East Palestine Train Derailment: Aftermath of the Ohio Chemical Spill

Now, I don't know if this, if they have to take additional precautions due to traveling with hazardous waste and whether or not those precautions were or were not taken. That's what I'm hearing about this case, is that they, that this is something that they were trying to cut money by transporting these things that are hazardous waste in a way that perhaps maybe they shouldn't have been transported that way. Or maybe the regulations should be different. I don't know if it's even hazardous waste though. I think it's just chemicals that we use in plastic. It's very hazardous. It's not waste. Right. Hazardous materials. Right, right. It's very hazardous material. It's the waste one that hits the ground. It's like the byproduct. Yeah. No, it's very dangerous materials. But that's why there's this one kid, Nick Drom, who's been doing these amazing tic-tacs that I'm obsessed with because it's that he's like a chemist. And he's great. He's actually taking what the APA is releasing and he's trying to make sense of it. And he's like, why am I the person who's doing this? Why am I the person who's asking these questions? Because what he mentions is when you look at the manifest of the chemicals that were on there, what we're looking at is they're doing what's in the air. But also he was saying there's petroleum. So we're talking about an oil spill too, but no one's talking about that. Well, let's play what he has to say. Rewind that, Jamie. He has a bunch. I don't know what to do. Well, just play this one. Play the one you have in front of you. Rewind that. Hold on. Stop. Sound. Play. Yeah, I don't know if that's his tic-tac-tac. It hasn't been very good. So let's talk about the trail derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. East Palestine is about an hour north of Pittsburgh, almost halfway to Cleveland. Norfolk Southern has a rail line that goes right through town and this derailment happened right on the edge outside of town on the border of PA in Ohio. The cars that crash, fine for them, contain vinyl chloride. The monomer used to make PVC. From the reporting on this has gotten vinyl chloride confused with polyvinyl chloride, the polymer made out of vinyl chloride. Now the reason that this distinction is really important is vinyl chloride is very hazardous and very flammable. Vinyl chloride is a plastic that's used in like everything. The other thing about vinyl chloride is that it boils at 8 degrees Fahrenheit. So it's shipped in its liquid form. Meaning that when these trains crashed and these started leaking, they weren't just leaking liquid but they were spewing boiling gas. So vinyl chloride is really toxic. OSHA has the permissible limit of how much you can be exposed to it during an 8 hour shift as a 1 ppm part per million average over 8 hours. So prior to this, the biggest spill of this chemical was in New Jersey where one train car and about 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride were spilled but it didn't catch on fire. Now this crash in Ohio has 5 train cars. These kinds of tanker cars can carry between 25 and 33,000 gallons. Let's call it 250 to 250,000 pounds of vinyl chloride. That's per train car, 5 train cars. There's maybe a million pounds of this toxic chemical spilling into the ground and also boiling off into the air. But then it caught on fire. I think this is where the reporting is really bad because no one is mentioning what the byproduct of vinyl chloride burning is. Of the many byproducts of burning vinyl chloride, one of them is hydrogen chloride. Hydrogen chloride is really unstable and latches onto water. Like this water vapor in the atmosphere and that turns into hydrochloric acid. So right now government officials, officials from the railroad, both the governor of Pennsylvania and Ohio are calling burning off the million pounds of this stuff a success. They're not mentioning that it means that we have hundreds of thousands of pounds of acid in the air, potentially. Now ever since engineering school I've studied a lot of industrial accidents. I just find it really fascinating and organizations like the Chemical Safety Board, NTSB, and OSHA all have really good reports available to the public. I think as a designer it's really good to learn about mistakes. When looking at these kinds of industrial disasters across time there are a couple things that are pretty universal across all of them. One, the responsible party in this coast, Norfolk Southern Railway, always plays down the reality of the situation. Politicians also just repeat the same lines and then news outlets just repeat the same. So all we're hearing is the responsible party's word. This hasn't been getting... So Jamie, I also sent you a video that shows what it looks like in the area where these clouds are passing over and it is horrific. It's apocalyptic. It's so terrible. The man who's on the ground who's screaming that these aren't storm clouds, that these are the clouds of this shit that they're burning from East Palestine. He's freaking out and animals are dying, pets are dying, fish are dying in the rivers. The idea that they only evacuated a small area. You're talking about miles and miles away from this. Animals are dying. Look at this. Play this. Go full screen with this because it's okay. Look at this. This is the fucking shit that they burn off, the fucking shit they burn off in East Palestine. This is not fucking storm clouds. Look at this. I know. Look at it. This is over Darlington. This is fucking insane. If you're just listening, what we're looking at is just intense black clouds covering this area and it's daytime and you can't see shit. The sky is completely covered in black. Give me the volumes. Shit from East Palestine. They're fucking controlled burn. Yeah, it's fucked up. The idea is that controlled burn is so crazy. Well I guess because they were worried that it was going to explode. That's why they felt they had to burn it. But it did explode, right? Didn't it explode? No, they felt it was going to be a massive explosion. And this would have happened anyway. But there's no other options. And they, like in one of that kid's TikToks, later on he talks about how they just buried it and so people are saying they did this just to get the trains running again basically, which again the cynic in me wouldn't doubt, but I don't know. I just sent you a text from my editor Joe Donatelli who I loved from Playboy. He now lives in Ohio and he does local news. And I will say local news has been great on this. They're actually reporting. And like he said to me, you have to be able to like muster the resources, fact check things. It isn't as fast as the internet where there's a void of information that gets filled. And he did a long thread about what they've learned at the local news station where he is that's really good. And I recommend people go check it out because I think local news is actually pretty good on this. But some people in Ohio are saying they didn't even know about it. There's like people who you'll see online. They're like, I'm in Ohio and I didn't hear about this, but maybe they don't watch local news.