This has not been getting a lot of coverage. And the coverage that it has been getting has not been very good. So let us talk about the train derailment in East Palestine Ohio. East Palestine is about an hour North of Pittsburgh, almost halfway to Cleveland. Norfolk Southern has a rail line that goes right through town. And this derailment happened right on the edge, outside of town, on the border of PA and Ohio. Of the cars that crashed, five of them contained vinyl chloride It is a monomer used to make PVC. Further reporting on this has gotten vinyl chloride confused with polyvinyl chloride. The polymer is made out of vinyl chloride. Now the reason that this distinction is really important is vinyl chloride is very hazardous and very flammable polyvinyl chloride is a plastic that is used in everything. The other thing about vinyl chloride is that it boils at 8 degrees Fahrenheit, so it is shipped in its liquid form, meaning that when these trains crashed and they started leaking, They weren't just leaking liquid, but they were spewing boiling gas. More precisely they were leaking boiling liquid, spewing gaseous VCM. So vinyl Chloride is really toxic. Osha has a Permissible limit of how much you can be exposed to it during an 8-hour shift, as a 1 ppm part per million average over 8 hours. So, prior to this, the biggest spill of this chemical was in New Jersey, where one train car and about 23000 gallons of vinyl chloride were spilled, but it did not catch on fire, now this crash in Ohio has 5 train cars. These kinds of tanker cars can carry between 25 and 33000 gallons. Let us call it 2500 to 250000 pounds of vinyl chloride. That is per train car, 5 train cars. There are maybe a million pounds of this toxic chemical spilling into the ground, and also boiling off into the air, but then it caught on fire. I think this is where the reporting is really bad. Because no one is mentioning what the by-product of vinyl chloride burning is. Of the many by-products of burning vinyl chloride, one of them is hydrogen chloride. Hydrogen chloride is really unstable and latches onto the water, like just water vapor in the atmosphere, and that turns into hydrochloric acid. So, right now, government officials from the railroad, both the governor of Pennsylvania and Ohio are calling burning off the million pounds of this stuff a success! but are not mentioning that it means that we have hundreds of thousands of pounds of acid in the air, potentially. Now, ever since engineering school, I have studied a lot of industrial accidents. I just find it really fascinating and organizations like the Chemical Safety Board. NTSB and OSHA all have like really good reports available to the public. I think as a designer, it is really good to learn about mistakes. When looking at these kinds of industrial disasters across time there are a couple of things that are pretty universal across all of them. One of the responsible parties in this: Coasts Norfolk Southern Railway, always plays down the reality of the situation, politicians also just repeat the same lines, and then news outlets, just repeat the same. So all we are hearing is the responsible party's word. Probably the best video about what happened in Pennsylvania/Ohio and it’s pretty mind blowing https://davidicke.com/2023/02/13/probably-the-best-video-about-what-happened-in-pennsylvania-ohio-and-its-pretty-mind-blowing/