Hazmat Expert On Ohio Train Derailment Disaster: ‘We Nuked a Town With Chemicals So We Could Get a Railroad Open’

Infowars.com

A hazardous materials expert claimed that money took precedent over public health and safety of residents when authorities decided to order the controlled burning of dangerous chemicals from the derailed train in Ohio.

The 50-car Norfolk Southern train that derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb. 3 prompted officials to evacuate the area and release and burn toxic gas from five of the cars, a decision that is prompting many living near the area to question their own safety.

"We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open,” hazmat expert Sil Caggiano told WKBN 27 on Sunday.

Given the known deadly toxins released from the burn, and despite reports that animals and fish started dying around the region after it started, the Ohio government assured East Palestine residents they could return to their homes just days later.

“I was surprised when they quickly told the people they can go back home, but then said if they feel like they want their homes tested they can have them tested. I would’ve far rather they did all the testing,” Caggiano said.

Residents have since reported headaches and dizziness despite environmental regulators claiming the air and water of the surrounding area is safe.

Caggiano also expressed his concern the toxic chemicals would leech into the water table and lead to a mass cancer event.

“There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at this thing 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line and wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know, well water could go bad,’” Caggiano said, urging residents to get a health check from a doctor now so they can document potential effects from the chemicals down the line.

Notably, East Palestine is located just miles away from the Ohio River basin that feeds downstream along the borders of West Virginia, Kentucky, Indiana, and even Illinois, raising fears the chemicals could become far more widespread.

New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D) warned the EPA “confirmed” vinyl chloride from the chemical burn has indeed leeched into the Ohio River basin, which could potentially affect tens of millions of people.

“Nearly 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride were on this train. Now, the EPA has confirmed it’s entered the Ohio River basin which is home to 25 million people. This is one of the deadliest environmental emergencies in decades and no one is talking about it,” Bowman tweeted Monday.

But East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway insisted Sunday that the town had a “closed water system” so the water is “100% safe.”

“It’s concerning to me, but the citizens also have to be aware. We have a closed water system. So the water system in the actual village of East Palestine is 100% safe,” the mayor said. “We’re getting the same numbers from two Thursdays ago before the accident it’s the same numbers. Our well field is way west of where the accident is and the creek where the water goes down.”

West Virginia American Water said Sunday it was raising its water treatment standards as a precaution.

“The health and safety of our customers is a priority, and there are currently no drinking water advisories in place for customers,” the company said in a statement.

Meanwhile, numerous class action lawsuits have been filed against Norfolk Southern over fears the controlled burn has unleashed an ecological and health disaster.

Original Article:https://www.infowars.com/posts/hazmat-expert-on-ohio-train-derailment-disaster-we-nuked-a-town-with-chemicals-so-we-could-get-a-railroad-open

Ohio Train Derailment – Creating a Toxic Disaster to Avoid Another Disaster …? MSM Silence Deafening

Europe Reloaded | Pam Barker

ER Editor: We’re publishing an account of the train derailment and chemical release in northern Ohio from Jeff Childers and Zerohedge. This is as much of a story about the MSM as it is about treating chemical spills and taking care (or not) of local residents affected by heavy toxicity. And a journalist on the scene gets arrested for doing his job. We live in sickening times.

Check the latest report from Zerohedge:

“Get The Hell Out Of There” – Ohio’s Apocalyptic Chemical Disaster Rages On

Notice how the local streams connect via the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.

Readers may want to keep the Turkish and Syrian earthquakes in mind.********

IGNITION  C&C NEWS

Government experts came up with a plan to blow up millions of gallons of poisonous chemicals after a train wreck. I’ve gathered up all the reliable news in one place for you.

Good morning and Happy Monday, C&C! Today I rounded up the Norfolk Southern disaster story into one place for you, since between corporate media and social media, the news is fragmented, hard to piece together, and all the apocalyptic hot takes make for tough sledding. The real news is better, and worse, than people think.

