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#east palestine
animentality · 1 year
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liberalsarecool · 1 year
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Every Republican decision was dumb. They assume catastrophes don't happen, then make sure they do.
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So....hmmmm. Someone assuage my worries. 
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saywhat-politics · 1 year
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thenib · 1 year
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Jen Sorensen.
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Every time I see a meme about a stupid UFO I’m going to post about the ecological disaster happening in the US right now because of a corrupt capitalist government
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mysharona1987 · 1 year
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Big Train managers earn bonuses for greenlighting unsafe cars
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Tomorrow (November 16) I'll be in Stratford, Ontario, appearing onstage with Vass Bednar as part of the CBC IDEAS Festival. I'm also doing an afternoon session for middle-schoolers at the Stratford Public Library.
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Almost no one knows this, but last June, a 90-car train got away from its crew in Hernando, MS, rolling three miles through two public crossings, a ghost train that included 47 potentially explosive propane cars. The "bomb train" neither crashed nor derailed, which meant that Grenada Railroad/Gulf & Atantic didn't have to report it.
This is just one of many terrifying near-misses that are increasingly common in America's hyper-concentrated, private equity-dominated rail sector, where unsafe practices dominate and whistleblowers face brutal retaliation for coming forward to regulators.
These unsafe practices – and the corporate policies that deliberately gave rise to them – are documented in terrifying, eye-watering detail in a deeply reported Propublica story by Topher Sanders, Jessica Lussenhop,Dan Schwartz, Danelle Morton and Gabriel L Sandoval:
https://www.propublica.org/article/railroad-safety-union-pacific-csx-bnsf-trains-freight
It's a tale of depraved indifference to public safety, backstopped by worker intimidation. The reporting is centered on railyard maintenance inspectors, who are charged with writing up "bad orders" to prevent unsafe railcars from shipping out. As private equity firms consolidated rail into an ever-dwindling number of companies, these workers face supervisors who are increasingly hostile to these bad orders.
It got so alarming that some staffers started carrying hidden digital recorders, so they could capture audio of their bosses illegally ordering them to greenlight railcars that were too unsafe for use. The article features direct – and alarming – quotes, like supervisor Andrew Letcher, boss of the maintenance crews at Union Pacific's Kansas City yard saying, "If I was an inspector on a train I would probably let some of that nitpicky shit go."
Letcher – and fellow managers for other Tier 1 railroads quoted in the piece – aren't innately hostile to public safety. They are quite frank about why they want inspectors to "let that nitpicky shit go." As Letcher explains, "The first thing that I’m getting questioned about right now, every day, is why we’re over 200 bad orders and what we’re doing to get them down."
In other words, corporate rail owners have ordered their supervisors to reduce the amount of maintenance outages on the rail lines, but have not given them additional preventative maintenance budgets or crew. These supervisors warn their employees that high numbers of bad orders could cost them their jobs, even lead to the shutdown of the car shops where inspectors are prone to pulling dangerous cars out of service.
It's a ruthless form of winnowing. Gresham's Law holds that "bad money drives out good" – in an economy where counterfeit money circulates, people preferentially spend their fake money to get it out of their hands, until all the money in circulation is funny money. This is the rail safety equivalent: simply fire everyone who reports unsafe conditions and all your railcars will be deemed safe, with the worst railcars shipped out first. A market for lemons – except these aren't balky used sedans, they're unsafe railcars full of toxic chemicals or explosive propane.
When cataclysmic rail disasters occur – like this year's East Palestine derailment – the rail industry reassures us that this is an isolated incident, pointing to the system's excellent overall safety record. But that record is a mirage, because the near-misses don't have to be reported. Those near-misses are coming more frequently, as the culture of profit over safety incurs a mounting maintenance debt, filling America's rails with potential "bomb cars."
Rail mergers and other forms of deregulated, anything-goes capitalism are justified by conservative economists who insist that "incentives matter," and that the profit motive provides the incentive to improve efficiency, leading to lower costs and better service. But the incentive to externalize risk, kick the can down the road, and capture regulators rarely concerns the "incentives matter" crowd.
Here's an incentive that matters. Rail managers' bonuses – as much as a fifth of their take home pay – are only paid if the trains they oversee run on time. Inspectors have recorded their managers admitting that they have quotas – a maximum number of bad orders their facility may produce, irrespective of how much unsafe rolling stock passes through the facility.
Inspectors have caught their managers removing repair order tags from cars they've flagged as unsafe. Inspectors will log orders in a database, only to have the record mysteriously deleted, or marked as serviced when no service has occurred. Some inspectors have seen the same cars in their yard with the same problems, and repeatedly flagged them without any maintenance being performed before they're shipped out again.
Former managers from Union Pacific, CSX and Norfolk Southern told Propublica that they operated in an environment where safety reports were discouraged, and that workers who filed these reports were viewed as "complainers." Workers furnished Propublica with recordings of rail managers berating them for reporting persistent unsafe conditions the Federal Railroad Administration. Other workers from BNSF said that they believed that their bosses were told when they called the company's "confidential" work-safety tipline, setting them up for retaliation by bosses who'd falsified safety reports.
Whistleblowers who seek justice at OSHA are stymied by long delays, and while switching their cases to court can win them cash settlements, these do not get recorded on the company's safety record, which allows the company to go on claiming to be a paragon of safety and prudence.
