Vinyl Chloride and the Ohio Train Derailment

Very interesting, indeed. The issues in this video with the track issues ... what a shitshow.

Can a smart person explain what that bill means? The summary[0] reads like the government just saying "you'll take the existing terms and like it" (I didn't know that the government could do this). Is that the same thing as making it "illegal to strike" as the linked comment suggests?

How does all this work?

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-joint-res...

Yet the GOP filibustered the version which would have given the 7 days of sick time that rail workers requested:

https://theintercept.com/2022/11/30/rail-workers-strike-hous...

The bill that did pass with bipartisan support was a compromise due to this bill failing. It is extremely disingenuous to suggest that the democrats, who voted overwhelmingly for a bill that satisfied more rail worker demands, hold most of the fault for the strike break.

The GOP correctly realized that by voting against rail workers, they could force democrats to also vote against rail workers in order to avoid a general rail strike which would be disastrous to the economy and laid at the feed of the Biden administration. This is the realpolitik world we live in, and peoples health will suffer due to it.

Oh and democrats do share some of the blame, just not the majority. Joe Manchin did vote against the bill supporting rail workers.

The GOP will generally just vote against anything urgent that the Dems put forward. They don't _really_ want to let the Dems fix anything, they'd prefer to be able to beat up on Biden (in this case) for longer.

There's no downside for them for this behavior. The Dems already hate them, and if anything their base will reward them for it.

If it’s true that rail companies are running fewer, but longer, trains then wouldn’t absolute derailments decrease even if per ride derailments have increased?

And longer trains derailing means that the impact will be more spectacular, which would explain why we are seeing more news coverage of these fewer absolute derailments.

I honestly haven’t seen much detailed information in the major news outlets other than there was a train derailed, a burn, some fish died, some people were evacuated, everything okay and safe now, “by the way we shot down some UFOs”, “do aliens exist?”

It’s possible I’m missing something but for whatever reason I don’t feel like it’s getting the coverage it really deserves which, by itself, raises questions.

Really, no one has provided a link to any credible images?

If you come at it with that attitude, then nothing can be trusted.

Unless you go do the work yourself, you're going to have to trust others with the work!

Please provide the official air measurements as well as a proof they're recent and taken in the affected area with no manipulation

Same for water

Oh wait, nobody can

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/11480zm/east_palest...

https://twitter.com/DC_Draino/status/1626311330964676610

Why don’t you go out to the site yourself? The burden of proof is on you. Nobody should go out of their way to try and convince some rando on the internet.

In theory. But would you (and fam) trade places with anyone living in that area? For 2x the price the insurance company would pay?

The real problem with this math is that the cost of the braking system would be borne by the company, but the costs of the derailment are borne by the public. So even if the derailment cost >>> the brake system cost, it's an easy decision for the industry to make. That whole privatized profits / socialized losses issue that keeps showing up.

Insurance companies doing this to help people manage risk and are often attempting to help people in moments of grief and tragedy, and those people opted into the contract.

Train companies doing this to unsuspecting towns are stochastic monsters killing people because the victims are a financial externality and therefore cheaper dead than alive. They knew that a disaster could happen but chose good balance sheets over externalized risk.

Boiling this down to pure economics is monstrous; Flip this around. What if I get to decide if you live or die based on my spreadsheets?

Clearly the dollar value of thing isn't the only thing that matters. We should make these as safe as we can afford to, to the point that mass death or even mass destruction doesn't happen while billionaires are made from it. We can't afford infinite safety but while we can afford more safety we should. It is even correct from a macroeconomic standpoint, people who don't die or suffer from disasters go on to be more productive in the economy than dead people.

I think it's understood that sometimes we need to reflect the value of a human life in monetary terms, but to act as if human lives provide no value beyond actuarial valuations is pretty horrific

See any major class action lawsuit, the true cost of these disasters is never paid. The company will restructure, file for bankruptcy, any pay out pennies to the victims.

Norfolk southern gave the town $25k to the town, however the true cost of one resident getting cancer is potentially millions of dollars. The true cost of a single evacuation is probably in the millions also. Nobody will ever pay for this.

they would likely reduce the number of derailed cars

In my limited knowledge weren't ecp brakes part of the ability is to prevent large trains from derailing, and being able to stop independently?

The older braking system, that was currently installed on those trains, has more points of failure.

