Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades.
I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though
FWIW Only one vinyl chloride car was listed as leaking. I would think the alternative was to bring in mobile pumps, new tanker cars, and possibly chillers. And that should probably be made the default standard, rather than defaulting to "controlled" release in an emergent situation.
There's many derailments throughout the country and chemical spills of other sorts have happened many times.
You're saying this a decade or two early, don't you think? Cancer rates are a trailing indicator.
I'm not going to try to address the normalization of deviance implicit in the rest of your comment, because what would be the point?
We all had these little bottles on our benches, with a funny silver lid that acted a bit like a "birdbath"[0]. You pumped it a couple of times, and the contents would come up, into a shallow bowl. You'd then take a long "Q-Tip" swab, dip it in the liquid, and use that to clean flux off the PCB you were fixing.
They also had open buckets, and people would wash entire assemblies off, in these buckets.
The liquid was trichlor[1]. We had gallons of it, sloshing around. If you got any on your hand, it made the skin turn white, and flake off. It smelled like the demon spawn of acetone and gasoline.
We were assured that it was completely benign, and not to worry our pretty little heads over it.
Let's just say that it can take some time to overcome [in]vested bias.
[0] https://www.aliexpress.us/item/2251832673900981.html
[1] https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/s...
Even in 1990 or so when I first came across it (also for cleaning PC boards), it was known to be hazardous.
Lots of pretty hairy stuff, in that lab. The gold-plating room had 50-gallon drums of cyanide.
Here's a video on that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b19lpkjUBrM
Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.
If you want a 1-mile zone it seems that you should be able to articulate why or else it should just get denied. However, it seems that wikipedia et al don't seem to have a citation as to how 1 mile was picked so it's hard to say if a smaller or larger zone should've been done.
Edit: Found a chart from Ohio.gov [1] showing impact areas. It does seem to be much smaller than 1mi.
> Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.
I mean if hot air only went up the Earth would have no atmosphere after a sunny day.
[1]: https://governor.ohio.gov/media/news-and-media/east-palestin...
This is a risky comment to make, because it sounds like I am supporting NS's cleanup plan, and I'm not. I'm just saying that people saying they're sick doesn't mean the plan was executed incorrectly.
Gastrointestinal bleeding
https://twitter.com/StatusCoup/status/1626288682326958083
Family including three year old child diagnosed respiratory infections
> There is also the theoretical possibility of burning vinyl chloride forming dioxins which are known carcinogens. So far, no dioxins have been detected.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/health-and-nutrition-histo...
Rivers are filled with something that’s heavier than water. Fish are all dying.
one way to tell is if the sheen, when itself disturbed, stays broken into pieces (bacteria) or rejoins together (oily)
If you consider phosgene and HCl to be "benign" based on their half life sure, but this assumes complete combustion. The cloud of visible black smoke emitted shows that clearly didn't happen. Partially combusted vinyl chloride monomer is some horrible mix of carcinogens that will contaminate the area for years.
It would have taken weeks for a large org like Norfolk Southern to unload the payload to other containers? Seems like an unreasonably long amount of time.