[mshake2]

>“Smoke and chemicals from the train, that’s the only thing that can cause it, because it doesn’t just happen out of nowhere,” Holzer says. “The chemicals that we’re being told are safe in the air, that’s definitely not safe for the animals … or people.”

>“All the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal background, what you would find in almost any community operating outside,” said James Justice with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Somebody is lying.

[m4x]

The widespread reports of smells in the air, headaches, dead fish and other animals makes it hard to believe that "all the readings are at normal concentrations".

Although what they actually said is that all the readings they've recorded are normal.

The most disconcerting thing is that vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, so there may be many people who have been exposed to enough to give them cancer but who won't know about it for some years yet

[KennyBlanken]

It's not just vinyl chloride in the air. It's hydrogen chloride and phosgene, because they decided to set the vinyl chloride on fire to get rid of it.

Phosgene was a chemical weapon in WW1 and was especially problematic because, drumroll please, it's heavier than air and doesn't dissipate readily. That's one reason they roundabout mention checking air in people's homes.

Air readings could be manipulated simply by taking them from the tops of hills, or upwind, or even a relatively low altitude via plane. People who don't know phosgene is heavier than air would not realize what was going on.

[amluto]

Or the readings could be the usual EPA PM2.5, CO, NOx, and ozone concentrations, and phosgene, vinyl chloride, and HCl are none of the above. (Although a cheap VOC sensor could plausibly detect phosgene and vinyl chloride.)

[sp332]

They say they did test for phosgene at least. https://mobile.twitter.com/MahoningCoEMA/status/162338173074... It’s plausible because phosgene should have been a small fraction of what was produced in the burn, and honestly it’s nasty enough that people would probably notice if they were breathing it.

[hedora]

That quote specifically refers to air pollution. Many other leaking cars were carrying liquid hazardous chemicals. They expect a 100% aquatic life die off in waterways the pollutants reach.

The EPA claims they have a multi-stage containment system in place, and that the ground water and Ohio River are not at risk.

I don’t see how that is possible, but since this is HN, I’m hoping someone will point to an article explaining how modern spill containment works.

[goatlover]

Obligatory: 3.6 Roentgen, not great not terrible.

[photochemsyn]

Or the people working for the EPA didn't want to get downwind of the plume themselves, so they took their air / water samples upwind of the mess, to avoid exposure (and maybe to make things look less bad as well) and called it a day. Really wouldn't be surprising.

[LargoLasskhyfv]

I'd expect anybody measuring things near there to be in full HAZMAT-suits? Especially if this is declared as local state of emergency, and the National Guard involved?

[acdha]

Do we have any reason to believe that happened? There’s been training and response plans for this kind of thing going back to the 70s so it seems like that would be a huge scandal.

[photochemsyn]

The EPA's response to the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout - in particular allowing widespread use of Corexit - was pretty scandalous:

https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2015/04/27/...

I think they also dropped the ball on lead in drinking water supplies across the USA. It's another 'regulatory capture' situation, most likely.

[acdha]

I’m not saying the EPA is perfect but simply asking whether we have reason to believe that this case was due to measurement choices, or if that was simply made up for the sake of argument.

[culi]

Context from another article:

> Cars involved in the derailment contained vinyl chloride, combustible liquids, butyl acrylate, benzene residue cars (railroad cars that previously contained benzene,” the release stated, “and nonhazardous materials such as wheat, plastic pellets, malt liquors and lube oil.”

[ta988]

Some lube oils are extremely toxic when burned. And there may be reactions between the various chemicals and their degradatoon products. Portable detectors will not be able to detect or quantify many of those. Only more advanced methods like Raman, gas and liquid chromatography with various detectors and mass spectrometry can tell more. And I have yet to see a report using any of those.

[fuzzfactor]

>butyl acrylate

Affectionately known as Brutal Acrylate.

In scientific terminology, that's some nasty smelling shit. Toxic too.

If there's enough of it spilled you could smell minuscule amounts a mile away easier than an instrument could get a valid reading though.

It's one of those.

The odor threshold of volatile acrylates is orders of magnitude lower than other flammable toxic chemicals like methanol, but the instrumental detectability of acrylates is not really any more sensitive than regular low-odor chemicals by comparison.

IOW the instrument is better at detecting low-odor chemicals than your nose is, but your nose is more sensitive to things that have a very strong characteristic odor like acrylates.

[arp242]

Not necessarily; the reports really could be unrelated to the train accident, or the EPA was simply unable to detect the cause.

[Alex3917]

Given that you can go on YouTube and see videos of the head of the EPA telling the 9/11 first responders that the air was perfectly safe to breathe, I’m probably going to go with the cat owners on this one.

[mshake2]

Had to look it up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijtLUisQKpA

She used every excuse she had: "We weren't going to let the terrorists win" "My son was in building 7 and almost died" "We needed to get the city back on its feet"

[Scubabear68]

I worked a block away and we were back in very quickly. Then the HEPA filters came, then there was a lot of chaos. I learned a lot of how government can go wrong those few months.

[dv_dt]

In the aftermath of 9/11 the EPA's assurances of the safety of the environment in the Twin Towers vicinity was pretty much hollow.

[NegativeLatency]

Or 4 years of hollowing out regulatory agencies is having a lingering effect

[aaomidi]

Just 4?

[beeboop]

Regulations seem more or less the same today as they did a decade ago. What exactly are you referring to?

[culi]

More or less the same?? We had 4 years of the largest reversal on environmental protections we've ever seen

The Trump administration had replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and natural gas extraction bans, weakened the Coal Ash Rule, which regulates the disposal of toxic coal waste, and revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards–just to name a few

Here's a full list: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...

And that doesn't count the extralegal strategies used by the administration to bring the department to a halt

[acdha]

There are two big things to consider even if Congress didn’t change the laws significantly. The first is that Congress delegates the power to decide exactly what’s covered by a law to the agencies, on the theory that they employ experts and can adjust over time faster than a legal change. Under Trump, a significant number of regulations were changed at the behest of the affected industries:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/climate/trump-envir...

The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.

The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.

It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.

[flandish]

A corporation always lies. Start there. See where the liability is, then see who they’ve donated to…

[mshake2]

The EPA isn't a corporation?

[flandish]

The content of the cars was not owned by the epa. Look at how close those corps are to the epa.

Like the history of cigarette health. Or how axon claims tazers are safe by hiring docs to publish they are safe and inventing things like “excited delirium”…

[emodendroket]

Charitably, they could be reading the wrong things, or the animals could be dying of unrelated causes. But... it's a bit hard to believe.

[djbusby]

Is it possible to look at these readings? Direct sensor data would answer this, right?