ECP brakes are generally per train and freight car or car block. Any single car or block installed with them likely wouldn't haven't made a difference, but more probably, in an environment with lax adherence to (or even avoidance of) safety technology guidelines, there is no guarantee that an ECP braking system would have been operably configured and maintained.

In the condition this train was at, whether they were equipped or not is irrelevant, because they'd more than likely just have been expensive decorations.

It can be made on site where it is going to be used. Generally combined with a manufacturing plant

Rail freight is almost always more cheap, efficient, and safe compared to trucking the same cargo. You also benefit from economies of scale, as adding extra rail cars doesn’t take as much manpower as sending out another truck.

Yeah and the author said it was the third most used plastic. Pretty much answered it there.

From what I heard most countries don’t allow this chemical to be transported, only produced on site with much safer to transport precursors.

> It does though?, PVC is manufactured using this chemical and rail is an efficient means of transporting it,

I agree that it addresses the utility of PVC. I wrote: "It addresses the industrial applications of the chemical." But the article never makes the claim that rail is an efficient means of transporting it. It also never answers why the chemical cannot be made on-site.

By truck (or by plane!) sounds even more dangerous, to me

The conventional alternative are pipelines, but for small loads such as vinyl chloride they would likely be problematic even ignoring the likelihood of eventual leaks.

A better alternative is to keep using trains, but have sufficient protection built in to survive a derailment and fires.

Require it to be produced on site just like many other hazardous chemicals.

Transport less dangerous chemicals, less dangerous finished products and only make the dangerous intermediaries onsite

Revoking their charter and seizing their assets seems just for a lot of this stuff.

For the USA, an easy mechanism for a corporate death penalty (for large enough corporations) without running afoul of takings clause would be to bar the corporation from engaging in interstate commerce, and to bar the equity holders from selling to themselves or relatives.

Are you willing to lose your job because your CEO did something wrong?

Because they don't price actual damage accordingly. How much would you price you getting cancer at? For me I would price that at a few billion easily, because I value my life quite high. I'm sure bill gates would put the price of him getting cancer in the billions too. There's of course no telling which child you are harming in the ohio river valley might be the next bill gates, so you might as well price them all at that valuation. That would put the costs of remediation well beyond what northfolk southern's market cap is, and would justify either closure or if its truly essential, having those assets and infrastructure being taken over by the public, much like how any other debt collection agency would take your assets if you lack liquidity.

This is the only approach that will work. Punish all those involved with stiff criminal charges and punishments that include jail time and loss of all personal assets. Avoidable incidents like these would become a thing of the past.

> who will go work at other companies and likely escape lawsuits since they were operating within the umbrella of their job.

And who'll exactly hire people responsible for the death of their previous company?

You present a view preposterously one-sided.

The FDA fines and sues companies not following the rules. They set a floor for behavior and mitigate frivolous lawsuits. This help companies and society, this is better for both. This isn't a pie we are dividing, this is complex system we are building together.

The current system isn't perfect but things are clearly better with than without. Businesses know what they can and can't be sued for and overall less bad shit happens to the populace. It isn't like I have the ability to sue people dumping CO2 into the air. Because lawsuits need more than someone polluting, they need someone to break a rule or cause direct harm and for the victim to know who to sue and have money to do it with

We could theoretically make these systems better by making the rules better and sometimes we even do.

So the traditional brakes use a stream of air to actuate the brakes down the line, the 'signal' in these brakes travels at roughly 1,000ft/second. The train in Ohio was 151 cars long and over 9,000 feet long, so from the moment the conductor tries to emergency brake, it would take over 9 seconds for the cars at the tail of the train to even begin braking vs. electronically controlled ones which brake instantaneously.

The ECP wikipedia gets into a lot of the details, but by evenly braking instead of the first cars braking and getting "pushed" by the back ones, you limit the risk of derailment by some amount.

The counterfactual of "what would have happened" with them is hard to answer with any certainty, but much less kinetic energy in the system and more even braking could have only helped.

Where humans and heavy machinery interact, there have always been financial incentives to capital to look the other way over safety concerns. There's some really great footage from GM plants in the 30's from a film they made "Master Hands"[0] that shows workers handling red-hot cranks with hand tools in massive forges and other working conditions that would get them immediately shut down by OSHA today. Those regulations came out of the labor movements of the New Deal and the war/post-war.

I think the most damning thing is that cases of black lung are actually on the rise in Appalachia in the 21st century because companies have managed to slacken worker protections for coal miners.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pr8rCNaASlc

The ends do not justify the means in this case.