The culture of retaliation is pervasive, which explains how the 47-cars worth of propane on the "bomb train" that rolled unattended over three miles of track never made the news. There is a voluntary Close Call Reporting System (operated by NASA!) where rail companies can report these disasters. Not one of America's Class 1 rail companies participate in it.
After the East Palestine disaster, Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed the rail companies to join, but a year later, none have. It's part of an overall pattern with Secretary Buttigieg, who has prodigious, far-reaching powers under USC40 Section 41712(a), which allow him to punish companies for "unfair and deceptive" practices or "unfair methods of competition":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
Buttigieg can't simply hand down orders under 41712(a) – to wield this power, he must follow administrative procedures, conducting market studies, seeking comment, and proposing a rule. Other members of the Biden administration with similar powers, like FTC chair Lina Khan, arrived in office with a ranked-priority list of bad corporate conduct and immediately set about teeing up rules to give relief to the American public.
By contrast, Buttigieg's agency has done precious little to establish the evidentiary record to punish the worst American companies under its remit. His most-touted achievement was to fine five airlines for saving money by cancelling their flights and stranding their passengers. But of the five airlines affected by Buttigieg's order, four were not US companies. The sole affected US carrier was Spirit airlines, with 2% of the market. The Big Four US airlines – who have a much worse record than the ones that were fined – were not affected at all:
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/ftc-noncompete-airline-flight-cancellation-buttigieg/
Rather than directly regulating the US transportation sector, Buttigieg prefers exacting nonbinding promises from them (like the Tier 1 rail companies' broken promise to sign up to the Close Call Reporting System). Under his leadership, the Federal Railroad Agency has proposed weakening rail safety standards, rescinding an order to improve the braking systems on undermaintained, mile-long trains carrying potentially deadly freight:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/11/dinah-wont-you-blow/#ecp
The US transportation system is accumulating a terrifying safety debt, behind a veil of corporate secrecy. It badly demands direct regulation and close oversight.
If you are interested in rail safety, I strongly recommend this episode of Well There's Your Problem, "a podcast about engineering disasters, with slides" – you will laugh your head off and then never sleep again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BMQTdYXaH8
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/15/safety-third/#all-the-livelong-day
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animentality · 1 year
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entitledrichpeople · 1 year
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The East Palestine Ohio train derailment affects a broad area and will affect an even wider area as poisons spread down the Ohio River.
Not only is East Palestine not safe, with reports of continuing animal death & streams full of dead fish, with wind spread there’’s probably a solid 50 mile range that’s in danger from things like toxic fumes and highly acidic rain.  Previous cases of exposure have included not only lung damage but also cancers and nerve damage.
Evacuate and do not return if you can if you live even remotely close (which a lot of poor and particularly poor disabled people may not be able to do), do not drink or bathe in the water, do not consume crops or let your animals consume grass/water/etc. that has been exposed. The ground, water, and air are all dangerously contaminated.  HEPA filters and N95s block some dangerous particles but not the main ones in this case (still, use them if you have them, they’re better than nothing but not truly effective in this case, they are extremely effective against covid 19 too so that’s a bonus).  
Things that will not help keep you from being poisoned but you should also do: Document all medical problems or symptoms that appear, and get doctors to explain in writing in their reports if possible.  Keep receipts/documentation of money owed/paid for any medical care you get or any vet care.  Take photographs and records of livestock deaths or now unusable crops.  Document if you had visitors.  Again, none of this will make you any less endangered, but they will make it way easier to sue later.  A lawsuit won’t cure your cancer but it can pay for your treatments.
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liberalsarecool · 1 year
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Corporate media taking a hard pass on the worst ecological disaster of our time.
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whatsuphoneybee · 1 year
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i wanted to piggyback off this very good tweet and remind everyone that-
Ohio's current voting maps are fucked!
The maps that were used in Ohio's 2022 election were ruled unconstitutional by the Ohio Supreme Court. And were found to be gerrymandered in favor of the Republican party (surprise surprise).
So the government currently in charge of handling the East Palestine disaster was elected unconstitutionally! :)
You can read up about that here! [1] [2] [3] [4]
Additional fun facts about Ohio's government! - A former members of said government's political party is currently on trail for corruption! - They slipped in a bill banning trans women from competing in school sports at 11:56 PM, putting it into an unrelated bill, so it couldn't be reviewed! (it was later shot down but they still used a shitty tactic to try and get it passed)
So yeah! Fuck the "Elect shitty people, live with the shitty results" attitude that's use to downplay and victim blame people living in rural, blue collar, "republican" states.
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environmental groups now that there's a major environmental disaster in east palestine but they don't want to bring negative attention to the current US administration
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3liza · 1 year
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as a disclaimer, I'm not an expert, and i understand the propensity of things like what I'm about to say to cause alarm and distress, and humans can and do handle much higher doses of toxic substances than small animals without showing as immediate or severe reactions, but if i was currently in the East Palestine area of Ohio i would leave immediately, at least for a few days.
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Before this weekend’s fiery Norfolk Southern train derailment prompted emergency evacuations in Ohio, the company helped kill a federal safety rule aimed at upgrading the rail industry’s Civil War-era braking systems, according to documents reviewed by The Lever.
Documents show that when current transportation safety rules were first created, a federal agency sided with industry lobbyists and limited regulations governing the transport of hazardous compounds. The decision effectively exempted many trains hauling dangerous materials — including the one in Ohio — from the “high-hazard” classification and its more stringent safety requirements.
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