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Chemicals from East Palestine derailment spread to 16 US states, data shows
(www.theguardian.com)
East Palestine, Ohio.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
402 points (98.8% liked)
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Funny how we so easily mistake one cataclysm for another
Its like school shootings, they all blur together and its hard to keep them all straightened out.
Once, as a teenager, I switched channels on the TV, and there was a movie. A caption appeared on screen: "Rhode Island".
"Nice!" I thought. "I always like movies set in cultures that are very foreign to mine."
As the movie went on, I was increasingly confused, as those Greeks, or Turks, seemed very similar to US Americans, and the setting appeared to be the USA. (It was dubbed in French, so I couldn't tell from the language)
I soon figured that it must be a location in the USA named after an Old World location.
New England has two types of place names. Old English colonial names and Native ones. Like a river called Woonasquatucket from the very same state you mentioned, Rhode Island.
Interesting.
Here in Québec, most towns and villages either have a native name, or saint's name.
From Columbus to the see
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(41 replies)
I'm so glad that Norfolk Southern is going to pay for all of the necessary remediation. Really a very considerate, and socially/ enviromentally conscious company. Bravo!
What are you talking about? Some politician grimaced as he took a sip of water and another one put it to his lips without actually taking a sip. Everything is fine!
Just hoping to shame Norfolk Southern into action. It was worth inconveniencing a few electrons/ photons, dammit.
It took me a minute to remember that this happened in Ohio and not the Middle East.
It would be a shame if all those states sued the train company for damages.
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(3 replies)
It’s 2024. Why are trains still derailing? Surely there’s a better engineering design than this.
Rail workers do not have the proper time to fully inspect cars and arrange them in the proper order due to understaffing and the high volume created by maximized rail schedules that prioritize profits over safety.
That's a huge reason why rail workers wanted to go on strike before there was bipartisan cooperation led by Biden to take away their labor rights.
It's cheaper to pay the fines when accidents happen than it is to run the trains safely. Just the cost of doing business.
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(4 replies)
The engineering is fine, great even. Executives have demanded that the trains run at the red line, for maximum profit. With no safety margin, when something goes wrong it goes really really wrong. That's why it was so important to hold them accountable and so fucked that we didn't. It's just a matter of time until the next accident.
It's effectively impossible to engineer around knowingly unsafe operation. The trains are fine, it's the railroads operating them unsafely and the state and federal governments refusing to maintain infrastructure that is the problem.
i wish the govt was in charge of maintaining the infrastructure, and i wish the govt owned the infrastructure then prioritized passenger traffic over freight so we could get some semblance of a working regional rail system.
prioritized passenger traffic over freight
Technically that’s already the law. But freight lines don’t care because the law isn’t enforced
They often do prioritize passenger trains, but if it's single track already occupied by a long, slow freight train, the passenger train is going to have to wait anyway.
I dunno. You never hear about high speed rail in Japan derailing, or the monorail at DisneyWorld going off the track. There was some crazy invention ages ago where a train with a gyroscope actually traveled on a single rail. We’ve got to do better than this.
Yeah, because they actually care about safety and put money into maintenance.
Most derailments happen due to operational error such as too much speed for the track (preventable with ATC), equipment failure (preventable with better inspection and maintenance) or external factors like a car on the tracks (not really preventable without major gate upgrades).
The only real technological innovations are automated train systems, but that technology already exists, we just don't use it in the US because the private rail operators make more money by cutting corners, not spending on upgrades.
In 2005, 106 passengers were killed and more than 500 injured.
That’s almost 20 years ago…
Thats line saying why are bridges still collapsing
Because zero effort has been put into maintenance!
Boats still sink, planes and cars still crash. Fundamentally, transportation will fail. The question is are these failures within an acceptable rate due to unforseen issues, or is this a problem with the system that operates and profits off of these devices, letting safety slip to maximize profit?
Maybe have a transportation secretary who has experience in transportation, as opposed to being a consultant and focusing on ticket refunds instrad of aircraft doors coming off and trains exploding...or would that hurt profitability?
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