NEWS AND COMMENTARY

While we were all focused on corporate media coverage of military press briefings about the United States’ new war on unidentified weather balloons, which I will cover in more depth tomorrow, another more important story was quietly exploding in a small Ohio town. There’s little substantive media coverage of the alarming ecological disaster unfolding right now in Biblically-named East Palestine, Ohio. It’s been happening for over a week and you are probably just finding out about it.

To set the table, I searched the Wall Street Journal and found a series of bland articles covering the unfolding disaster that abruptly stopped three days ago. It sure looks like the Journal received orders to forget the story or something.

The WSJ’s first story published on February 5th, headlined, “Ohio Train Derailment, Fire Battle Rural Town.” The sub-headline reassured that “Officials say water and air are safe so far, but urge people to ‘stay away from East Palestine.’”

So far! Remember that, about the air and water. The Journal’s February 5th article described the accident like this:

Fifty cars on a Norfolk Southern Corp. train derailed Friday night about 9 p.m., causing a chemical fire. The National Transportation Safety Board said the eastbound train included 141 load cars, nine empty cars and three locomotives. It departed Madison, Ill., and was headed to Conway, Pa., when it derailed.

Mr. Conaway and Fire Chief Keith Drabick said emergency-response officials are aware of 14 cars carrying vinyl chloride, a colorless gas that can easily burn and is used to make polyvinyl chloride hard plastic resin. Because of the smoldering fire, emergency responders haven’t been able to access the derailed cars.

Kurt Kollar, with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s office of emergency response, said officials were monitoring chemicals that reached some nearby streams, but said there is no current risk to the area’s drinking water.

Each of the fourteen chemical cars carried 25,000 to 33,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. That’s close to a half million gallons, or millions and millions of pounds of the chemical. From Encyclopedia Brittanica:

Vinyl chloride, also called chloroethylene, [is] a colourless, flammable, toxic gas belonging to the family of organohalogen compounds and used principally in making polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a widely used plastic with numerous applications… Vinyl chloride can cause liver damage, and it is classified as a known human carcinogen.

A spill of carcinogens would be remarkably bad timing if a population had somehow injured their cancer-fighting immune responses. Just spitballing.

OSHA considers vinyl chloride dangerous at 1 part per million (PPM). Here is the NJ Department of Health emergency responder reference for vinyl chloride spills, which says burning the chemical can cause an explosion, among other alarming facts:

So, reading between the lines of the Journal’s February 5th article, we can visualize baffled, gas-masked EPA bureaucrats standing there in East Palestine, peering dazedly at 141 derailed train cars, watching the chemicals gushing into local streams and, presumably, soaking into the town’s ground water, and wondering what to do. They knew East Palestine’s streams connect to the Ohio River, which feeds the Mississippi River, which dumps into the Gulf of Mexico through a vast delta system.

The bureaucrats almost certainly felt a keen sense of urgency to do … something. But what? A massive cleanup operation, as described in New Jersey’s Emergency Responder Quick Reference, would have been expensive, time-consuming, and even more damning, would have gotten a lot of bad media coverage of something you’d expect to see in the Third World, not in America’s breadbasket. No. They needed something … quicker.

On February 6th, the Journal’s headline read “Ohio Train Derailment Prompts Explosion Concerns, Evacuation Order.” The headline suggests the train could have spontaneously exploded, but the more nuanced truth appears in the sub-headline: “Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday instructed residents of East Palestine, Ohio, to stay away from their homes as officials planned to release chemical gas from five derailed tanker cars.”

Ah. So, before it all “exploded,” they planned to deliberately release the chemicals. Why?

The answer appears in an “update” on Norfolk Southern’s website and in a second article about the chemical train derailment published in the Journal on the same day, February 6th, which included this initial paragraph:

A team of experts released a chemical from five tanker cars and ignited it Monday afternoon to prevent a potentially catastrophic explosion following a train derailment Friday along the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

They “ignited it.” In contrast, the Norfolk Southern update said they planned to ‘vent’ the chemicals, and admitted they knew it would catch on fire:

The Journal cited the use of “experts.” They called in the experts! Thank goodness experts were on the scene. I bet knowing the government’s experts were working the job made those fretful East Palestinians feel a lot better. And so the experts came up with a carefully-designed plan with a lot of moving parts: lighting the chemicals on fire, “to prevent a POTENTIALLY catastrophic explosion.”

