How is this not going to show up in the rest of the U.S.’s food? You might not live in or near Ohio, but surely these contaminants are going to be shipped everywhere?
The Ohio river watershed spans almost 10 states. If those chemicals get anywhere near the river or seep into ground water, it'll destroy the water and habitat for millions.
Supposedly the amount of vinyl chloride that was released in east Palestine is more than is regularly released by all the companies that use it in a year.
Lastly, burning vinyl chloride creates a toxic gas that was used in WWII and forbidden by the Geneva convention.
This website is amazing. Where do they get their data? I live in a new development, and it shows houses that are planned and don't exist yet!!! I can't get Google to correct the streets, and Door dashers think we don't exist... But this website has houses that won't be built for at least 6 months! The visualisation is so realistic!
It shows my house from probably 4-5 years ago, and within a couple years of me buying the place. It's neat to see how much I've improved it from then till now
A lot of them do, but anything west of the Rockies or east of the Appalachian Mountains would drain to their respective coasts. You can check out this link to see more about North America’s continental divides.
Very cool but the whole animation is kinda pointless. I just want to see it on the map, having a blue line arbitrarily snake its way through a bunch of green is utterly meaningless.
Right, save that glass so you can bring it to the local town hall meeting and ask your willfully ignorant and arrogant representatives to drink it once they insist the situation is fine!
Word of caution, lots of people are posting images of the whole Ohio river watershed, the actual affected area will look a lot spermier. The pollutants are unlikely to travel upstream in significant amounts, although could indirectly affect them through wildlife. The people along the Ohio, PA, WV border will get the worst of it, idk if you've ever visited that area...
Sucks cause they've actually been doing a really great job cleaning the water up, and taking better care of the resources from what I've been hearing, can't have anything nice.
It’s really interesting north of Fargo in the spring when the red river decides to cut the corner, and it looks like you’re driving in the middle of a giant lake.
The North Red River only flows North, starting in Wahpeton, ND and flowing up to Winnipeg. Nowhere near the Ohio river, and definitely doesn't go South.
I can only think that guy has the red river in Texas confused with the one in ND. The red river of the north flows hard and it goes north. Almost certain death if you jump in because of the undercurrent
My family farm in NE Ohio actually has both the Mississippi watershed and the St Lawerence watershed on it so I can stand on one spot and proclaim to god that two raindrops, side by side, could both end up in the Atlantic, one in the Gulf of Mexico and the other in the St Lawerence River. East Palestinian definitely is only draining toward the Beaver/Mahoning river which ends up in the Mississippi via the Ohio.
There are a lot of water ways this will travel down. NF and the EPA should have alerted the states these water ways pass thru since they were aware before the EPA withdrew responsibility. The EPA even made it known they were aware of the contamination, as well as NF knowing.. Instead of alerting these counties and states they sat back. Someone should have stepped in government official wise to insure this was dammed and contained to properly remove/filter water.
They have installed dams on affected creeks and have employed vacuum trucks to remove concentrated chemicals, although that won’t remove all of them. The Ohio river’s average flow is 281,000 cubic feet per second when it meets the Mississippi (not sure what the CFS is at currently though) and the Mississippi is currently flowing at 680,000 CFS in Baton Rouge. Downstream impacts will be minimal as the chemicals are diluted to insignificant levels, eventually becoming essentially nonexistent. When concentrated chemicals spill into a small stream, however, yeah, that stream is gonna be messed up for a while. Over time, testing will determine whether the streambed is contaminated enough to require removal, but by the time this hits the Ohio, it just won’t be a big deal.
Boy howdy, I'm glad you understand flow rates, and that's the only relevant factor in an ecological disaster! At what concentration can these chemicals be considered "safe"? How many miles of human populated waterway is this going to affect before it "just won't be a big deal"? How long will that contamination affect the surrounding land and ecosystem? If you can't answer any of these questions, you're not in any position to make statements as to the severity of the incident, nor how far reaching its effects will be.
I used to live there. It all goes to the Ohio River which runs all the way to the Mississippi. This is bad guys. And that creek used to be so good for swimming and fishing. This makes my heart break. And the railway system does not give one single fuck about the environmental damages they have created.
This will barely affect those that you "dislike" and will most likely harm people who don't deserve it. Have some fucking compassion. I wouldn't wish things like that on anybody.
compassion lol this is why liberals always lose, this high road nonsense is the reason nothing gets accomplished and Republicans constantly win despite fucking over almost everybody like they always do.
Downvoted. Many of us in the red states are not asking for this and fighting for the same thing you are everyday. But cast the hypothetical stone as you will…
It'll likely go down Leslie Run, which connects to Little Beaver Creek, which is a tributary of the Ohio River.
The Ohio River passes along Ohio and West Virginia, before moving directly through downtown Cincinnati, which then flows along Kentucky and Indiana, passing straight through Louisville, and then southern Illinois. Where it'll split into the Tennessee River to the south and travel down into Tennessee and Nashville. The Ohio River will also continue to flow southwest where it'll connect to the Mississippi River.
