East Palestine Ohio Train Derailment.
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444, retired
GED/HEO
2-15-23
I had a quick look at my CNN App on the phone yesterday and the first three or four stories were about Russia and how badly it’s doing in Ukraine. Next up was how China is going on the offensive to shore up its credibility after the balloon fiasco, but I didn’t see anything in the top five or so about East Palestine Ohio.
Things are not well in East Palestine, a small community of 4700 residents 50 miles northwest of Pittsburg. On February 3rd 38 cars of a 150-car train came off the rails and a huge fire resulted. As you can see from the image, a huge canopy of smoke rose above the town that was not unlike the nuclear explosions we have seen in the movies; those of us being fortunate enough never to have lived in Nagasaki or Hiroshoma that is.
The train was carrying chemicals as well as combustible materials containing Vinyl chloride which is a toxic flammable gas, a combination I assume, that had something to do with the fire. The NTSB and the EPA are investigating the causes including, “….tank car fittings, the locomotive event data recorder and surveillance video from a residence that showed what appeared to be the failure of a wheel bearing moments before the derailment.” NYT 2-14-23
The EPA says that about 20 rail cars were carrying hazardous materials in addition to the vinyl chloride; butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and ethyleneglycol monobutyl and the EPA claims these ethers have been released to the air, soil, and waters in the area although none at “levels of concern”. Well that’s nice since fish and frogs have died in local streams and people have reported dead chickens and shared photos of dead dogs and foxes on social media. They say they smell chemical odors around town.
1500 to 2000 residents were told to evacuate the area immediately after the derailment and a few days later the evacuation order was extended to include anyone in a one to two-mile radius around the village as well as parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Despite the claims of very little threat to the residents or local environment, this is something that simply cannot be determined when it comes to the ingestion of toxic chemicals. Ohio Senator JD Vance claimed that the derailment was a “complex environmental disaster”.
Trump fan Vance is looking for a scapegoat already. This venture capitalist, antiabortionist, xenophobe and fan of Victor Orban, Hungary’s extreme right-wing prime minister, portrays himself as a champion of the rust belt (the white worker) and boasts his Appalachian background. These market driven disasters expose the limits of so-called white privilege as the predominantly white population of this community will discover.
Vance is also questioning the “….Transportation Department’s regulatory approach to our nation’s rail system,”. His intention here is an assault on any governmental agency as opposed to the success of the market and seeking some failure on the part of the workers in the railroad industry. But Vance’s pal, Donald Trump rolled back regulations for trains carrying highly explosive liquids in 2017.
We are hearing the same old story. Catastrophe arises, people die, and then we find out from politicians like Vance and the mass media that represents Wall Street, the billionaires, industrialists, hedge fund managers and other social parasites, that some mistakes might have been made. But these social failures are not mistakes, they are a product of conscious social policies implemented by people like Vance and the two capitalist parties that impose a dictatorship of capital over US society.
East Palestine is
just another chapter in this playbook. There are too many to mention here but a
few.
Sacramento River Catastrophe
We had a rail disaster in Northern California in 1991 when a train derailed
near the town of Dunsmuir. A tanker car carrying a toxic chemical, metam sodium,
was catapulted in to the Sacramento river. The tank ruptured and spilled more than 19,000 gallons of the stuff
in to the pristine waters. “It killed
every fish, crayfish, insect and all other aquatic life in a 45-mile stretch of
the river from Cantara Loop to Lake Shasta.”, media reports stated. The
spill also caused health problems among residents of the area.
This was not the first accident of its kind at this point in the journey. I had read sometime later that workers that loaded the train in 1991 had complained about the way the cars were loaded and positioned, but their concerns were not taken seriously. The Record Searchlight, a local Northern California paper pointed out on the 201th anniversary of the disaster that the way the cars were positioned, “…was a configuration destined for disaster.”
Oroville Dam
The evacuation of some 200,000 people and the near catastrophic rupture of a spillway at the Oroville dam in Northern California, the nation’s tallest, was also due to negligence and placing profit before safety or social need. Environmentalists and other had warned of the dangers but cost was prohibitive.
West, Texas
In this disaster, that occurred two days after the Boston bombing an explosion at a fertilizer plant rocked the city. The loss of life was far greater than the Boston bombing and the damage more extensive, 15 people were killed and more than 150 homes destroyed or damaged in a 37 block area. A high school, middle school, apartment complex and a nursing home were also destroyed in the April 17 blast. “Chunks of concrete were fell from the sky like cartoon anvils…” wrote Business Week at the time.
One might ask who would put a fertilizer plant next to a school. We finally come to the answer to all of this when an expert on chemical safety informed us that the problem, or a major “shortcoming in the system of regulating chemical plants…” is “…the reliance on self reporting.” The New York Times reported that the fertilizer plant that was the source of the catastrophe Fell Through Regulatory Cracks.
BP Spill Gulf of Mexico
And while we’re on the subject of self-reporting let’s not forget the tragic BP
spill in the Gulf of Mexico that killed 11 workers and the consequences of
which we will not fully know for a long time. In that instance, another
disaster the US ruling elite would rather we forget, the New York Times reported that:
“ Federal regulators responsible for oversight of drilling in the Gulf of Mexico allowed industry officials to fill in their own inspection reports in pencil — and then turned them over to the regulators, who traced over them in pen before submitting the reports to the agency, according to an inspector general’s report to be released this week.”
Is it no wonder that the majority of the US population, workers, much of the middle class, are disgusted with the political situation in the United States.
No Way Out Through The Democratic Party
These market driven calamities cannot be curtailed by appeals to the Democratic
or Republican parties that have dominated US political life for almost two
centuries. As a Facebook friend pointed out earlier this week, we should “….remember
that railworkers voted to reject a contract that gave them no sick days, and
Joe Biden sent that same contract to Congress asking them to vote to force the
workers to accept the contract. Democrats, who ran the Congress, obliged. The
CEO of Norfolk Southern, whose negligence caused the spill, makes $13 million a
year.” The median income in East Palestine is $28,000 a year.
Working class people, the poor, the disenfranchised, have no political voice in the US and one of the lowest voter turnouts of all the advanced capitalist economies. Where is the so-called “Squad” here? Where are the Democratic Party members of DSA who are in office or active in the Party? In the 2016 national election almost 100 million opted out. Neither party appeals to this section of society that has drawn the conclusion through experience that both parties represent big capital. It’s not that they are corrupt, it’s that political parties represent class interests and the capitalist class has two parties and workers have not one.
Neither the production of social needs or the transportation of them can be determined by private individuals and their rapacious drive for profits. Housing, education, health care, all the major needs of society must be taken in to public ownership. A system based on exploitation and profit cannot be regulated in to fairness. There will always be regulatory cracks as there will always be tax loop holes for the wealthy as the regulators and legislators are always representatives of capital. The mass media, owned by the same people that own the railroads and the commanding heights of the economy, will always cover for these criminals whose policies result in the destruction of the environment and human lives lost.
The heads of organized labor who have said next to nothing as Biden and Pelosi gathered the US Congress together to deny workers the right to strike and force a contract on them they already rejected, are guilty as well. One again, a capitalist crisis wreaks havoc on working people and they will likely appeal to the culprits to do something.
We are seeing a movement among young workers, tech workers, low waged workers and others. These struggles, whether against police violence, environmental degradation, housing, health care, racism, for women’s rights and many others cannot be won in isolation. All these issues are important but are all a product of the generalized assault on working class people by capital; we must connect them, link them together. Every struggle must be seen in this way. As the old Wobbly saying goes, An Injury To One Is An Injury To All.
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