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Comment by xadhominemx | Hacker News Reader

Phosgene also has very low environmental persistence. I think the actual amount of dioxin created from combustion of vinyl chloride monomer at atmospheric pressure is very low. In any event, both were dispersed into the atmosphere at concentrations that pose(d) very little danger to people outside of the temporary evacuation zone.

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I stand corrected. They did a great job and no one in East Palestine is sick

That is correct. Not a single person in East Palestine was hospitalized.

I just wanted to follow up here. Yes, people have been hospitalized. Would you care to revise your statement?

https://twitter.com/StatusCoup/status/1629530227146731521

Correct. There is no one in East Palestine who got sick from this.

There's many derailments throughout the country and chemical spills of other sorts have happened many times.

> There is no one in East Palestine who got sick from this.

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?

None of the contaminants are carcinogenic, really

> Vinyl chloride is a mutagen having clastogenic effects which affect lymphocyte chromosomal structure.[20][22] Vinyl chloride is a Group 1 human carcinogen posing elevated risks of rare angiosarcoma, brain and lung tumors, and malignant haematopoeitic lymphatic tumors.[23] Chronic exposure leads to common forms of respiratory failure (emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis) and focused hepatotoxicity (hepatomegaly, hepatic fibrosis). Continuous exposure can cause CNS depression including euphoria and disorientation. Decreased male libido, miscarriage, and birth defects are known major reproductive defects associated with vinyl chloride.

Yes, they found elevated rates of some cancers in people who spent their careers in poorly ventilated vinyl chloride production facilities. For the sort of concentrations and durations we’re talking about in East Palestine, it’s not carcinogenic.

It's nice to see someone using some logic in here, there is a ton of ignorance. The only issue is that people always need to find someone to blame. Most aren't going to take facts like you have provided and use that in their assessment of the situation. My main concern would be the groundwater if anything, not the byproducts of combustion that have long blown away in the wind, or the fact Joe Biden didn't come walk around the town. I can imagine the town hall meetings are full of ignorant fools who just want to blame and be angry or political.

My first job (1983) was as a bench tech, at a defense contractor (microwave spy stuff/TEMPEST).

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...

1-1-1 Trichloroethane???

Even in 1990 or so when I first came across it (also for cleaning PC boards), it was known to be hazardous.

Yup. This was in 1983.

Lots of pretty hairy stuff, in that lab. The gold-plating room had 50-gallon drums of cyanide.

People's dogs and cats just up and died. Last time I checked humans are also mammals that breath.

Yes the pets were present while the controlled burn was taking place. People were evacuated.

The chemical was especially toxic to certain types of animals (notably fish) but much less toxic to humans.

Here's a video on that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b19lpkjUBrM

All of that smoke and no one got sick ? Hard to believe

They evacuated people first.

Wasn't the mandatory evacuation order only for a 1-mile radius?

How much larger are you suggesting it needed to be, and based on what?

Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.

I think the radius of the evacuation zone should be up to the issuer to justify.

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...

I don't want to downplay anything that happened here, but if you said a train of dihydrogen monoxide derailed and the vapors were spreading through the community, some number of people would come forward claiming to be sick. Statistically, someone is going to wake up with a cold on the day of the derailment. And the brain is a very powerful drug, if you scare someone with a chemical spill, they can show symptoms regardless of whether or not some chemical is acting on their body.

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.

>no one in East Palestine is sick

Gastrointestinal bleeding

https://twitter.com/StatusCoup/status/1626288682326958083

Family including three year old child diagnosed respiratory infections

https://twitter.com/NewsNation/status/1625679079520325633

It appears the family caught a cold

My friend from East Palestine took a video of the water in a creek that runs outside his house. The water is rainbow like an oil spill. This was yesterday. Whatever they combusted and dispersed, it's very much still there and I sure wouldn't want to be drinking that water.

Probably a biofilm.

If it's the same photo, a biologist weighed in on it on Twitter and suggested exactly that.

I mean, i imagine that whatever contamination that is, is separate from the combustion products that went into the atmosphere.

that sounds like iron oxidizing bacteria, did it look like this?: https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=%22iron%20bacteria%22

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