Given the fact it’s going to affect things downstream & across state lines… probably at least the level that “Chinese spy balloons” are getting.
Might hinge on how bad the first impending acid rain ends up being.
I think Jackson Mississippi still doesn’t have clean water, & you haven’t seen that in any headlines for quite some time. Most things that actually matter don’t get very good news coverage, lest people become concerned about how hard they’re being swindled by corporations.
Ohio just got completely swindled by JD Vance, so nobody should be surprised when bad things continue to happen to the general populace with zero accountability from those causing it.
Also, keep in mind that this is the land of a river (Cuyahoga aka Cleveland) catching on fire at least 15 times. Environmental disasters with no accountability are our groove.
He’s a grifter pushing policies that lead to disasters like this. And a significant portion of Ohio roots for them.
Surely you can understand the correlation between policies that take away safety measures for (marginal) profit increase & catastrophic disasters happening because of a lack of safety measures.
Nothing is going to change (in this case railway/environmental disasters) until lawmakers that care about implementing proper safety measures are elected. Or any sort of accountability at all.
Here’s my attempt at a steel man: JD Vance is one of the bad guys on the bad guys team. Whenever bad things happen it’s the bad guys’ fault.
I’m aware that sounds like a pretty poor alloy, but it’s internally consistent, matches the observables, and I can’t really honestly do better.
Edit: The point of this is to explain what this derailment has to do with JD Vance. Any reply that fails to explain why JD Vance is somehow personally involved is failing to do better than the offered steel man. Just generally supporting policies you disagree with merely makes him a bad guy. You do think he’s bad for supporting these policies you believe are bad right? Next you have to show that a freshman senator in the minority who’s been in office for a month is somehow responsible even indirectly. I’d like to see a better effort to steel man that than mine.
If bad guys are what you call politicians that repeatedly call to strike down industrial safety measures & corporate accountability, then I could perhaps say that you are on to something
I wasn’t able to find anything about striking down industrial safety measures in JD Vance’s campaign platform or voting record. Can you? If not then what does this have to do with JD Vance?
If you were actually trying to "steel man" wouldn't you say "policies which make this type of industrial accident more likely" rather than "policies that are bad/you disagree with," which makes it sound childish and random?
I can’t find any evidence of JD Vance supporting such policies in either his platform or his voting record. I don’t think just making things up counts as steel manning.
Incidentally, in the USA Congress has delegated the power to regulate rail safety to the Executive branch which last I knew was controlled by the Good Guys. So I’m really at a loss how to show that this has anything to do with a freshman senator in the minority. I begin to think nobody else knows how to either. The miasma theory of Vance’s affiliation with the Bad Guys somehow making bad things happen in his state really is the best argument anyone has presented here.
I saw people on social media saying "wow this looks really bad" and had to put a fair amount of effort into finding stories on Apple News (where I usually read news stories) giving a rundown. Social media can certainly be prone to Chicken Little-ism but nobody seems to be questioning the line officials are giving here. If anything I think this might be a sign of how weak local news reporting has become. No doubt this would be of interest if it happened in the vicinity of New York City or Los Angeles.
Which group of the wealthy/powerful would attention to this issue benefit?
Like to be clear not only is it not an issue that's going to be addressed, the Biden administration is actually looking at loosening safety regulations further. Republicans are not going to go against industry. It's an industrial state that flagrantly does not care about pollution issues (like building a shopping mall on top of a toxic waste dump level flagrancy) and nobody involved wants to rock the boat right now.
The fundamental underlying issue is there's not enough people to run the trains. The train lines don't want to pay a high enough salary that the supply would meet demand, and DOT weed testing regulations are reducing the pool of eligible applicants as well, pushing that curve downwards further. They've been running fewer and fewer people per train and longer and longer trains, and it's getting unsafe.
(it's the same reason freight trains no longer yield to passenger in america despite being statutorily required to - the freight trains are too long for the sidings, oops, guess we can't pull over, you'll have to! Trains have just gotten longer and less staffed and much closer to the safety capacity of the equipment as they get longer and heavier, and this is just one of many exciting ways this is playing out!)
There is no way out of this without getting more people into train crews and reducing the size of the trains. The brakes on these trains can't safely stop a train of this length, and the derailleur equipment currently installed can't even safely derail trains of these lengths if they break loose, so when they go they go into a big pile of other cars and you get a massive industrial accident. It is. not. safe. to. run. trains. this. long. You need more crews and larger crews running smaller trains again. This is an issue that has crept up in the last 20 years and become a critical issue in the last 5 years.
But pushing back on industry is a big no in America these days, Republicans aren't going to do back a union let alone go against industry (name a single ohio republican that would not have leapt on the framing of "Biden picks unions over rail jobs and christmas") and this isn't the fight the Biden administration wants to pick right now, they want this to go away. They already slapped down the union, which really pissed off quite a few of the base... but what are they gonna do, vote republican? The biden admin wants the trains to run on time so people get their amazon shit.
And the local elected officials are on the 'locking up journalists who try to report it' level here, not actually doing anything that would inconvenience industry. And Biden just wants the trains to run on time, he's already made that very clear.
So again: which set of powerful people are going to be making a big ruckus in the media? Everyone is OK with this. Ohio is an industrial state, they keep voting in Republicans (even in statewide offices) and fighting against unions. This is what Ohioans collectively signed up for and continue to sign up for every election. Open for business, right?
