The East Palestine Rail Disaster Is Nothing New

This catastrophe in Ohio has been receiving a lot of media coverage, albeit after being if not ignored then played down by the authorities. Leaving that aside, including the useless Pete Buttigieg, they seem now to have the situation under control. How though could something like this have happened in the first place? 

We live in a world in which chemicals are important, which means they have to be  manufactured and distributed, something most of us don’t think about when we are shopping in the supermarket or the local hardware store. You may purchase only a gallon of disinfectant, but it is produced in massive quantities under carefully controlled conditions.

The Environmental Protection Agency has now released a complete inventory of that unfortunate train’s cargo. Before returning to that though, let’s take a look at a few other chemical related disasters.

Most of us don’t think of coal as a chemical, and most of us see little of it today, but as recently as the 1960s most homes had coal fires. Wales was a major producer of coal for the UK, and on October 21, 1966, a colliery spoil tip slid down a hill in the village of Aberfan killing 144 people, most of them pupils at the Pantglas Junior School. You will find much footage of the aftermath on YouTube. The Queen visited the village at the time, and again in 2012 to open a new primary school.

Four months after the Aberfan disaster, there was another environmental catastrophe when an oil tanker ran aground at Cornwall. Thankfully, there were no fatalities, at least not of humans, but up to 36 million gallons of oil leaked from the Torrey Canyon into the sea causing immense damage to wildlife.

If the Torrey Canyon was a disaster, the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe dwarfed it. The initial explosion killed eleven workers (all men, of course), between the ages of 22 and 56. Bad as that was, the resulting oil slick had the potential to kill every fish in the Atlantic. A team of specialists was able to eventually seal the offending well, but the effects of the disaster continue to this day.

In terms of immediate human death toll, the biggest such disaster by far was the 1984 catastrophe in the Indian city of Bhopal. The actual death toll will probably never be known but it was well over three thousand (more than the 9/11 attacks). The accident occurred at a plant owned by the multinational Union Carbide. A large quantity of methyl isocyanate leaked, and although it was noticed and the alarm raised promptly, it was too late for thousands of people.

There had been safety concerns with the Bhopal plant since at least 1976, which brings us back to the East Palestine derailment. 

Some people have suggested that if not this incident then others have been the result of sabotage, but it seems more likely the real reason was cost cutting. In December, China Joe signed a bill to block a national rail strike. America’s rail workers are overworked and underpaid. The train that derailed at East Palestine on February 3 was made up of 900 cars and was 9,300 feet long. A simple way to avoid such disasters in future would be to limit the lengths of such trains drastically and to limit their speed likewise. 

Frankly, a train of that length is absurd, but of course it saves money. There is no reason such trains should not be limited to say 20 cars and perhaps a maximum speed of 20 mph. It isn’t as if these are high priority transports. An even better suggestion would be not to transport large quantities of dangerous chemicals by train or by anything but to manufacture them on site as far as practicable. 

Undoubtedly some will claim this would be too expensive. Before making that judgment they should wait and see what is the final cost of the current derailment, one that will be expressed not only in financial but environmental and human terms.