[r85804306610]

i personally want whoopi goldberg to go over the shipping manifest <https://epaosc.org/sites/15933/files/TRAIN%2032N%20-%20EAST%...> during her day time show, and eli5 to her listeners what those various substances are, what their short and long term effect on the environment are, and specifically the effects on the various ohio river tributaries where EPA has already detected some of the contaminants. i know that's too much to ask, so a passing mention would be good enough. i /suspect/ people who think it should be covered more find the situation to be horrendous enough to warrant that kind of media reaction.

[flangola7]

She should also mention the names of top executives at the company, the names of relevant officials, and how to contact all of them.

[XorNot]

Sure but here's the problem: all of those chemicals are biodegradable. Most information about what is happening is basically "there was a large release of a non-environmentally persistent contaminant" which just plain isn't going to hit the fears right for people.

Vinyl chloride doesn't hang around[1]: nothing with an ethene-double bond is going to be good for you if you ingest it, but it's not stable because that's why it's used: UV light and most biological processes will degrade it very quickly.

Would you want to bathe in it? No. You also wouldn't want to be near a really large, concentrated release but it's not perfluorocarbon, nor heavy metal.

Which is to say, you could go look these things up right now - this information is not even slightly secret. But it is both a serious situation, and one that isn't what the "why isn't this being covered" people want it to look like.

[1] https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf