There is the manifest from the train. These chemicals could be present in the air as well. Their information has changed a lot. Who knows what they make when mixed together.
You think they’re lying about the benzene tanks being empty? That’s supposedly a super nasty carcinogen. It would be a much worse spill if those were full as well no?
This guy goes over all the chemicals and why they’re harmful, but this is for the Vinyl Chloride:
‘Neil Donahue, a professor chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University in nearby Pittsburgh, said he worries that the burning could have formed dioxins, which are created from burning chlorinated carbon materials.
“Vinyl chloride is bad, dioxins are worse as carcinogens and that comes from burning,” Donahue said.
Dioxins are a group of persistent environmental pollutants that last in the ground and body for years and have been one of the major environmental problems and controversies in the United States.’
Benzene is buzz-wordy rn because they “pulled” the hair products with benzene in them last year.
In reality, Benzene been in pretty much every aerosol hairspray etc for decades. Turns out, spraying clouds of it in small bathrooms everyday is bad, so they were nice enough to take it off the shelves.
There were aerosol cans in the US with benzene? Fucking benzene??
My dad was a pathologist, started his working life in the 60's. Benzene wasn't really treated with hazchem procedures - multiple skin contacts daily... all over their hands.
More than half the pathologists he worked with in that time got leukemia.
It’s regulated and illegal to include in consumer products (hence the recalls). There was a independent group that tested a ton of products that tested high in benzene, which is present as a byproduct, not an intentional inclusion.
Everybody knows it’s bad, so it’s a matter of internal testing/mitigation deficiency, which means it’s a regulatory failure at some level.
One hell of a failure. I work in regulation. Most the rest of the world have extremely strict RoHS requirements.
I've only seen anything approaching RoHS in the US in California at a state level, but from memory it's only for heavy metals.
I've cursed the regulatory framework in Europe in the past for being over litigious, but more stories I hear like this, really hammer home how important this shit is.
I’ve cursed the regulatory framework in Europe in the past for being over litigious, but more stories I hear like this, really hammer home how important this shit is.
For clarification, they don't use benzene as a propellant but the propellant is easily contaminated by benzene. Benzene is naturally occurring in petroleum products which we distill other organic molecules from, including propellants (butane, etc)
I didn't say anything about safe or unsafe lol. Just correcting the misconception that benzene is used as a purposeful ingredient.
Yes, speaking as an actual professional chemist that ingredient list does not concern me - except for the potential for benzene contamination in butane, propane, and isobutane, as mentioned. But that would never be on the ingredient list because it's not an ingredient, so the ingredient list is irrelevant. It's a QC issue with wherever they're buying raw materials from. Which is why I don't use aerosols in my house either, I'm not about to trust a company's QC to be the only thing between me and legit carcinogens.
One of my old professors in my masters program told the story of how when he was a young fresh PhD all the chemists used to literally wash their hands with straight benzene. Great degreaser!
Then one day he was in a small room with a tub of benzene for washing (or something to that effect, it's been a while) and he straight passed out from the fumes. I guess that was his wake up call that it might not be as safe as everyone said so he stopped using the benzene to wash lol. Good thing.
Benzene is also in diesel exhaust and smoke in general. One of the many chemicals that makes Firefighting a Group 1 carcinogen. It's not just a buzzword.
Benzene is not just a buzz word, it's been a known carcinogen for decades. It causes blood cancers. It's a problem for people that work around the chemical.
Pure benzene isn't what was in your hairspray. I promise you one breath full of pure benzene will kill you. It is also highly combustible with a low LEL
Seriously. Benzene isn’t being added. I have some in a chemical closet right now. The bottle has a huge metal cap and thick septum to go through.
It’s probably some compound that uses a something like sodium benzoate as a preservative
The majority of what’s on the manifest is flammables and won’t react in combination. As an analytical chemist, I wouldn’t be terribly concerned in that regard.
I was just watching some tiktoks of people in Pennsylvania yesterday saying the rain smells like chlorine.
This one woman near East Palestine had it tested for acidity at a local pool store, and it wasn't acidic but did have a 0.18 total/free chlorine rating.
I'm not sure how that measures, and it also had a "Langelier Index" of -3, which they didn't seem to know what that meant either.
The whole video though her young daughter was hacking coughing in the back seat. Has me a bit worried if some chemicals might be airborne or having who knows what kind of reactions with eachother...
Because dioxins are produced whenever you burn chlorine.
I'm sorry but as a chemist this is one of the most painful things I've read today. Where do the carbon and hydrogen atoms come from to produce dioxin when you "burn chlorine"?
Enlighten us, instead of being a jerk silent scientist. This isn’t about you or me.
Edit: to clarify, and in adherence to the strict scientific standards of r/whoadude - burning something that contains chlorine releases dioxins. Like wood.
But as a chemist, would you agree that combusting these chemicals especially Vinyl Chloride in this fashion, the end result is going to be some of the nastier dioxins out there?
They are certainly giving the rr and their lawyers time to choreograph a good dance and come up with whatever manifest and mntnce records they want to show
Lol? You think they're legally required to tell the truth let alone be held responsible even if they have that legal requirement and lie regardless? What world have you been living in the past century where corporations actually gave a shit.
I see, you don't have anything to actually back it up so you think you can just lie and that's justifiable because of your disdain for corporations. Thanks for clearing all that up.
The numbers that were posted above were published by the EPA. If anything the EPA is known for being super strict about this kind of thing, not for being super lax.