It was a plan my military-obsessed 12-year old son would come up with on his first try.

The plan must have been terrific, since experts designed it. So what do you suppose happened next? Remember: the GOVERNMENT’S experts were deciding what to do. Ohio’s EPA is packed with diversity hires and nepotistic appointments. And they were being advised by FEDERAL experts and officials as well as the chemical industry’s public relations damage-control team. So we are NOT talking the country’s best and brightest, who were all laid off for not taking the jabs anyway.

As the headline explained, the plan to stop the chemicals from quickly draining into the Ohio river, sorry, I mean to “PREVENT a catastrophic explosion,” the government’s bumbling, industry-captured experts wound up CAUSING a catastrophic explosion.

New Jersey’s Fact Sheet says burning vinyl chloride makes it into hydrogen chloride, which easily binds with water to make hydrochloric acid, and phosgene, a deadly gas, the use of which is a war crime. Hydrogen chloride is not much fun either, as the Encyclopedia Brittanica points out:

Exposure to 0.1 percent by volume hydrogen chloride gas in the atmosphere may cause death in a few minutes. Concentrated hydrochloric acid causes burns and inflammation of the skin.

On February 6th, the same day the experts detonated the chemicals, CBS News ran a story reporting dead fish appearing in creeks up to five miles away. The sub-headline read, “A couple who live about five miles from where the train derailed spotted dead fish in Leslie Run on Sunday night and Monday morning; KDKA’s Erica Mokay reports.”

The Ohio River is only fifteen miles from the site of the accident.

On February 7th, two days after experts blew up the vinyl chloride, the Journal reported a mandatory evacuation in East Palestine was underway. Note that they didn’t evacuate folks BEFORE they blew up the chemicals.* In other words, they didn’t predict the fallout.

* UPDATE 11:20am. A commenter who lives in the area said there was a pre-venting evacuation within a one-mile radius. Officials failed to foresee the need for the larger evacuation.

On February 8th, the Pennsylvania Department of Health published a fact sheet reassuring residents there was no danger to them or to their animals:

On February 9th, the Journal reported residents had been cleared to return home and start baking casseroles and making hot chocolate. Nothing to worry about. It’s fine.

Meanwhile, social media posts by locals were telling a completely different, much more dramatic, and wildly alarming story. Locals have been reporting a massive wildlife die off. Fish dying in streams, flocks of birds falling out of the sky, chickens and cows dying on farms, pets dying in people’s yards. Reports of animal deaths up to 100 miles away were appearing as of this morning.

I couldn’t confirm any of those animal deaths except for the fish kills. There’re no local media reports of dead animals, and I found no credible first-hand posts or video on social media. So for now, all we know for sure is that a LOT of fish died.

On the fourth day following the explosion, the corporate media narrative started mutating. The Journal ran its final story on the derailment on February 10th, three days ago, and the headline read, “Train Axle Was On Fire Before Derailment, Video Shows.”

It was already burning? Oh. Okay. So … I guess it would have exploded anyway, is that right? That’s what we’re supposed to conclude? They couldn’t put the fire out somehow?

Since that pathetic excuse for a story ran, there’s not been a single article in the Journal about the crash, the chemicals, the ecological impact, the response, the cleanup, or anything else related to the derailment after that. There’s absolutely nothing after the February 10th’s lame attempt to make it sound like the train was going to detonate anyway. I had to find other sources to continue the timeline.

Also on February 10th, social media erupted after Ohio police arrested NewsNation reporter Evan Lambert while he was trying to cover a local briefing. The bodycam footage does not make it exactly clear whose fault it was. It also seems like other media were covering the briefing, so it wasn’t completely closed to reporters, which is what some of the hot takes suggested.

