable risk. Is it possible that drinking these chemicals for a long period of time, even below acceptable risk, will have negative health effects? Certainly. The soil spills have largely been contained, but is it possible that trave amounts of these chemicals can seep into people’s homes and basements? Yes. Will the water-borne chemicals in the river, even though they’re so diluted as to be undetectable, cause persistent problems in the local ecosystem up and down the food chain? Maybe. We don’t know. Are there chemicals we aren’t testing for, or chemicals that were made in the mixing of the spillage, that are now roaming free in the environment, in the air, the water, the ground? Quite possibly. We don’t know. The train derailment is a disaster, and it will have long-reaching and deep-seated environmental consequences for years to come. The good news is that it’s pretty limited in scope, mostly to this one area. The bad news is that we really, really don’t know how big that scope is or how dark it gets.

Ultimately, that will be the most difficult and exhausting effect of this spill on East Palestine now and for years to come; science doesn’t have answers for you. It’s as safe as we can make it, and we think it’s safe enough for you to live in, but we cannot guarantee that you won’t develop aggressive cancers or neurological complications years down the line. Or that children born in this town, even years later, wouldn’t be born with abnormally high frequencies of birth defects. Or that these chemicals in the water won’t bioaccumulate in fish, and anything you catch in the water for the next fifty years could be toxic. How can you live with that risk? How can anyone be comfortable in their own home again after something like that?

Of course, this is still a matter of scale. Officials feel confident that there is no immediate threat to anyone in the area, and that short-term and medium-term health effects are not a concern, mainly due to how big the spill was in comparison of how much larger the surrounding environment is. Containment and treatment measures are still ongoing, and probably will be for a while. But I think it is absolutely understandable that people in that town would be angry with the government for the slow response, especially considering that, by a fluke of definition, this disaster is not qualified for FEMA aid. The Ohio state government actually turned down federal aid, since they have it under control. Somehow, I find it reassuring that they think it’s a small enough deal that they can handle it on their own. But then again, I don’t have to live there.

And I mean, who the hell am I to downplay this whole thing, anyway? Because let’s be honest, as much as I try to push myself the other way, I am still downplaying this. I’m looking at this from a national scale, and for all I know, it could be way worse than anyone estimates. I’m not a voice of authority, I have never been to East Palestine, I haven’t seen what it’s like. I’m not the one filming those videos that pop up all over Reddit of the oil-slick waters and dead fish they’re still finding weeks later (though it’s an interesting perspective to consider that people living in exploited places, like at the backs of industrial factories in the US and abroad, live with this every day). I’m literally the “liberal elite” chiming in with my arm chair takes and soapbox opinions without ever having been on the ground. And why am I downplaying it, anyway? Because I trust science? Because I trust the EPA?

There are roughly three government agencies I will more or less trust sight unseen, and that’s the EPA, the US Forest Service, and the National Park Service, and the NPS is basically just the forest service again. But why do I trust them implicitly? I have no inherent reason to besides the voice of authority and the hope that they’re acting in the best interest of us and science (plus the fact that I largely agree with what these organizations are trying to do). The U.S. government is shady as fuck, but this distrust runs deep on both sides of the aisle, much deeper than I can get into now. I can’t really blame people in East Palestine for wanting to test water and air themselves, and at least one environmental attorney seems concerned that the Ohio government isn’t being entirely truthful with its citizens. This is the difficulty of living in a post-truth world; everything is suspect, and your beliefs may be based as much on faith as any real-world “fact.” And yet, what else can I do but believe the reliable, credible sources? Anything else often leads to sticking your head in the sand or, well, conspiracy theories. So I’ll do the only thing I can and base my opinions on the facts presented, and we’ll all have to wait and see what comes of it.

Speaking of trust, I sure would be pissed if the train company that fucked this all up still hadn’t shown up for weeks afterwards, and took until February 19th to make any sort of statement about it all. It’s not clear to me at this time if the CEO of Norfolk Southern is going to visit East Palestine at all; he flat-out canceled a visit because of apparent threats of violence. I mean, I can’t really blame the people in that town. And I’m the government’s reaction and rollout of aid has been slow and patchwork, as it always is. There’s no perfect disaster response, but the US seems especially poor at its implementation, at least as far as post-industrial countries go. But speaking of violence and press releases, there is another thing that I can cover really quickly. There was only one reporter arrested for trying to cover the train derailment; he is a reporter for NewsNation. It wasn’t clear why he was picked out from the crowd, though his charges of disorderly conduct were later dropped by the state, which suggests that there might not have been a good reason to arrest him. Oh, wait, did I mention that the one reporter arrested is black? Hmmm. Wonder why the police singled out a black reporter to arrest…

