So one of the biggest issues with the derailment in Ohio was defect detectors. Defect detectors are instruments laid across the track that detect things like overheating brakes and axles and other such anomalies and then alert the crew via a radio transmission. The defect detector did not help in this case for two reasons: 1) Norfolk Southern raised the heat threshold on their defect detectors such that it only alerted the crew a minute before the derailment, and 2) trains are so long now that by the time a defect is detected farther down in a consist the locomotive may be too far away to receive the broadcast.

IF YOU ARE PANICKING ABOUT THE OHIO TRAIN DERAILMENT AND CHEMICAL SPILL PLEASE READ THIS

A post describing the incident in a panicked tone has been circulating. That post makes some extremely overstated claims, including that a huge number of animals will die and that there is a media blackout of the story. This is is information that was made as an addendum to the post (OP saw the info and made it their pinned post after seeing the correction) and some people were looking for a way to share the updated info without having to share the triggering post. So, here's why you SHOULD NOT BE PANICKING about the Ohio train derailment and chemical spill:

Here is the New York Times reporting on this on February 4th.

Here are NBC and The Daily Beast reporting on this on February 5th.

Here are People Magazine, the Sacramento Bee, The Daily Beast again, CBS News, Reuters, and Reuters again reporting on this on February 6th.

Here is CNN reporting on it on February 7th.

The EPA response profile has been active and updating since February 4th.

I want to preface this by saying THIS IS NOT GOOD, and we shouldn't act like nothing is happening. This is bad. This is a serious environmental disaster. There are currently risks to humans and animals, and risks to humans and animals will be ongoing for quite some time at various levels.

However I think that "this will kill all the pets in the area and will lay a swathe of poison from Ohio to Mexico, burning the world between" is perhaps something of an overstatement and I'm aware that folks are upset about this but holy shit let's please try not to catastrophize the catastrophe.

The purpose of an intentional burn at the site was as a containment measure, because it is better to temporarily have extremely toxic chemical byproducts in an evacuated area than it is to allow an extremely carcinogenic chemical to slowly disperse.

There was a similar chemical spill in New Jersey in 2012 (still not a good thing! Not something that we should let go lightly!) and it did not result in "all pets dying" or a mass poisoning of rivers and streams.

Here is the DHHS Toxological Profile for Vinyl Chloride, a nearly 300-page document that goes over risk factors and harms caused by the chemical. Given the tone of the original post, here's what people probably want to see right now:

At the moment, there appears to be one man who claims that his pet fox died as a result of exposure to the vinyl chloride, and it sickened some of his other pets. There is some discussion of dead chickens and one dead hawk was found. Dead fish were found in some bodies of water, and the EPA is monitoring other bodies and has issued directives for dams and spillovers to collect chemical runoff to prevent as much downstream contamination as possible. At the moment, it is very difficult to say whether there will be a significant amount of acute animal deaths (wild or domesticated) as a result of this, though I would guess there will be a very significant increase of cancer in the area in the coming years.

One reporter at a press conference from the Ohio governor was arrested, he has been released and the AG's office is investigating his arrest. There are a lot of photos of the derailment and its consequences on social media and other news websites, and it does not appear that anyone is preventing people from taking or sharing photos of the disaster.

Look. I am not someone who thinks that you should blindly trust the government. There are huge issues here. This is a disaster that happened for a number of reasons, many of which are related to absolute shit regulation of chemical transportation and which were probably exacerbated by overworked railroad employees who got fucked over for the sake of the economy in December. There is bad shit here that is worthy of criticism, there are legitimate things to be concerned about.

But just because I don't trust the government doesn't mean I think it's a better idea to trust a shitpost account on twitter that provided "evidence" in the form of an instagram account posting screenshots of text messages from one guy who had a collection of exotic animals he wasn't able to retrieve from the evacuation area and a tiktok video.

There are definitely things to worry about with this, but please don't panic.

Also look, if the news is too miserable and you don't want to look at it too much but you want to at least pretend to stay informed, the Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet is a constant stream of paragraph-long reports on breaking news. Two of the stories I linked up above are from the Cheat Sheet. Just. Keep it open in a browser tab and check headlines once a day, okay? This has been news for an entire week, if People Magazine is doing human interest stories on it there isn't a media blackout please don't get your news from twitter or tumblr please I am begging you.

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If you see someone who is panicking or spiraling because of the original post, please consider linking them to this post.

Source

This is theft in every sense of the word. The value of the railroads comes from the labor of the workers making sure it runs. Any profit made is stolen from them. The railroad industry is not only willing to steal the value of their labor in profits, but - as is the nature of capitalism - is stealing their health, sleep, and social time as well.

Capitalism as a system of never-ending extraction on a hoarding death drive is on its full display here. We'll never stop its incessant meat-grinder churn until we get rid of it. The legal and political system has been built to serve the system: it's got to go.

Find a revolutionary socialist organization near you (key word: revolutionary) and get organized, because the extraction is only going to get more brutal and more violent if we don't exert the power we have to stop the system by withdrawing our labor and using it for our own benefit instead of their greed.

Yes. And not just their health: ALL of our health

Read This Thread And Be Enraged. The Health and Safety standards those workers were striking for are as much about preventing ^^^THIS^^^ as they are about protecting the workers themselves. Undermanned trains suffer malfunctions. Broken stuff doesn't get seen, doesn't get fixed, or gets triaged in favor of bigger problems because the Company values the deadline over everything(somehow, I suspect incinerated cargo fails to meet its deadlines too). They hit damage and blockage to the rails that more eyes would have caught. Under-rested crews miss maintenance issues, or make mistakes, or flatout faint from exhaustion at critical times. Everything their job needs -quick thinking, clear assessments, sure hands, awareness, strong bodies- is undermined by insufficient rest.

These Fucking Shareholders take home TENS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS A YEAR, the Executives executing their policies take home TENS OF MILLIONS, INSTEAD of paying for the staff they NEED to operate safely; INSTEAD of maintaining and upgrading the trains to keep them running sure and safe.

MILLIONS of dollars are spent ~lobbying~ Politicians that could have been spent making sure their trains DONT FUCKING EXPLODE and POISON towns in Ohio for Gods' know how long.

But Capitalists don't care. At the end of the day, the only thing they care about is how much higher their fucking pile gets, and how many OTHER Capitalists they can look down on that night. It's Fucking Ridiculous that the people with the least power in these companies, the people with the least authority, are the Only Fucking People who give a damn about their impact on the wider world. The workers die, WE Die, the Earth is POISONED, and it means nothing to them so long as Number Go Up. This is why Strikes are important. This is why we side with workers every time. You don't have to share my conviction that it is Unjust to work a person to the bone and pay them a pittance of what they earn while you do nothing and pay YOURSELF the lion's share. You just have to recognize that these fucking Moneymen will kill you to make a dollar, and that the only people even trying to fucking stop them are their striking workers.