While some online pundits already consider the derailment story “old news,” the story continues to develop. Yesterday, local WKBN news ran a story headlined, “3 Additional Chemicals Discovered on East Palestine Train Derailment.” Oh. According to the story, the U.S. EPA said ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene were also in the rail cars that were “derailed, breached and/or on fire.”

Now they tell us! There was no reference to the experts’ intentional venting, burning and exploding. And we can also safely conclude that they have no idea what the environmental impact will be yet.

Yesterday, Reuters ran a story on the derailment quoting Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator, who said it was “unconscionable” that the EPA hadn’t publicly listed ALL the chemicals that were in the trains. The agency, she said, should launch a website showing local water and air test results “in a way that is easy for the public to understand.”

Then late yesterday the U.S. EPA posted the full manifest. There were lots of chemicals on that train, not just four:

I’m not the only one who’s skeptical of the evolving narrative. Local WKBN quoted Silverado Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, who explained “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open.” The specialist recommended that everyone in East Palestine should immediately get a health check-up, to make a record of where their health stands now, so that moving forward, they can document any injuries possibly related to the train derailment.

Norfolk Southern, the railway operator responsible for the accident, posted a long FAQ. They are offering financial assistance and home testing to anyone in the area:

My guess is that, to receive financial assistance, folks will probably have to sign something. If so, people should read the fine print carefully, and make 100% sure they aren’t releasing the railway from liability.

Norfolk Southern acknowledged the fish kill, but told residents not to worry about that:

I reviewed Norfolk Southern’s other FAQs. The answers include way too many lawyer weasel words, like “probably” and “as far as we know.” For example, in response to the question “Is my drinking water safe?”, Norfolk Southern provided this answer:

Due to the location of the derailment, it is improbable that substances from the derailment will impact the groundwater or drinking water wells in the area.

“Improbable.” That’s a weasel word. The right answer should have been that they’ve installed permanent testing wells and are posting the test results online in real time. Or they should have top railway officials go down to East Palestine and drink the water on camera. How about that?

Although corporate media isn’t covering it, a regional cleanup operation appears to be underway. One example is in this Twitter video, apparently showing environmental mitigation workers painstakingly collecting dead fish from streams, one slippery deceased minnow at a time:

Here’s a video explainer posted to TikTok by someone who seems to know what they’re talking about. But I couldn’t confirm his identity:

That pretty much brings you current. To summarize what we know — and don’t know — so far:

— Experts appear faced a difficult decision about whether to let the chemicals drain out of damaged rail cars or send them into the atmosphere. They decided to take the latter option. Some online commenters suggest that was the better choice, because burning dilutes the chemicals into a larger area (the sky) and protected drinking water.

— Norfolk Southern appears to be following the script for an accident of this type.

— Cleanup operations are underway.

— Long-term injuries like cancer are probable in East Palestine, but regional effects are presently unknown.

— I haven’t yet found any credible reports of animal kills, or even fish kills outside the East Palestine area. Not yet.

— Some people are saying Obama-era regulations relaxing railway safety rules when transporting dangerous chemicals appear to have made the accident possible. Others have claimed the cars were improperly marked and should’ve been handled more carefully. Still others say the railroads are understaffed and that’s why the accident happened. It’s too soon to tell.

To me, the unfolding accident is a metaphor for where the country is right now. This should never have happened in America. You’d expect to hear about something like this from Bolivia or India or somewhere like that. As the pandemic has already informed us, our agencies have been captured by industry and are being run by unqualified hacks.

The UK Guardian has the right idea. On Saturday it ran a story about the crash with this headline:

The entire country is headed down the wrong track, and if it crashes the disaster will make what’s happening in Ohio look like an early movie trailer. Nor should we forget how the pandemic created this disaster, through understaffing caused by vaccine layoffs and by over-stressed supply chains. In a sense, the Ohio accident is just one more injury directly attributable to our overpaid, over-fed public health expert class.

We need to fire them all and start over.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll be back tomorrow to catch us up on all the other rail cars stuffed with developing news.