Remember this when Intel wants you to move to Ohio for those new fabs. You're moving to an industrial hellscape and nobody's gonna care if your wife's shopping mall is built on a superfund site or an unsafe train running on a skeleton crew crashes and explodes and dumps a cloud of poison gas into the air. It's Ohio. Let alone any sort of fun genotoxic effect or pregnancy problems in the middle of abortion-war central. And it's not just this one place either, Ohio is a mess of all kinds of industrial shit. Ohio DGAF, is Intel worth your family getting cancer over?
Economists have this idea called "revealed preference". The revealed preference here is that winning the War On Egghead Intellectuals, this year's installment of the War On LGBTQ, and the War On Climate Science is more important than not having dead kids. This has been repeatedly been made clear for 3 decades now. And Biden is just past the point where he cares about forcing angry toddlers to do the right thing, he's not gonna deathmatch SCOTUS over this of all things for people who don't even want him to and will frame him as just doing it for the union. People want their fucking amazon packages, they want Dow-Corning and 3M and Duke Coal jobs, if you wanna kill your kids or give them turbocancer so that parcel delivery line-costs go down 5% then nobody's gonna stop you, Amazon thanks you for your service to America's profit margins. Uncle Joe has always been a lot better at politics than people give him credit for, why make drama where none exists?
Everyone just metaphorically wants to go have dinner, can we please just not fight about this for once? That's why nobody is talking about it.
(Michigan also had that same plating company dump a bunch more hexavalent chromium into the Huron River again, so to be fair Ohio is not alone in midwest toxic spill stories flying under the radar! But it seems likely Whitmer/Nessel will put the hammer down, I am guessing the remediation is going to get a lot quicker and a lot less "voluntary"/"self-reported".)
It wasn't supposed to make you feel good. I ain't feel good writing any of that shit either, I hope nothing there makes you think I'm anything other than a deeply unhappy person, it fucking sucks and it just continues to get worse every year.
It's just, it's the same dead kids every week. This week they died in a super cool explosion or got super cool cancer instead of dying in a super cool school shooting or choked to death by a couple super cool cops or died of a super cool preventable illness because their medication costs $2k a month, or gotten super cool lead poisoning from an emergency manager after being stripped of their democratic process. We shrugged about helping 9/11 first responders, you think people really care about some dead kids?
People don't care, not really, they say they do but they don't vote like it. The whole "thoughts and prayers" meme is a nod to just how little we really care. You wanna see people get real unhappy and start voting some fuckers out, make the flow of amazon packages stop. The dead kids don't matter, not like the packages do, people will line up and vote on that shit. If there is the perception of things going back to the way they were in 2020 with the supply chain people are gonna lose their fucking shit and vote in some really despicable motherfuckers (oh, it can always get worse). The trains gotta run.
The revealed preference of american society is stability above morality or dead kids. And we're willing to go pretty authoritarian too to get that stability, if it comes down to it, like the emergency manager shit. Biden's doing a great job catering to what americans really want and vote on, which is making the damn amazon packages show up.
America just wants to have a normal dinner for once. Yep, some kids died, that happens every week here and we just move on. More kids are gonna die next week, and the week after that too. Open for business, buddy, did I fucking stutter?
Shikata ga nai. There just isn't. Not unless an awful lot of people suddenly start being cool about an awful lot of stuff.
> At the end of his news conference, [Gov. Mike] DeWine said he didn’t authorize the arrest and reporters have “every right” to report during briefings.
> “If someone was stopped from doing that, or told they could not do that, that was wrong,” DeWine said.
Seems OP's statement is a bit generally misleading statement for a single incident, without also knowing the full details that prompted the arrest in the first place.
Things like "he was told to stop speaking during the governor's remarks" and "asked Lambert to stop his live reporting because they believed it was loud and disruptive" seems to indicate it's a situation escalating because ... I don't know, I wasn't there, and there doesn't seem to be any footage of these incidents. Hard to tell who is "at fault".
A single journalist, among many attendees, being arrested for allegedly being loud in a gymnasium during a news conference is a bit of a stretch to state as evidence that authorities are generally arresting journalists reporting on the derailing.
Given the amount of people affected and the toxicity of the chemicals, you'd think they'd give it commensurate coverage --such as Chinese balloons, Biden documents, Trump documents, Police beatings, etc.
Aren't there several of these situations ongoing at any given time? It has happened twice near some aunts of mine. Train derailments leaking chemicals do not seem that rare.
The Vinyl Chloride Monomer is often referred to as VCM.
It is a gas which is liquefied under pressure in a similar way to propane, so tanks and rail cars must be completely airtight at all times.
Otherwise the entire liquid cargo will rapidly be expelled under pressure as a liquid from any opening on the bottom of the vessel, or the entire liquid cargo will still evaporate quite rapidly and eventually all escape as a gas stream through defects or open valves on the top part of the vessel.
Any VCM liquid spilled will act like propane and rapidly turn into a gas which will disperse much wider through the air much more rapidly.
Not much is going to soak into the soil or be carried away by water drainage channels.
If it was an acetone spill or something like that it wouldn't evaporate nearly as fast, nor present as widespread an atmospheric content downwind, and you would have to get a lot closer to the spill to detect the vapors or smell it yourself even for a briskly evaporating liquid like acetone.
But the VCM is not only flammable, it is actually a highly toxic gas.
VCM smells exactly like most brand-new PVC shower curtains, because VCM's exactly what you're smelling in very small concentrations, as any residual monomer often outgasses strongly the first few days after hanging the curtain.
In an unventilated bathroom I would think that's often beyond the recognized working VCM levels allowed in industrial facilities.