Why I’m not that worried about the Ohio Hazmat Train Derailment 🛤️💥

For one it’s a very big country. I live 425 miles away from East Palatine Ohio, so the chances of any exposure to it are basically zero, unless maybe it drink milk or eat beef from cattle that grazed on dioxin laden grass. And even that risk is tiny compared to the world we live in literally saturated in an alphabet soup of toxic chemicals. Rather than fearing PFOAS, PCBs, dioxins, furans, and the rest of the alphabet soup we should stop cranking them out and their precursors from out factories.

It seems like despite public skeptism, the states and federal government did the right thing burning off the leaking toxic chemicals and containing the rest. The wind was from the northwest that day, so most of the smoke blew towards Pennsylvania State Game Land 275 and rural countryside. Some of the smoke might ended up reaching Beaver Falls, PA from looking at the radar but probably not much further. Probably not Pittsburgh, which is too far away. Smoke doesn’t carry that far, even in a big fire. Walk 20 miles in hilly south-western Pennsylvania coal country and see how truly far 20 miles is. Cars and their fast operating speed often distorts our perception of time and space.

Compared to the big western wildfires which can dump smoke into the upper atmosphere, this was a pretty isolated incident. And it was a one time incident, emissions relatively small compared to some of other large polluters that operate 24-7 in that general vicinity, including Homer City, Keystone and Conemaugh Coal Power Plants. For about 6 months a few years back, one of the steel furnaces outside of Pittsburgh operated with pollution controls down, because they couldn’t stop the plant mid-batch without forever destroying the plant.

The truth is while it sounds bad to burn off a tanker car full of vinyl chloride – houses and cars burn regularly in fires with many of the same chemicals. Roughly 350,000 houses burn per year in United States, 175,000 automobiles burn per year. And especially in rural Pennsylvania people burn trash and even vinyl siding in construction burn piles, and all kinds of nasty stuff as trash pickup is expensive and doesn’t service all rural areas and people are poor and like fire.

If we are worried about persistent organic pollutants, ultimately it comes down to industry not manufacturing the precursors and pollutants themselves. We need tougher regulations of chemicals and not just be pointing fingers at rednecks that burn stuff. Accidents happen, trains derail, cars crash and burn and house fires are not uncommon. If they were unthinkable every community wouldn’t have a fire department.

If we care about human and environmental health, we need to look at those massive coal plants and industrial factories that make the toxic chemicals and their precursors and not a one off, toxic spill which has largely been broken down over the vast rural countryside, hopefully not leaving too much of the partially incinerated chlorinated byproducts in it wake.

I’m not really concerned about this one spill but I do worry about the future of the climate and the environment overall with all the toxic pollution we are dumping in the air 24-7.