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The Doom that Came to Ohio
Feb. 26th, 2023 10:37 pmSeveral of my distant friends have asked about the Ohio train wreck, and whether it's affecting me. It isn't - I'm about five hours west of there, the prevailing winds are from the northwest at this time of year, and I'm up the watershed from all of the contaminated rivers. I've been to the town before, and hate to see this happen. It was a nice place, and I had some excellent fish n' chips at a small drive-through there.
What's truly appalling to me is the federal government's lackadaisical response. Those cars were filled with vinyl chloride. When they were pressure-released and burned at atmospheric pressure and orange heat to prevent the cars from exploding*, they undoubtedly converted a large proportion of the vinyl chloride to polychlorinated dibenzo-dioxins, along with related products, which then spread across the countryside as fallout.
They found (from memory) something like 60k fish dead, and people are reporting headaches, rashes, and the like, and the government seems to think this is okay.
*A poor decision, although one can't really blame the firefighters. They're trained to think in terms of knocking down fires, and preventing explosions. That limited focus has served us ill here, as the chemical reaction products, rather than the force of an explosion, were always the worst risk in a case like this. I'd class the damage from an explosion as trivial, compared to what actually happened. This is probably a mass-casualty event, but it'll take awhile for people to die.
What's truly appalling to me is the federal government's lackadaisical response. Those cars were filled with vinyl chloride. When they were pressure-released and burned at atmospheric pressure and orange heat to prevent the cars from exploding*, they undoubtedly converted a large proportion of the vinyl chloride to polychlorinated dibenzo-dioxins, along with related products, which then spread across the countryside as fallout.
They found (from memory) something like 60k fish dead, and people are reporting headaches, rashes, and the like, and the government seems to think this is okay.
*A poor decision, although one can't really blame the firefighters. They're trained to think in terms of knocking down fires, and preventing explosions. That limited focus has served us ill here, as the chemical reaction products, rather than the force of an explosion, were always the worst risk in a case like this. I'd class the damage from an explosion as trivial, compared to what actually happened. This is probably a mass-casualty event, but it'll take awhile for people to die.