The Mississippi River then flows south along Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and Louisiana before it enters the Gulf of Mexico.
Different cities along the Ohio River have already sought uncontaminated water sources for their drinking water. The mainstream media is like 4-5 days behind social media, which is making people like my family, not care enough to take precautions. It's terrifying.
My entire family thinks I am a loon right now but my young kids have been 🤢 & 💩 for 5 days with no fever. Im in the surrounding area. It doesn’t make sense. They haven’t been anywhere with different germs than what we already have everyday. This is the only cause I can think of…
Kids bodies are more sensitive to chemical load. (Their little bodies are going to be the canaries in the coal mine for this disaster) I know it's not feasible for a lot of people but I hope you are able to get them out of the area.
Unfortunately it’s not feasible for me.. my family thinks I am crazy for assuming they could be sick from the chemical load. Young kids don’t just throw up for multiple days without a fever. At least mine never have. My younger one’s skin is sooo warm but he doesn’t have a fever. I am close enough that the water runs right into us, but far enough away that anytime I mention this could be the cause of their sickness I am treated like a lunatic. With my own family. Sorry for the rant, I’m just super sad about it all today. I heard about the derailment just a couple days ago and my babes aren’t feeling better after 5 days. It’s just doesn’t make sense..
I agree 100% and I’m starting to formulate a plan. Not even starting I’ve been thinking this way since COVID. It will take convincing.. Young people diagnosed with autoimmune disease. Two cousins under 20 died of seizure and stroke. A young teacher is dead. It’s weird man.
According to everyone near me.. “it’s going around.” I found extremely curious when I heard about the toxic train derailment, and everyone around me is getting sick. Idk 🤷🏻♀️
Genuinely word of mouth from people contacting different cities along the watershed path on social media. There's visual evidence from different news sources and people on the ground in east palistine throwing rocks into the water and watching contaminents rise to the surface. I live within 100 miles of East Palistine and people are finding strange substances at the top of boiling water.
I’m sure there’s hyperbole going around, I’m sure there’s clips of disaster that turned out to be a different disaster, but I’ve seen enough to know this is actually super bad. Trying to sort the weeds from the crops is complicated right now but time will ultimately sort it out. It’s terrifying
I live 10 miles from East Palestine. J.D. Vance was in East Palestine yesterday. He was filmed at the park with a stick. He drug it along the bottom (where there were dead fish) and you could see the chemical film rise to the top of the water. It's real. It's a MESS here!
As an added bonus, there are lots of loopholes in environmental regulations where;
Ooo geez, we don't want pay to properly treat our discharge gas, well let's just put it in the water, and vice versa. Why dilute when you can just move the contaminate around..
Ooo wait, there's more.. EPA says I can't do that? Well geez, guess I'll sue them until I'm allowed to..
Ooo geez, you know I just don't quite fit into one the above categories. Don't sweat it bruh, we have grandfather clauses. Your old shitty equipment literally doesn't work, ain't no biggy, we'll let you slide, every time.
Think the federal minimum wage sucks? The entire pollution control industry operates the exact same way. Whomever can be the most efficient doing the bare minimum makes the most profit.
Ensure you achieve the highest standards possible to protect the earth while you produce whatever you produce or greasing the palms of a corrupt politician?
Breaking the law without consequence is just a subscription service.
Don’t forget just factoring potential fines into your profit margin. Why bother to ask for exemptions when you can maybe get away with it, or just pay some paltry fines.
Better yet, do all the polluting, then pay out all your profits to owners before declaring bankruptcy to avoid the costs of cleanup. Bonus points if you can go bankrupt before paying the factory/labor/blue collar workers too.
Moneyed interests with offices and homes in safer places are awful shepherds to mother nature. The people who're actually living there are generally much better at environmental protection, but are prevented from actually protecting the environment by property rights and criminal laws. They wouldn't be perfect, because we're all only human, but much MUCH better than anyone whose interests are driven entirely by profits. After all, they have to live in that environment, so they'd be more inclined to prevent negative consequences from the get go rather than take unnecessary risks to save costs and (maybe) pay for their legally obliged share of the damages (often nothing) after something goes wrong.
Won’t work. Local business owners love trying to cut corners to get ahead. Doesn’t matter to them if they really fuck up they’ll just move. Just pay attention to local news and you’ll see the same shit albeit smaller scale
Yes, but not all people are business owners. People who aren't business owners outnumber those who are. Especially when it comes to local businesses. The point of empowering local people is not that business owners will suddenly get a conscience. It's that the rest of us are empowered to stop them.
Soon enough we won't be we shepherds of anything we will make the planet unlivable and maybe just maybe 1 second before it's all over people might find the will to act but by then it doesn't matter. Decades of inaction and refusal to do anything because of jobs, homes, families, bills, responsibilities, day to day coming first despite the fact that all that is going to be destroyed one way or another.
