I also love this phrasing that talks about the immediate uncomfortable reactions, but makes no mention on the extremely serious long-term implications of exposure.
These chemicals won't just make you feel unpleasant in the moment, they'll kill you in the long run.
LMFAO vinyl chloride is a multi-organ carcinogen...its literally one of the quickest ways to stage 4 right up there with Benzene exposure.
phosgene was also part of the release when Ohio decided a "controlled burn" of the vinyl chloride was somehow a good idea. the plume could be seen from commercial flights.
honest to god the damage control media outlets are attempting in the midst of what by every definition is just under a massive environmental disaster is just ridiculous. If this happened in China it would be front page news.
Yes, these things take time to fully investigate. Where are the daily updates from the EPA though? Why aren't the major news outlets syndicating these daily EPA updates?
This is relevant to more Americans than the war in Ukraine, which many news outlets have a dedicated section for in the header section (Business, World, Sports, etc.)
I just checked US News & World Report and CNN front pages - not even listed.
According to whom? Looking at this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Environmental_disaste..., it's not hard to find incidents that were arguably worse, eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Dan_River_coal_ash_spill or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_wate...
If they're there, whatever work they're doing is not making it onto front pages. The alternative explanation (subtext from the description above) is more likely - most major news outlets have not sent a journalist to cover this, neither are they covering EPA updates. If they were, why is their work not receiving daily updates on the news outlet front pages?
That's what makes this scary - the few independent journalists that are trying to cover this are being locked out, and the national journalists are nowhere to be found.
Also
https://www.cnn.com/cnn/2023/02/14/us/ohio-train-derailment-...
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-train-derailment-officials-s...
I can't believe how much bullshit you spew when it's so easy to disprove. Google the disaster and any news network and you'll find news about it. Why do you lie? Seriously is it because you want to push your immature cynical "all the government and media is bad" crap?
It's trace amounts. Barely enough to detect.
That suggests intent. While I am as cynical as the next person I wouldn't make a claim like that without also citing evidence to back it up.
[0] - https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/2022/11/15/lets-talk-about-t...
[1] - https://theintercept.com/2022/08/17/new-york-times-dan-goldm...
[2] - https://theintercept.com/2016/01/29/nyt-outside-spending/
[3] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/16/democrats...
[4] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/tax-bezos-help-worke...
Is it damage control or just some strange calculation that it isn't a story that will attract page views?
Both rationales are concerning, but they suggest different pathologies in our media ecosystem.
Chemicals are counter-intuitive. People don't have a good match for looks-scary to is-scary.
I watch the Checmical Safety Board incident report videos from time-to-time. The most common killer in chemical plants? Carbon monoxide: odorless, colorless, tasteless, and simply displaces oxygen. You climb into an enclosed space, have just enough time to realize something's wrong (maybe) before you pass out, and never wake up. The methyl isocyanate that killed in Bhopal rolled along the ground creating a silent blanket of death.
A giant black plume climbing into the cloud layer is scary looking but in no way correlated, one way or another, with the actual risk to public safety. Made for great 6 o'clock news footage, but the followup story really is just "Clean the soot off your house and maybe check your basement for any chemical that rolled away before it burned."
No it’s not
> Vinyl chloride exposure is associated with an increased risk of a rare form of liver cancer (hepatic angiosarcoma), as well as primary liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma), brain and lung cancers, lymphoma, and leukemia.
If there's some fact in the parent comment which is in dispute could you please be a bit more clear about what it is? This is a very unhelpful comment from you.
Reading the Wikipedia link it's not so clear if only continuous exposure elevates cancer risk. However it also lists significant acute effects:
> Prior to 1974, workers were commonly exposed to 1,000 ppm vinyl chloride, causing "vinyl chloride illness" such as acroosteolysis and Raynaud's Phenomenon. The symptoms of vinyl chloride exposure are classified by ppm levels in ambient air with 4,000 ppm having a threshold effect.[17] The intensity of symptoms varies from acute (1,000–8,000 ppm), including dizziness, nausea, visual disturbances, headache, and ataxia, to chronic (above 12,000 ppm), including narcotic effect, cardiac arrhythmias, and fatal respiratory failure.[18] RADS (Reactive Airway Dysfunction Syndrome) may be caused by acute exposure to vinyl chloride.[19]
So I'm not sure if the previous post was harmful fearmongering.
We'd know about the acute effects by now from hospitalization, and we generally know about the chronic effects in the environment because this isn't even the first vinyl chloride spill.
Is Paulsboro, NJ currently a cancer hotbed?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a8519/n...
What should we be looking for?
The parent comment had multiple assertions in it, so there's literally no way for me to know what you meant by "no it's not" until you told me.
If you're gonna argue that there are no consequences to acute exposure, you gonna have to provide some sources.
Additionally, an hour is also several orders of magnitude shorter than a week.
I'm not saying that the residents are facing concerning exposure levels, however your attempts to dismiss that concern have been either incorrect or factually lacking. If you are trying to correct misinformation, you need to raise the bar.
> Carcinogenic classifications: EPA-K;A, IARC-1, NIOSH-Ca, NTP-K, OSHA-Ca, TLV-A1
Makes you wonder.
Once you've got a medical record of exposure that also makes it possible to go after these companies for the long term effects, which should be communicated to you by medical professionals based on your exposure time and estimated dosage. I don't like that that's the requirement for our legal system, but it's the reality.
Tongue in cheek, but assume it all got spread out over the city, I suppose.
https://www.consiltant.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/201909...
> the speed [of evaporation] is determined by, among other things, the pressure in the system, temperature of the substance, substance properties such as boiling point, vapor pressure, molecular weight and density and of course the size of the hole.
Trying to do napkin math of dividing 30,000 gallons into the volume of air over a city under a certain altitude seems like a pointless exercise given the very long list of parameters that would highly influence its dispersion.