East Palestine: Problems and Propaganda
The bill for all this should be given to Norfolk Southern, not the American taxpayer.
Even some who are inured by the media’s relentless false reporting in order to push a progressive agenda — such as the recent MSNBC report that Governor Ron DeSantis “says that slavery and the aftermath of slavery should not be taught to Florida schoolchildren” — might be surprised to learn that the person responsible for the Norfolk Southern train derailing in East Palestine is . . . Donald Trump!
Vanity Fair gave a good summation of that argument, explaining how Trump “gleefully gutted” safety regulations:
Among the biggest relevant regulatory rollbacks Trump has conveniently remained mum over is the 2018 scrapping of a 2015 Obama-era rule requiring advanced braking technology on trains transporting particularly hazardous materials. That rule would have required compliance by certain trains by 2021 and others by 2023, but as Fortune reported at the time, Trump’s Department of Transportation decided that “the cost of installing these more sophisticated brakes outweigh[ed] the benefit.”
This was echoed throughout MSDNCNN, the union between the media and the Democrat Party. Joy Reid, for example, asked Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, “The sort of theatrics of Donald Trump being in Palestine were odd . . . What do you make of the fact he went there despite the fact the regulations he rolled back were partly responsible for this tragedy?" To this Buttigieg, who looked as miserable having to do Department of Transportation stuff rather than delivering another sermon on American racial injustice as I do when forced to diet, unsurprisingly agreed:
“It was definitely an ironic thing to do. You take down regulations, you water down regulations, you weaken the power of the administration to deal with freight railroad companies, and then you show up wanting to be a great friend of the people who have been impacted by a rail disaster.”
Yet, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), neither Trump’s scrapping of Obama-era rule requiring advanced braking technology on trains transporting particularly hazardous materials,’ nor his ‘gleeful watering down regulations,’ had anything to do with the derailment. According to the preliminary NTSB report:
“Train 32N was operating with a dynamic brake application as the train passed a wayside defect detector on the east side of Palestine, Ohio, at milepost (MP) 49.81. The wayside defect detector, or hot bearing detector (HBD), transmitted a critical audible alarm message instructing the crew to slow and stop the train to inspect a hot axle. The train engineer increased the dynamic brake application to further slow and stop the train. During this deceleration, an automatic emergency brake application initiated, and train 32N came to a stop.
After the train stopped, the crew observed fire and smoke and notified the Cleveland East dispatcher of a possible derailment. With dispatcher authorization, the crew applied handbrakes to the two railcars at the head of the train, uncoupled the head-end locomotives, and moved the locomotives about 1 mile from the uncoupled railcars. Responders arrived at the derailment site and began response efforts.”
NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy put it more succinctly on Twitter:
The Vanity Fair article makes an odd conclusion that even if the accident wasn’t Trump’s fault, it was still Trump’s fault, because somehow Trump suppressed Norfolk Southern’s desire to run safer trains: “While it has been noted that, technically, the rule would not have required the Norfolk Southern train that derailed in Ohio to have such (ECP) brakes, some believe it would have if not for Trump.”
They have a phrase for this type of thinking. It’s called Trump Derangement Syndrome.
The derailment of a Norfolk Southern train and the subsequent controlled burning of the dangerous chemicals it carried may have resulted in an environmental disaster the world has not seen since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.
Of the freight this train carried, the compound vinyl chloride seems particularly dangerous. According to Dayton Daily News:
Exposure to vinyl chloride can cause irritation and burns to the skin and eyes, and repeated exposure can damage skin, bones, and blood vessels in the hands, said Kelley Williams, professor of Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Defense at WSU.
Inhaling the chemical can cause coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath leading to headaches, dizziness, and passing out. Vinyl chloride has also been shown to affect reproductive systems, damaging sperm cells in men and causing miscarriages in women.
In the long term, more severe exposure to vinyl chloride can cause several types of cancers, including angiosarcoma of the liver (ASL), hepatocellular carcinoma, and a potential for brain tumors.
Many of the consequences of vinyl chloride exposure are already evident. Some residents of East Palestine “say they have developed rashes, sore throats, nausea, and headaches after returning to their homes this week.” Ominously, the accident has already killed an estimated 43,000 fish and animals, including many beloved and beautiful pets.
A reasonable response to such an event would have been to adequately evacuate the area as immediately as possible after a mushroom cloud laced with carcinogenic chemicals began hovering over their homes, affecting their water supply, their land, and their air.
East Palestinians — at least those willing to be evacuated — should have been moved to hotels where they could be fed and sheltered. They of course should be financially compensated for the time lost away from their jobs and from having to close their businesses.
During the evacuation period, the EPA should then thoroughly test the town for contaminants. Only after the government could assure East Palestinians that it was safe should the evacuees be invited to return to their homes.
There was a brief and limited evacuation period from February 3rd to February 8th, when East Palestine was determined to be safe, but nearly a month later there are still reports of being getting sick, including rail workers.
The bill for all this should be given to Norfolk Southern, not the American taxpayer.
None of this would have been unprecedented or especially onerous. East Palestine is a town with less than 5,000 people. Shelter is provided for the 7,000 or so illegals who cross our southern border each day. When Hurricane Ian began bearing down on Florida, over two million people were placed under an evacuation order. Russia evacuated over 100,000 after the Chernobyl disaster. California even recently issued an evacuation order for the 9,000 residents of Montecito due to an incoming heavy rainfall.
Sadly, this evacuation never occurred. Residents were told to go about the lives by officials who would not drink the water there themselves.
We face a disaster with possible multigenerational ramifications, worsened by a toxic cloud of misinformation from the press.
— DK