Source

Join C&C in moving the needle and changing minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/-learn-how-to-get-involved-

Twitter: @jchilders98.
Truth Social: @jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com
Emailed Daily Newsletter: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com

“Get The Hell Out Of There” – Ohio’s Apocalyptic Chemical Disaster Rages On

TYLER DURDENMONDAY, FEB 13, 2023 – 03:26 PM

BlueApples

Update:

During a press conference, the NTSB referenced a video from Salem, Ohio, about 20 miles from East Palestine which shows sparks and flames emitting from beneath the train. The apparent structural issue with the train was captured on a security camera when it was travelling through Salem. According to Michael Graham, board member on the NTSB, two videos they had obtained were indicative of mechanical issues attributed to the rail car axles which likely led to the derailment.

The second video obtained from when the train was passing through Salem was recorded by a processing plant nearby a hotbox detector which scans the temperature of the axles as trains pass by. According to Graham, the wayside defect detector reading resulted in an alarm alerting the crew of a mechanical issue shortly before the derailment in East Palestine. Consequently, that alert forced the train to execute an emergency brake application which may have been the cause of the derailment. Presently, the NTSB is reviewing the trains data and audio recordings in order to examine the cause of the derailment and which hotbox detector indicated a mechanical error preceding the accident. The NTSB is expected to issue a preliminary report on its findings within 30 days.

…

While the US government is dispensing millions of dollars in resources to treat balloons as an existential crisis, a small town in Ohio finds itself engulfed in what actually looks like the apocalypse. Perhaps by design, all of the drama surrounding violations of US airspace by Chinese spy initiatives has done well to keep what is becoming one of the worst environmental disasters in recent memory from getting any headlines.

The chaos began early last week when a train of more than 100 cars derailed in East Palestine, Ohio near the state’s border with Pennsylvania with roughly 5,000 residents. The accident launched fifty of those hundred freight cars from the tracks. Twenty of the freight cars on the train were carrying hazardous materials, ten of which were detailed. While the accident had no fatalities, of those ten cars, five contained pressurized vinyl chloride, a highly flammable carcinogenic gas.

In order to address the volatile scenario around the crash site, the Ohio Emergency Management Agency executed its plan of venting the toxic gas with a controlled burn in order to evade an uncontrolled explosion which presented the risk of catastrophic damage. “Within the last two hours, a drastic temperature change has taken place in a rail car, and there is now the potential of a catastrophic tanker failure which could cause an explosion with the potential of deadly shrapnel traveling up to a mile,” Gov. Mike DeWine warned in statement explaining the decision to take action to avert widespread devastation.

However, that operation sent large plumes of smoke containing vinyl chloride, phosgene, hydrogen chloride, and other gases into the air as the flames from the controlled burn raged on for days. Phosgene in particular is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and respiratory trouble. The toxicity of phosgene gas is so potent that it was previously used as a chemical weapon during the First World War.

The hazardous airborne chemicals prompted officials to issue mandatory evacuation and shelter-in-place orders within a one-mile radius of where the train derailed. Those orders forced nearly 2,000 residents of East Palestine out of their homes. Despite the public safety risk in proximity to the crash site, over 500 people within the parameters of the evacuation order refused to leave their homes. However, those orders were lifted on February 8th, allowing residents to return to the area adjacent to the disaster.

Following the controlled burn, local authorities received multiple concerning reports from residents outside of the mile-long radius of the evacuation area conveying that the emergency posed by the disaster was far from over. One local farmer reported the sudden deaths of many of the animals on the premises of his farm, Park Dairy. The farmer, Taylor Holzer, also works with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources as a registered foxkeeper. Following the disbursement of chemical agents into the air from the controlled burn, many of the foxes on Holzer’s farm experienced fatal effects from the air quality surrounding the area.

“Out of nowhere, he [a fox] just started coughing really hard, just shut down,” Holzer recalled to local media outlet WKBN 27 News. “This is not how a fox should act. He is very weak, limp. His eyes are very watery and weepy. Smoke and chemicals from the train, that’s the only thing that can cause it, because it doesn’t just happen out of nowhere,” he added.

“The chemicals that we’re being told are safe in the air, that’s definitely not safe for the animals…or people.”

