[ajross]

It's one thing to fling around some words for fun in a web forum. It's rather another to put up an essay on a serious topic with this kind of ornamentation. It makes it look like the author is selling something.

If I want to read a policy paper on rail safety regulation, I want it dry. Give me events, causes, remedies, suggestions, costs. I don't want to read a stump speech.

And in point of fact there aren't any remedies or reasoned argument here, it's all yelling and finger pointing. How might this have been prevented? Why did it happen in the first place (FWIW: we don't actually know yet, AFAIK). How else might we ship these compounds? Do we need to? What industries are they serving? That's the stuff I want to hear.

[hinata08]

Read some NTSB reports for dry reports

Or CSB videos on YT

Or some TV shows like Seconds from Disaster or that Air crash one.

or listen to industrial engineers when they do their simulations and Fault trees and HAZOP shenanigans

there are a lot of publications and books and even university courses about how to study the functional safety of systems.

However, all of these dry "remedies, suggestions, costs" only make sense when you can have the "stump speech" about what you want. You need to discuss what industries you want, and what risks do you accept. When you study a risk, you can avoid it (no go), transfer it (mostly to insurance companies), mitigate it (with these new practices and technical solutions you called for, to reduce frequency and/or impact) or accept it (all green).

The articles underlines how the current risk of derailment was known and accepted by the Department of Transportation. There was nothing more to do technologically, if the risk was accepted as it was.

If you want a remedy or suggestions, go see the government and the companies to tell them chemicals plumes aren't acceptable when they happen every few years. Technical solutions will come, if they want to continue to operate trains but more safely.

[ajross]

> However, all of these dry "remedies, suggestions, costs" only make sense when you can have the "stump speech" about what you want.

What do you interpret the author wanting, then? It's genuine question. The linked article is a list of grievances, but you can't grieve your way out of modern industry. If you want a world with no dangerous train accidents (which is pretty much all I can gather the author desires) you need to explain how to do that, because we can't reasonably have a world where we don't ship dangerous stuff by train.

[hinata08]

I hate the opposition of risk and 'modern industry'. Some companies do it all the time.

Make a lot of money for years doing finance, then having to pay for losses some day ? -> "we're too big to fail, we have to be covered" Make a lot of money doing illegal stuff ? -> "we're too big to jail, and we need business" Stop to carry dangerous chemicals on unsafe trains ? -> that's "a cost"

Now, as far as understand from the linked blog, the author is an environmentalist, and want to address three points in regards to the modern industry :

- Risks and externalities need to be actually internalised to companies, so that they could use processes and business plans to avoid or mitigate them.

> “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” > To “nuke,” metaphorically, is to decide to unleash the full destructive powers placed at our disposal by modern science with less than full heed paid to the ultimate consequences.

- he wants an analysis of risks and impacts of the industry, even in a distant time and out of the plants :

> Quietly, unspectacularly, toxic chemicals [...] have for over a century been leaking steadily out of tankers and pipelines and mines and barrels and factories and into Ohioan soil, water, and bodies.

>This is the consequence of a life lived in the shadow of the infrastructure of the US chemical industry: you could be murdered and not even know it.

>The derailment catastrophe underscores the cruel fate to which the hinterland of an increasingly automated and geographically dispersed chemical industry has been condemned: industrial toxicity without industrial employment.

- And he wants the government to do something about it.

At first, by comparing what is happening with some dystopia.

And then by reminding that a lot of poeple are already concerned with these issues, which has already been documented by authors and some part of the citizens.

> It is not just that we are talking about what’s happening in East Palestine [, Ohio]. It’s that it feels like we have always been talking about it.

> We mean that everyone is talking about it, but in a way that isn’t making a difference.

Sadly, the article doesn't seem to offer a turnkey solution !

it's up to the reader and the society to find it !

In my humble opinion, business can be done responsibly, if regulated, and if accountability actually exists.

Train protection systems have been used in Europe for decades, and it didn't ruin any train company. They would even seem cheap compared to paying decades of hospital costs to poisoned citizens, or to clean the environment, if train and chemicals company had to pay for any of these (and not the victims or the taxpayer)

Other industries in here have been asked not to pollute, and to do some prevention, with the Seveso directive. They have also been asked to avoid some chemicals, with the REACH regulation. (including chrome VI, the one in the famous Brokovitch case)

They are still there and profitable ! So stop to have the vision that opposes environmental protection and the modern economy. We could do the transition like in cleveland, as mentioned in the article.

[AstralStorm]

The key is capitalism, which always good for short term profit even at the expense of dooming everyone.

Do you think any of the institutional or otherwise detached investors will pay for any of the safeties? Lose money or sleep?

The companies will rather circumvent or ignore the regulations, outsource the toxicity, diffuse it over the entire world. When caught, they're just slapped on the wrist, if at all.

Even in EU, cases like VW systematically breaking ecological regs on cars, undetermined someone killing tons of fish in Oder river... Creative bookkeeping and monitors being underfunded and understaffed is rampant. That where they exist at all.

Nobody wants to seriously touch it or the whole facade falls apart. The things you mentioned are fig leaves. Minor steps ahead at best.