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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

> can make people dizzy and drowsy

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.

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Our fearless US press is too scared to have on-site staff to cover the largest ecological land-based disaster since Three Mile Island. Or they've been told by the regime it's a non-issue? Not sure which is worse, but the outcome is what you see before you; back page coverage a week after the incident. Barely a blurb.

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.

>Our fearless US press is too scared to have on-site staff to cover the largest ecological land-based disaster since Three Mile Island

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...

"...the outcome is what you see before you; back page/hardly any coverage a week after the incident. Nothing on the front pages a week after the incident. Barely a blurb."

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?

Before you mock the press maybe take a look at how they are being treated in Ohio. This is from a press conference given by the governor last week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQMLxBpiSu8

If true, thia should be even bigger news - instead front pages are covered with chinese baloons

I would like to see Ohio law enforcement try that against ABC News, CNN, etc. (they won't)

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.

Sounds just like Russia!

Hard to tell what's going on when the "before" isn't shown in the video, and very large sections of what is there has talking heads but no audio / silence.

Prove there's a conspiracy to reduce coverage of this event.

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?

No need for a conspiracy when the spy balloons (Jan 28th) and Turkish earthquake (Jan 6) happened concurrently (Feb 3 initial derailment, Feb 6 for giant black smoke from controlled release).

Do you know how much phosgene, though?

It's trace amounts. Barely enough to detect.

> the damage control media outlets are attempting

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.

Time and time again, even media sources that we're told are trustworthy and rigorous show that they'll shill for corporate interests if given enough financial incentive and a promising enough narrative[0][1][2][3][4]. At what point do we just assume that financial conflict of interest is inherent in how media reports on issues?

[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...

> 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.

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.

It's honestly that there's not much story because it looks worse than it is.

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."

> LMFAO vinyl chloride is a multi-organ carcinogen...its literally one of the quickest ways to stage 4 right up there with Benzene exposure.

No it’s not

https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...

> 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.

Don’t chide me. Parent comment is ridiculous and harmful fearmongering and hyperbole. Read your own link - there is no mention of carcinogenicity* from acute exposure and environmental a biological persistence is very low. I would be more concerned if I spent a career in a vinyl chloride production facility without proper ppe.

There is no language in that link that limits the risks to long term exposure. If you follow the OSHA link on that page, you'll see that the ERPG-3 is 20000 ppm; that's the level at which some people will start facing lethal complications after an hour of exposure.

If you're gonna argue that there are no consequences to acute exposure, you gonna have to provide some sources.

20,000 ppm! Do you understand how high that is??

"The levels required for acute exposure risk ate very high" is factually quite different from "there is no risk from acute exposure."

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.

Parent comment referred to carcinogenicity.

Yes, it is classified as a carncinogen.

> Carcinogenic classifications: EPA-K;A, IARC-1, NIOSH-Ca, NTP-K, OSHA-Ca, TLV-A1

Not from acute exposure!

High enough you could start using percentages!

> Don’t chide me. Parent comment is ridiculous and harmful fearmongering and hyperbole. Read your own link - there is no mention of harm from acute exposure and environmental an biological persistence is very low.

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.

There were no severe acute effects - there were no hospitalizations, the vast majority of the vinyl chloride was intentionally burned, and the little that remains has very low environmental or biological persistence.

As is so often the case, people who fearmonger about what could happen fail to notice that the medical establishment keeps quite good records on what is happening.

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?

Exactly! Vinyl Chloride is an extremely common and high volume industrial use chemical. If acute exposure could give you cancer, we’d have known decades ago.

Yes, actually. Along with a ton of other medical irregularities. https://www.nj.gov/health/hcpnj/documents/county-reports/HCP...

Skimming over that, irregularities aren't immediately standing out to me.

What should we be looking for?

I wasn't chiding you, I am a layman and I genuinely had no idea what issue you saw in the parent comment. Read your own comment that I responded to again.

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.

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