[yungbeto]

Worth mentioning that in February the EPA proposed to severely deregulate chemical facilities like the one in Garden Grove, gutting third-party audits, hazard reporting, and public transparency requirements. They titled it the ‘Common Sense Approach to Chemical Accident Prevention.’ The public comment window closed just eleven days before this disaster…

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2026-02-24/pdf/2026-0...

[aliasxneo]

From what I understand, this gutted the 2024 additions which effectively returned it to the pre-2024 regulations. The EPA also cites a ~45% reduction in accidental releases from 2014–2023.

Not saying the 2024 changes were not justified, but your comment makes it seem like we're going back much farther in time.

[0xy]

How did these EPA regulations help prevent the East Palestine disaster?

Didn't an EPA whistleblower credibly accuse the fully regulated EPA of a coverup including backdated policies in that incident?

Sounds like a better system, coverups, corruption and incompetence.

[anon291]

It's not like chemical spills didn't happen before these changes though. Let's not sensationalize. Can you directly link the change in policy t this leak?

[themafia]

Once I learned that sugar dust can literally _detonate_ I stopped being a Libertarian.

Also the USCSB is one of my favorite federal institutions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg7mLSG-Yws

[jandrewrogers]

Sugar dust does not “literally detonate”. The term you are looking for is “deflagrate”. Sugar is not a high explosive.

All carbohydrate powders have this property. We’ve had grain elevator explosions for as long as we’ve had grain elevators. Demonstrating this with bread flour was an old schoolboy trick. An extremely wide range of ordinary dusts and powders will work.

Dust explosions are the far more improbable solid phase equivalent of a gas leak explosion.

[deepsun]

Also wheat flour. And grains like wheat can catch fire, so they sprayed with tons of water while loading on a ship.

[drivingmenuts]

Yeah, what this administration calls common sense is more like dumbass sense than anything else. On almost every level.

[thephyber]

To zoom out, there’s a HUGE percentage of the US who uses “common sense” as a catch-all excuse to end all discussion.

In the debates I watch, they typically don’t have the mental capacity to steel man the opposition’s position so they can’t comprehend that someone else has a different intuition / “common sense” than them.

Beyond that, “common sense” has become a dog whistle to both virtual signal / vice signal to like-minded in groups and to deride outgroups. In a way, using that phrase is a way to dehumanize the person they are talking to.

[lokar]

IME “common sense” is code for “we don’t need to listen to experts about this”

[deepsun]

Well, that is literally it's definition: sense of the commons. In other words -- what masses feel.

I know it changed its meaning over time, but that was the original meaning.

[andrekandre]

to paraphrase a common meme: physics and chemicals don't care about your common sense

[0xy]

The Biden era EPA covered up the East Palestine disaster by backdating policy changes to make the spill look less bad for the administration, didn't they? That's what an EPA whistleblower alleged.

[dboreham]

It's common sense if you're trying to make more money and are a psychopath.