But it would be wrong to say that reporter(s), plural, were arrested, because it was just the one. And it would be overblown to say that there was a media blackout on the event, or that it wasn’t being covered, because, come on, this shit has made national headlines for weeks. It had an article in the New York Times the day of, apparently. But also, how can you blame national news outlets for not paying much attention initially? This is such a regional, local event. Disastrous, frightening for thousands of people, and surely worthy of stories, but compared to other ongoing things, it’s a blip in the radar. But people took that lack of focus as a sign of a larger coverup, and things snowballed on TikTok until suddenly it was trending again. So goes the world today. Although I do still find it odd that the whole weather balloon thing maintained such traction for so long. It stinks of something, but I don’t know what. I have other thoughts on that, but I will hold my tongue for now. This post is already far too long, and I’m not even being paid to write it.

But that is the state of East Palestine, Ohio, as it stands today, and from what little of it I can see. The spill is too small to pollute much more of the river, and this is not comparable to something like Chernobyl in any meaningful way. Maybe comparable in that they’re both largely based on human error, perhaps? Though even that’s debatable, since the derailment was probably caused by an overheated wheel bearing or something similar, a mechanical failure common to trains. I guess, I don’t know about trains? What the hell do I know about trains?

I went into this whole thing expecting to find that I would be writing about one of the biggest environmental disasters of the year, and instead came away deeply disappointed by the whole scale of it. There isn’t much of a good reason why I should be writing about this at all, really. It shouldn’t have gained the traction that it did, or taken on such strange, conspiratorial shapes in my mental space as it ended up doing. But I wrote so, so much about it now, and maybe that’s exactly because of the space that it took up in my head. It was this shadow thing of immense proportions and meaning, and when I took a closer look at it, and really did the research, I found that the amount written about it was highly disproportionate to the actual notability of the event. Every reputable news source has written thousands of words and probably dozens of articles about this thing, now. But what keeps poking up for me is that there does seem to be a larger meaning behind all of it. The ways that this connects to larger stories are hidden in the smoke, suggested by forms and tangents. There is more here.

Perhaps the biggest threat of misinformation and conspiracy theory is that this stuff grows unchecked and the people who buy into it often, if ever, research to confirm their beliefs. It sticks in your mind, filed away as a new piece of background information, categorized and correlated with the same weight and assumed veracity of everything else you have every taken the time to learn about or commit to memory. So the next time something like this happens, you’re reminded of the previous “cover-ups” and “birds falling from the skies.” There is no cover-up happening here; if what the EPA says is true, there’s not even a big environmental disaster to hide. Just your standard, run of the mill oil spill (God, what a nightmare world we live in that “oil spills” become “run of the mill”). But hmm, if you think about it, it sure would be a convenient way to hide other things. Like lifting safety regulations on trains. But the rabbit hole goes ever deeper. It becomes self-perpetuating. TikTok sure seems to have a great track record for this kind of stuff recently, though it could be any social media platform, really. TikTok isn’t special.

But from an environmental perspective, the hardest part of this whole thing is, well, perspective. On a regional, national, or global scale? This is a drop in the bucket. This is less than a drop in the bucket. This is like spitting in the bucket but missing so badly that only the little microscopic flecks of spit caught by the wind make it into the bucket. The East Palestine train derailment will likely contaminate the local aquifers and surface water for decades, contributing to ecological degradation in minor, insidious ways, and there is the very real possibility of East Palestine becoming a hot spot for rare, long-term cancers, decades down the line. But it is nothing compared to the larger consequences of industrialization around the world. Hell, you are more likely to contract cancer from your non-stick pan than you are from an event like this. The government won’t do anything to protect you from that.

Did you know that one of the single largest inland oil spills happened in the Kalamazoo River, Michigan, in 2010? It was caused by a rupture in Enbridge’s Line 3 (go fucking figure, here come those motherfuckers again), and spilled about a million barrels of crude oil into the Kalamazoo river, closing 35 miles of the river for cleanup and hazards to human health, and cost over a billion dollars an five years to fix. This is an order of magnitude larger than what has happened in East Palestine. And its larger cousin, the 1991 Line 3 spill (also Enbridge) was 1,700,000 gallons. It is, to date, the single largest inland oil spill. Do you remembering hearing about that one in science class? Or how about the 2010 one? No? Yeah, I don’t either, and for good reason, because you know what was happening at the same time as the 2010 spill? The fucking Deepwater Horizon spill off the Gulf of Mexico. One of the single largest oil spills in history (not counting the Gulf War, which was basically one enormous oil spill the size of a small country), the Deepwater Horizon disaster killed 11 people, injured 17 others, spilled 210,000,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, killing millions of birds, fish, and other sea life. Playing the comparison game, it’s easy to get swamped by the sheer scale of this other shit that’s happened, and I don’t mean to drown out East Palestine. Their suffering is real. But the media attention feels vastly disproportionate to what’s actually happening there.

