There seems to be more politicking than substance around the deregulation of train safety from the Trump administration. While there may have been other regulations removed by the Trump administration, from what I have read, the brake deregulation has not been confirmed or denied as a contributing factor. That being said, Republicans should take some blame for pushing for less regulation in hazardous trains, clean air, and water. The Biden administration should also take some responsibility for siding more with the train corporations than train operators and workers. I hope Norfolk Southern paid a hefty price for the cleanup, restoration, any lasting environmental and health impacts, and penalties. Corporations must be taught that prevention is in their interest.
Polluters always are the ones doing the testing. They do that because they need to pay for and manage it. The EPA sets guidelines and performs audits. If the guidelines for the approved methods for tests were not followed everyone down to the lab techs are in for criminal charges. A few lab samples is what all water test quantitations are based on.
Time to evacuate Katy. Toxic wastewater from Ohio train derailment headed to Texas (yahoo.com) DEER PARK, Texas (AP) — Toxic wastewater used to extinguish a fire following a train derailment in Ohio is headed to a Houston suburb for disposal. “I and my office heard today that ‘firefighting water’ from the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment is slated to be disposed of in our county," Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said in a Wednesday statement. “Our Harris County Pollution Control Department and Harris County Attorney’s have reached out to the company and the Environmental Protection Agency to receive more information," Hidalgo wrote. The wastewater is being sent to Texas Molecular, which injects hazardous waste into the ground for disposal. “It’s ... very, very toxic,” Dr. George Guillen, the executive director of the Environmental Institute of Houston, said, but the risk to the public is minimal. “This injection, in some cases, is usually 4,000 or 5,000 feet down below any kind of drinking water aquifer,” said Guillen, who is also a professor of biology and environmental science at the University of Houston-Clear Lake.
We need less regulation so that the industry can self-regulate according to market forces. Clearly the train industry will now look at this disaster and ask themselves - how can we prevent making people sick in 40 years after we've all retired and living in mansions? We really care what happens to them while we are vacationing in the Maldives.
Those sick folk just won the lotto with settlement money. Not able to more work! All it took was a lifetime of cancer and kidney failure.
Can't drink the water in parts of our own country, but today we just pledged another $2 billion of our tax dollars for bombs for Ukraine. Smart!
I'd rather spend two billion dollars to help stop a war criminal like Putin than put billions into the pocket of a Texas Company pouring toxic chemicals into our state for profit.
I don’t blame Biden for this. I don’t blame Trump for this. I don’t blame the GOP or Democrats for this. I don’t blame DeWine, Vance, or Brown for this. The blame goes to a mix of **** luck and capitalism doing what it is supposed to do: taking as many shortcuts as possible to maximize return. In this case the train caught on fire and spilled toxic chemicals in East Palestine. Every other day we have awful industrial accidents in the US. Policy only works if it’s enforced (spoiler: it usually isn’t and if there is enforcement it’s a fine and may cost less than doing what is being mandated). There is no real desire to make this safer as lobbying only works because the population at risk does not understand the risks (and why would they) or they don’t care about the risks (because dying of liver cancer from a train spill beats dying of starvation because there are no labor jobs available).
Deepwater Horizon Roll the dice now. Get fat bonus EoY. Settle later. Preferably on someone else's watch.
I agree that the profit motive is responsible for lax safety but I don’t think there isn’t a real desire to do something about it. The latest infrastructure bills does have funding to make rails safer and while this is a bad accident rail travel and transport is still overall safe. While shippers and transport companies have a profit motive to cut corners there is also a profit motive from the insurance industry to make things safer. The industry has been a major advocate in things like improved building codes and safer means of transportation.
