Recap: East Palestine Derailment

As if things weren't bad enough already...

A freight train carrying hundreds of thousands of gallons of extremely toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3rd, 2023, spilling its chemical contents, and was then detonated and burned off by local authorities working with Norfolk Southern rail. Media was near-silent about it in the first critical couple of days, an investigating reporter on the scene was arrested, and the only place anyone really seemed to care about it was Twitter. The ramifications of this are going to be felt for years. A large part of Ohio has been rendered temporarily uninhabitable - not that authorities are going to actually tell anybody that - and the impacts are going to be felt all the way down to Louisiana as the contamination spreads from the Ohio River to the Mississippi and into the surrounding farmland.

A quick recap of what’s just the very latest disaster to hit us …

That doesn’t look good.

What was it carrying?

Most of the concern has been about vinyl chloride, which is an extraordinarily carcinogenic precursor to most of the plastics we use. Very tiny quantities, on the order of 1 ppm, are sufficient to cause extensive cancers and death within months; everybody in the path of the toxic cloud was exposed to concentrations up to 50ppm.

However - that’s not all it was carrying. In total, the train was loaded with:

• Five tanks of vinyl chloride

• One tank of ethylene glycol monobutyl ether

• One tank of ethylhexyl acrylate

• One tank of isobutylene

• One tank of butyl acrylates

Cargo manifest (click to expand) Source

It would be bad enough if it was all just released as-is. Of course, it gets worse: rather than try to clean it up, which would have been dangerous, expensive, and delayed reopening the rail line - they decided to burn it all. So, in addition to all of those chemicals - not all of which will have been “successfully” burned, many of which seeped into the groundwater, and will have been aerosolized into the air - we also now have the Midwest water table contaminated with the following:

• Vinyl Chloride (VC):

  • Combustion product: hydrogen chloride (HCl)

    • Reacts with water vapor to form hydrochloric acid and phosgene

  • Health risks: cancer, respiratory irritation, central nervous system depression, death

• Ethylene Glycol Monobutyl Ether (EGMBE):

  • Combustion product: acrolein

  • Health risks: cancer, respiratory irritation, central nervous system depression

• Ethylhexyl Acrylate (EHAA):

  • Combustion product: formaldehyde

  • Health risks: cancer, respiratory irritation, headaches, nausea

• Isobutylene (i-C4H8):

  • Combustion product: formaldehyde

• Butyl Acrylates:

  • Combustion product: formaldehyde

Everybody in the path of the cloud, and anybody using or consuming contaminated groundwater, or water from the Ohio or (soon) Mississippi River, has been and is being exposed to a number of extremely potent carcinogens, and the World War I chemical weapon phosgene. These aren’t the “everything causes cancer” carcinogens; the State of California might have determined that coffee and bikinis “might” cause cancer, but these most certainly will, and at very, very low exposures. To make matters worse, these chemicals will not quickly degrade once they’re in the soil: while we’re not talking hundreds of years like Chernobyl, it will take at least a full year before the chemicals in the soil and water will degrade and become harmless.

Who’s affected?

Tens of millions of people.

Mass deaths of fish and wildlife have been reported within a 200 mile radius.

The first concern is the gigantic cloud of death that was, to the apparent surprise of local authorities, trapped in an inversion layer in the atmosphere; instead of dissipating, lingering, coherent and very densely concentrated. At first, the winds were blowing easterly, endangering PA; subsequently, they have shifted north-northwest-northeast, blanketing the rest of northern Ohio, parts of Michigan, and presently threatening Toronto.

The skies of V̶e̶n̶u̶s East Palestine. Source

The thick, dark clouds are composed of hydrochloric acid and phosgene; you’ll find similar conditions on the surface of Venus. Cars driving through the affected areas have been reportedly showing signs of corrosion, and people outdoors have reported coughing fits, watering eyes, breathing difficulty and neurological effects. Everyone in the path of the cloud, or exposed to the contaminated groundwater, is very highly likely to suffer aggressive cancers over the coming months; wildlife and livestock have been dying en masse, within a 200 mile radius thus far, and rivers and streams are full of dead fish.

It gets worse.

The region of America fed by the Mississippi River stretches over 2300 miles, and constitutes America’s largest regions of fertile farmland. Huge quantities of toxic chemicals have leached into the river, which is used for both human drinking water and agricultural irrigation and livestock feed, across Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, downstream of the Ohio River, where the derailment occurred. These chemicals are also highly toxic to plant life. While authorities are taking some measures to contain the damage, the response has been lackluster and slow, with the government and the rail company apparently much more interested in covering it up, downplaying it, and getting the trains running again. By the way, there was another hazardous derailment today in Houston!

This disastrous situation is likely to have a devastating impact on the farmland in the region, potentially delivering yet another major blow to the food supply. As toxic chemicals continue seeping into the soil and groundwater, the loss of fertile land and the death of wildlife and livestock will have far-reaching consequences, further increasing food prices and emptying shelves. The Mississippi River Basin is used for the irrigation of a huge proportion of American food exports and locally consumed wheat and corn. The second-order effects on farming are likely to impact food production for at least the next couple of years.

What can we do?

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those stories that comes with a happy ending. The toxic clouds are still moving around the Northeast, and the contamination of the Ohio River has likely already reached the Mississippi. While some local officials have begun installing a separate intake to avoid using Ohio River water, it’s already been ten days since the derailment, and four days since the burnoff began; too little, too late doesn’t even begin to cover it, and we should expect to see confirmation of Mississippi contamination in short order.

I did just release an article detailing several known cures for cancer, so that may be of some help to the millions of people in the path of this disaster. Even so, there’s only around 7000 oncologists in the US, and with so many millions of people likely to suffer rapidly progressing cancers in the coming months, expert advice and treatment is going to be in very short supply. Even the Three Mile Island meltdown can’t hold a candle to this. The EPA recommends high-quality water filters to remove vinyl chloride from drinking water, although they aren’t entirely effective; shower and washing water will likely be similarly contaminated in the affected areas for some time.

Local authorities did issue a temporary evacuation order; barely days after the burnoff began, they advised residents that they could return if they wanted. That abhorrently poor advice is surely going to cost thousands of lives. Don’t worry about the smell of chlorine in the air, either. The distance between conspiracy theory and reality is down to about a month these days; given that Netflix only just released a movie, filmed on location in East Palestine, about this precise scenario, does make one wonder if there was any premeditation precipitating these events. I suppose we’ll find out in short order.

My sympathies go out to anybody in the affected areas. There is a GoFundMe here to provide help to East Palestine locals via charities in the area.

I’ll be following developments as they happen on Twitter.

Local videos discussing the ramifications: One Two Three Four

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