Or how about the fact that the Ohio River watershed, and the Mississippi watershed that it is a constituent part of, are already some of the most polluted waters in the country? Sure, we don’t have an immense amount of garbage or human waste floating in the rivers (not anymore, anyway), but thanks to industrialized agriculture, all the pesticides, fertilizers, and additives sprayed onto food throughout the American Midwest eventually all end up in the rivers, and the ocean or ground water down the line. All those dead zones and algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico? Yeah, that’s our fault. If you’re worried about the Ohio river being polluted by East Palestine, you’re really missing the much, much, much bigger picture. Not that East Palestine doesn’t matter; it does. 3,500 dead fish would beg to differ. And the people there, they can’t really be sure if their streams are safe or not anymore. They deserve cleanup and safe waters. But don’t all the rivers?

Industry has this funny way of making all these spills, chemicals, garbage dumps, refineries, cleaning plants, waste burning sites, and other noxious entities into something like, ironically true to the movie/novel, white noise. Once it’s everywhere, you stop noticing it at all. These things are necessary parts of industrialization, they say. We need this to survive, to build, to expand. Just don’t look at the man behind the curtain and it isn’t so bad. Ignore it, and it will go away. A world built on fossil fuel extraction is a world built on the quiet implication that things like East Palestine will happen. It’s a natural outcome of systems of extractions. And this will happen everywhere. Maybe not to you, of course. But you never know.

Oh! But there’s the kicker. We can’t forget to mention that this kind of stuff happens routinely and on a more systematic, insidious scale to poor neighborhoods and people of color all the time. People who can’t afford, for reasons financial, social, or geographical, to ignore the white noise, the man behind the curtain. Like living in a neighborhood in Minneapolis where they’re burning trash in a POC neighborhood because I guess their health is expendable. Or the construction of a new warehouse in Chicago’s Latino neighborhoods because, sure, there’s already existing industrial infrastructure there, but why do you think it was there in the first place? Or how a gas plant from a century ago can still produce cancerous chemicals in a largely black neighborhood while the company that owns it stubbornly refuses to clean up? Environmental racism, or the systematic act of taking those “accidents of industry” and pushing the effects onto historically disenfranchised groups, is very real. Think about that discomfort of not knowing that I mentioned way earlier. Of never being sure if your home is truly safe. Marginalized groups of people in spaces of environmental degradation have been living with that reality for literal generations. While white folks certainly feel the effects of resource extraction too (I propose Hibbing, Minnesota as a weird example), it is so often highly disproportioned. And while I’m not in the position to answer this question myself, I do want to wonder whether or not this derailment would have gotten the same media attention if East Palestine wasn’t 98% white. Remember that reporter that got arrested? Hmmm.

But let’s get back to trains, and the perspective of this whole thing. Remember when I said that this is one of a thousand train derailments every year? If we assume that something on this scale is a fluke, but that 1% of train derailments contain some concentration of hazardous chemicals like this, then that’s ten derailments every year with non-zero, local, long-term environmental impacts comparable to what the end result of the East Palestine derailment will be. And that’s a generous assessment of an industry that regularly, consistently does everything in its power to cut costs by firing workers, skimping on safety regulations, and bribing senators to ease up on them, all in search of a bigger profit margin.

Fun story, did you know that fancy train braking technology exists that might have diminished or prevented this disaster? And that it was regulated into use on trains by Obama, and then removed from regulation by Trump (citing the high cost of installation and maintenance to corporations), and then quietly ignored by Pete Buttigieg? Funner story, did you know that none of that applied to the train that derailed in East Palestine because it wasn’t considered “high-hazard flammable”? This train avoided safety regulations by altering the definition of “hazard” so that it no longer applied to chemicals that can explode a tanker car. You’d think that would be the first fucking thing to change, but no. Because right or left, corporate or government, they do not actually care about your health or well-being. In the end, it’s what makes them the most money. And like the Ford Pinto, it’s always easier to clean up the mess than fix the problems.

