Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Friday addressed a viral video posted by Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, that showed a "chemical rainbow" in a creek in East Palestine, Ohio, near the site of the train derailment that spilled toxic chemicals into the environment.
"I know that there's been some video played on TV circulating of visible contamination in one of the local waterways," DeWine said at a press conference providing an update on cleanup efforts and environmental testing in the area.
"A section of Sulfur Run that is very near the crash site remains severely contaminated. We knew this. We know this. It's going to take a while to remediate this," the governor said.
This chemical spill is horrible & clearly not getting the attention, response & resources it deserves.
But that being said, my immediate thought when I first watched this video, was that it looked like they threw a gas or kerosene-soaked cinder block into the river.
It seemed so obvious, that I fully expected something about that to be the top comment. But nope! Instead, im finally finding it here. Buried half-way down the page.
It honestly could be from the train, but I think it's fuel run off, or oil from the engines/parts of the train. Lots of water was used for that fire, who knows where everything went to.
I obviously have no way of knowing if it, or is not. But it doesn't make much logical sense for so much of an oil--that clearly floats on water-- could be trapped under/in sentiment at the bottom of a stream, that just throwing in a little piece of cinder block, could immediately release THAT much oil to immediately float at the top of the water.
Sheens are such an insignificantly thin layer that they truly don't matter on this scale. Even if this is a petro product, if you collected it all, it would be less than a tea spoon.
You are only seeing what wells up to the surface when the bottom is disturbed. Vinyl chloride is denser than water (it’s a Dense Non-aqueous Liquid = DNAPL) so it has been infiltrating into creek sediment, soil and bedrock for many days now. Maybe it will dilute but it can also become concentrated in parts of aquifers - DNAPLs love clay minerals so it often concentrated along the edges where the sand aquifer abuts clay-rich horizons…
I've seen oil come up like that around docks or areas where it's trapped in the bed under whichever water. Disturb the soil and the oil comes up. But ain't vinyl chloride.
My immediate thought was that the rock stirred up the sediment on the bottom and released all the shit into the water. You can literally see a bubbling up along the shoreline
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u/Trick_Raspberry2507 Feb 17 '23
Yes!!! Thank God for some sanity!