Holzer’s concerns were echoed by reports from other residents who described similar conditions near their own properties. One of those residents was Katlyn Schwarzwaelder, the operator of a local dog kennel in nearby Darlington, Pennsylvania. The catastrophe caused her to leave her home despite the fact that it lies more than 10 miles away from the site of the controlled burn. After fleeing to Boardman, Ohio, 15 miles away from the derailment, Schwarzwaelder stated she received multiple reports of dead chickens, fish, and other animals from friends and acquaintances. One affected resident told Schwarzwaelder that they let their 2-year old dog out to use the bathroom only for it never to return. When they embarked upon a search for their missing pet, they found it dead in their yard.

Testimony from Holzer, Schwarzwaelder, and others paints a drastically different picture than the official narrative tailored by officials who assured residents that the situation was under control. The poor air quality presents short and long term health risks to the public considering the carcinogenic effects of the chemicals. Carcinogens like vinyl chloride can cause cancer in organs including the liver, according to Kevin Crist, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering who also serves as the Director of Ohio University’s Air Quality Center.

Although officials in charge of the emergency response utilized techniques like dispersion modeling in order to calculate and mitigate the risk of airborne chemicals, the chemicals disbursed following the derailment pose other significant risks of contamination. Chemicals also spilled into the Ohio River toward West Virginia, prompting officials from the neighboring state to shut down water production in the area and turn to alternative sources for water supply. Soil contamination is another significant risk that leaves officials weary of broader implications affecting public health than those associated with the air pollution alone.

However, the magnitude of those risks hasn’t been apparently recognized by the leadership across various states affected by the disaster.According to Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, there were no concerns regarding the air and water quality in the area. Nevertheless, the governor reiterated that a shelter-in-place order remained in effect for Pennsylvanians within two miles of East Palestine. Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency took a similar tone, stating nothing unexpected was seen following the controlled burn. James Justice of the EPA summed up his agencies position by saying “So far, so good and we’re going to continue to monitor until the fire’s out,”.

While the immediate risks presented by a possible explosion following the train’s derailment may have been averted, the emergency response may become an instance of a cure being worse than the disease it seeks to remedy. The accidents also brings the state of safety regulations surrounding rail transport of hazardous freight into a new light. Over the last five years alone, eight train derailments have occurred in the Pittsburgh metro area, leading to calls for increased oversight over the industry.

Despite the inherent risk that comes with transporting chemicals like vinyl chloride, the US Department of Transportation approved a rule to expand the scope of what hazardous materials can be transmitted by rail. The rule made it permissible for liquefied natural gas to be shipped by train without additional safety regulations. This enables freight trains to transport 100 more tank cars with up to 30,000 gallons of the natural gas extracted from shale fields.

“The risks of catastrophic liquefied natural gas releases in accidents is too great not to have operational controls in place before large blocks of tank cars and unit trains proliferate,” the National Transportation Safety Board wrote in a comment if support of the proposed rule. In response to that comment, critics of the rule highlighted how a potential explosion of just twenty-two tank cars filled with liquefied natural gas holds the same amount of explosive energy as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in the waning days of the Second World War.

The ongoing crisis in East Palestine represents an environmental and humanitarian disaster that hasn’t been seen in the United States in recent memory. The scenes from East Palestine look as if they’re taken straight out of a horror film depicting nuclear winter.

In spite of that, the magnitude of this story has been seemingly scrubbed from the public view as national media outlets continue to run sensationalist headlines about issues that look innocuous in comparison. It is an instance of history being rewritten in real time, setting a precedent that would allow victims of other widespread devastation to be swept under the rug. However, the scenes of the horror engulfing this small town in America’s heartland may prove to make this disaster impossible to ignore, rightfully putting the spotlight on the shortcomings of state and federal agencies tasked with emergency response management whose continued lack of accountability enables them to fail the American public time and time again.

Source

Original Article: https://www.europereloaded.com/ohio-train-derailment-creating-a-toxic-disaster-to-avoid-another-disaster-msm-silence-deafening/