If recent anti-union action by railroad officials and the fucking president of the United States is anything to go by, this is an industry (and government) that cares less for its workers than the generally accepted baseline. I’m referring to, of course, the railroad strike in Nomvember of 2022 that threatened to shut down railroad freight, with the primary sticking point being how many days of paid sick days the workers get. Sure, it’s a bit more complicated than just “corporation wouldn’t give the union what they wanted,” because some unions had agreed to a tentative contract but a handful of holdouts were waiting on a better contract, hence the threat of a strike. But they were asking for seven days of paid sick leave. Do you know how many paid vacation days workers in Germany get, let alone sick days? Twenty-five. Minimum. And their trains seem to run fine! (Except when der trein ist kaput, ja)

But the railroad corporations, and the federal government, know what kind of power these unions have. As Biden himself said, economic devastation. They were scared of this strike. So scared that they basically broke all modern labor law precedent (well, not really, because what they did was technically legal, but established in the 1920’s) and forced the unions to accept the contract. That is practically unheard of in labor relations, from what I can tell. The federal government doesn’t just waltz in and dictate what unions do. But they did, because the boards of the railroad companies asked them to. The heads of these railroad companies are making tens of millions of dollars a year. And they’d rather cut paid sick days (you know, when you literally cannot go to work) for thousands of workers than make a few hundred thousand less. Sure, maybe it’s not quite that simple. Operating budgets run into the billions, with a “B.” But there’s a reason they can get away with pocketing millions of dollars, and it sure isn’t financial management.

But that was a tangent that got far, far away from the one particular train derailment in the case here, today. I never thought I’d say it, but let’s go back to Ohio. My point in all of this, which has now outgrown any of my initial estimations for run-time and has surely been lost, is NOT to dismiss the East Palestine derailment. It is a disaster, yes, and it has drastically disrupted the lives of thousands of people in ways that we may not fully understand for decades to come. They deserve compensation from those that caused the problem, support from those trying to fix it, and kindness from the rest of us. Don’t try to dunk on them because they live in a red state. Not only is it bad form, it’s actively cruel. But this is a decidedly local problem. A local problem caused by national politics, sure, but still a local problem. Changes should be made to prevent something like this from happening again. I don’t want to downplay the human story here.

However. I do want to downplay the environmental story. Ironic, isn’t it? Birds did not fall dead from the sky. The Ohio River is not at risk of (any more than standard) serious contamination. One singular reporter was (likely wrongfully) arrested. There is not a government cover-up. There was a temporary evacuation, and permanent health risks (including cancer and birth defects) will likely go unanswered for an indeterminate length of time, but this is not Chernobyl 2.0. These are chemicals that, for the most part, dilute quickly, and some of them even break down into less dangerous components. As far as the EPA can tell, the water and the air is clean once again. This may be little consolation from an agency with an uncomfortable track record, but they have hopefully learned since, uh, 9/11. Norfolk Southern, the company whose train derailed, promised to set aside at least two million dollars for East Palestine relief aid. Life will be uncomfortable for some time, but it will return to normal. There weren’t even any fatalities.

But why did this thing become such a huge media sensation, if its long-term impacts are ultimately local and short-term impacts already cleaned up? That goes back to that echo chamber I mentioned way at the beginning. This was a local event that, at any other time, would have garnered little more than a passing story. But an information gap, filled in by interested TikTokers, repeated by national news pundits, and politicized by fringe moguls, created something that captured people’s attention and made it incredibly difficult for the average person to sift through to the truth. Conspiracy theories and flashy taglines of destruction always make the front page. And what we’re left with is a hazy cloud of swirling rumors and misinformation that is as difficult to dissipate as the black smoke over Ohio. None of this serves any purpose but to cloak the much larger stories at play here. The mismanagement of the railroads from not just the top of the company but from the heights of government. A lone example indicative of much larger ways of the dramatic effects that industry can have on the environment, even accidentally. And, beneath it all, a tale of how it is so, so easy to weaponize not only the coverage of a disaster but the suffering of those being exploited by capital for its own gain.

Balancing this story between wanting to be cognizant of the real-life impact this has and is having on people while also trying to be aware of how minuscule this thing is on an environmental scale is difficult. No environmental disaster should be dismissed for its scale; here or anywhere, people and animals alike losing their homes and ecosystems is tragic. But there is just so, so much unsaid about all of this, or things just hinted at in most news articles, that it’s impossible for me to also not catch on to the bigger trends here. Is there a way to do that tastefully? Have I succeeded in trying to humanize folks while also getting my point across? Or have I, like I suspected earlier, gotten deeply involved in something that is really not worth as much time as we’ve all spent on it now. There are bigger fish to fry.

Sure, maybe this whole post is just me and my soapbox putting a leftist spin on a minor tragedy. And it’s tacky and I’m just as guilty as the rest of the news media for, as I said myself, fringe politicization. I’m not so blind to my own biases as to not see the irony here. But let’s be honest; the train derailment at East Palestine is bad. There’s no doubt about it. The town deserves help. But in a larger context, everything else is much worse.