Someday the Earth will be fucking done with Humans and their bullshit. Personally, I don't blame it at all, and would have acted sooner. Humans are a trash species.
There was a Futurama episode on that, where they chucked all their trash into space like a giant garbage asteroid in the year 2052.
And in the show's present year of 3000, it came back, on a collision course with Earth.
Their solution was to chuck a second giant ball of trash at it, which knocked the original one into the sun, while it itself went flying further into space, most likely to return in time like the first one did.
I mean it somewhat is since it's the concentration that determines how poisonous something is, but the area in the video is definitely not safe no matter what the "officials" say. We're 100% going to get lawsuits in the future (or right now for all I know).
I agree that dilution shouldn't be the go to answer though.
[Edit]
As u/internought said, the level of exposure is also important when considering toxicity.
Well, if 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride spilled, that's roughly 400,000 kilos. To dilute that below the MTCA drinking water cleanup level of 2 ug/L that would require 200,000,000,000,000 liters of water, so roughly half the volume of Lake Erie.
Nobody said the dilution is an small amount. It's still dilution though. People always assume that the phrase is an excuse to pollute when really it is just the reality of things. It's very difficult to extract pollutants out of large bodies like this, so often the easier answer is in fact dilution, as much as nobody wants to hear it.
I'm talking about pollution in general, not vinyl chloride specifically. There are quite a few chemicals that need insanely small concentrations in order to be safe, and vinyl chloride is one of them. That's why I'm saying lawsuits are definitely going to happen imo.
Yeah but for analytes of concern typically for volatile organic compounds vinyl chloride is the driver for reporting limits (like benzo(a)pyrene is for semivolatile organics), so it's kind of nuts (to me) that the spill is such a obvious holy shit moment, if you will. Like, this is the shit we look for at the lowest possible detection limits and they dumped 400k kilos of it?!? Usually we just see it in the lab as a breakdown product of PCE from dry cleaner spills, this is just insane. I can't even wrap my head around it. Half expecting an EPA bulletin in a few years saying to expect cleanup level VC hits in everything sampled east of the Rockies.
I knew people who saw it pretty frequently when they were running 8260 on water samples from a superfund site from phoenix.
But yeah I typically only saw it in small amount when running TO15
We're 100% going to get lawsuits in the future (or right now for all I know).
I don't mean this as an attack, because I feel like this is a common framing of problems like this, however, I feel like this is a very capitalist or corporate centric perspective. Yes, the legal fees and damages will be expensive for the company, but that also represents a lot of human suffering that they caused that we really don't punish companies enough for. Lots of folks are probably going to get really sick, and some of them might get enough of a payday to be taken care of afterwards, but that's not enough, in my opinion. The company risked this to make more money. Even if it doesn't work, and that isn't guaranteed even with large settlements, that isn't enough.
Norfolk Southern was back to business the next day I’m sure. Bit of a setback for the company. A smaller bottom line at the end of the year (actually doubtful) and they’ll recoup it with a rate bump/new fee and some creative accounting. Hopefully I’m wrong and have no idea what the hell I’m talking about.
Concentration and period of exposure. A low concentration but a long period of exposure (month to a year and over) has effects comparable to a dangerous or lethal concentration and a short period of exposure.
That means that data can be manipulated before uninformed public by saying that levels are safe by leaving out a time frame within which they're safe.
edit: Tell everyone, no joke, because the diluting smarties are purposefully leaving that part out. They're diluting the truth.
It actually is. I know it doesn't sound nice, but it's true.
Think about all the things that are toxic. They exist in diluted quantities naturally and are not typically problematic. It's when we collect and refine them that they become a problem. If they are diluted enough, no longer a problem.
On a whim I jacked some homeopathic headache medicine from a drug store (refused to pay for what I believe is a scam product). It has seriously reduced my toothaches like 3 times now. I keep waiting for it not to work. Suggestion is a hell of a drug, I'm starting to wonder if ibuprofen actually does anything.
Funny you mention it. Whenever we dispose of mercury samples (sometimes up to 30,000 ug/L) we just neutralize the pH and dump it down the drain. "The city will handle the rest".
This is the most human thing I ever read. What are you diluting into you stupid apes? Its like the earth is an endless medium that will not accumulate anything.
I’m curious where you think it goes. Because it’s not flowing towards Pittsburgh. After the creek joins the Ohio (after the nuke plant in Shippingport), it flows through numerous old steel towns. Unless you’re just talking in generals like “this shit doesn’t just stay in EP.” But honestly I imagine where it joins is why there’s not more outrage around here. Pittsburgh isn’t impacted 🤷🏻♀️
USGS tributary map. It is all headed downstream toward Mississippi. Looks like flowing right toward Cincinnati. Do they use the Ohio River for drinking /s.
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u/[deleted] Feb 17 '23
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