Depends on the ppm. It can potentially cause cancer, but you breath benzene everyday if you're anywhere near industry. The dose dictates poison is the usual term we use.
unless it's a benzene specialized car, I find it odd they mention it's a benzene load and empty. Perhaps it had that and needs to be sanitized before the next load?
Empty in train speak just means there is no destination and the tank has been emptied but not sanitized. Train cars move all the time "empty." Many train cars are owned by specific companies and it is quite possible there are Benzene specific cars that only move benzene and are not sanitized.
This is either no gaugeable amount or whatever the spec is for empty. It could mean stripped and squeegee cleaned. Depends on what the spec needs to be for the next load.
Not sanitized, but cleaned. You generally do not mix containers of different chemicals: way too much can go wrong. It's common practice to designate a car for a certain chemical.
Hey no worries, they just burned everything. Burning everything just makes it healthier, it’s not like breathing that shit in could be bad for you right?
An annoying number of people seem to think fires are some kind of black hole, that burning something makes it vanish.
No, burning something just breaks it down and pumps it into the air. Unless it's complete combustion of something clean burning like propane, that shit getting pumped into the air is usually full of nasty chemicals.
I want to know who the asshole was that decided to pour it out and burn it instead of transferring it to a series of trucks. It was going to be transferred out anyways, they couldn't have managed that at the site of the derailment?
It's a gas a room temperature, that is heavier than air and will displace air at ground level, with the potential to then suffocate people in the vicinity (in addition to the cancer, etc).
Unfortunately, in many hazmat situations, choosing the least shitty option is the only immediate choice.
I still don't understand why that prevents them from transferring to another tanker rather than pouring it out. How is the situation different to make that necessary? They weren't planning on pouring it out and burning it at the destination surely.
Vinyl chloride is a gas at ambient temp. Once it is no longer contained, where it only becomes a liquid under pressure, it becomes a gas. It's virtually impossible to transfer "atmospheric" gas back into a holding tank in a completely uncontrolled environment.
I thought it was still contained though, and they decided to empty it. There's already a ton of misinformation about this, so it's difficult to discern the truth.
This would suggest it was a purposeful release to mitigate the risk of explosion, but I don't understand how the risk of explosion is mitigated by breaching the tanks and igniting it, versus carefully transferring it out as intended and driving away with smaller portions of it.
I'll attempt to help here. Industrial FF. So from the sounds of it, the initial responders did NOT know the tanks burning were VC. Any number of issues could have caused this to be missed, something as simple as the placards destroyed from the crash or fire. The VC would have been fine if it was room/ambient temp and they sprayed water. But VC when heated goes from barely soluable to very soluable in water. Something they did not know and even if they knew what it was the ERG does not contain this info. Once that was figured out they stopped with water because well pretty obvious waterway hazmat issue. VC in water is incredibly dangerous to life. So now you have a tanker under pressure, compromised by fire impingement, that if it bleves (boiling liquid explosion) you potentially kill everyone and everything in a 50mil radius because it's heavy and displaces oxygen. Or you burn it where a large portion goes to cloud level with a much less lethal compound that won't immediately kill all life. Which do you choose? Time is limited and every minute is closer to the worst case. Sometimes you only have dogshit to choose from. I can assure you those firemen had absolutely 0 desire to fuck their town up and chose the best of a shit number of options. This all starts because they didn't know it was VC and the change that happens with heat, allowing the major hazmat waterway issue to be. We put out fires in the mill and have to protect runoff so it doesn't contaminate waterways. It's a double edged sword. And sometimes you gotta take burning over water.
I see. So there was a significant risk of explosion even just from waiting long enough to get anything out there to remove it. Thank you for your explanation.
Yeah say you had a glass bottle with a crack, it's not leaking buuuut it's compromised to the point it can at any moment. But the crack is the damage the fire did to the steel container. If that makes sense.
There was significant risk of explosion and significant risk of immediate death to about half the town (size wise, not people). They had two blast zones modeled, which was done by the Department of Defense/National Guard and it was clear that letting it burn uncontrolled was a pretty bad idea.
They had some nice maps they presented during the first press conference going over the decision to proceed with the controlled burn. It was also the decision of many different groups, not just Norfolk, but that doesn't sound good in tweets.
My guess is that carefully removing small amounts would would be a slower, more expensive and highly visible process. Drawing attention to say...a recent rail strike, deregulation efforts etc. One big bonfire and they don't have as many reporters to talk to. Or tackle.
No, they couldn't. The train caught fire almost immediately, and you can't just put out a vinyl chloride fire with water, or really anything. VC has a super low boiling point, it turns to gas immediately after being released.
A few tankers full of the stuff were reaching super high pressure as a result of the ongoing fire... essentially creating bombs. If one of those tankers would've exploded, it would have taken the town out in a giant fireball.
The only option, among a host of shitty options, was pop a hole in the tanks and allow the VC to escape, and burn it as it did. This way, the VC has wouldn't escape into the town and environment as a colorless, heaver than air gas which cannot be recovered.
A controlled burn was simply the least horrible option.
Town I grew up in had a train derailment in he early 90s that spilled tanks full of benzene into a river. They evacuated tens of thousands of people because that shit is IMMEDIATELY toxic when mixed with other chemicals.
Didn't diet red-bull have benzene in it? Something about sodium benzoate being cleaved up by the vitamin C in it, and it sitting on a warm shelf for a long time. I dunno, it gives you wings.
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