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Irretrievably Broken in East Palestine
From CBS News:
Thousands of animals have died in East Palestine, Ohio, in the aftermath of the train derailment that sent numerous hazardous substances into the surrounding area. Officials said on Tuesday that in the immediate days following the Feb. 3 incident, there were 3,500 dead fish as local waterways, including the Ohio River, became contaminated.
There are a lot of things broken in this country. But nothing is sadder than the sight of a broken people. They are angry and they want answers. But they are so broken they refuse the answers. Everything is a lie, everything is a coverup, everything is a conspiracy. Or is it just an opportunity?
East Palestine is not a destination. It’s been a long, long time since people wanted to be there. It’s a poor river town. During WWII, many left for greener pastures. They went north and east to steel towns like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Youngstown, and Canton. They went to Akron to work in the factories of Goodyear, Firestone, and General when they were cranking out tires 24/7.
As one of our other Ricochet members noted, “if you said East Palestine had a major catastrophe, the first response should be, ‘How can you tell?'”
State and local environmental people have been collecting air, water, and soil samples since the day of the accident. Almost all results have been encouraging, but the good news has been met with resistance. Towns downriver are not reporting elevated levels of the contaminants. The air is testing well. Yesterday they were getting butyl acrylate readings of under 3 parts per billion, where 560 parts per billion is considered hazardous. The municipal water system is testing fine, although local residents with well water were advised to use bottled water until their wells are tested.
To date, they’ve removed 8,300 cubic yards of contaminated soil and 1.1 million gallons of contaminated liquids that are being stored where they can be treated or disposed of properly. Sulphur Run Creek was dammed up, and a pump system was set up to allow clean water to avoid the contaminated area. But if you read nothing but social media, you are convinced that the area has been abandoned by the railroad, abandoned by the State of Ohio, and abandoned by the Federal Government. And it’s simply not true.
The CBS “report” that claims thousands of animal deaths hasn’t been corroborated. The local Humane Society has taken in about 20 reports of harm to domestic animals, but no test results have been confirmed. One resident, who claims the spill killed her two-year-old cat, has already set up a GoFundMe account.
So far, five lawsuits have been filed in Federal Court. Lawyers are outraged and are determined to get 67% justice for the residents of the town and 33% for themselves, of course.
I hate to be cynical, but I fear a lot of this is performative and an opportunity to cash in, to move out, and start new someplace else, not that I particularly blame them. What I do have a hard time abiding is everyone else outside of Columbiana County who is injecting Rahm Emanuel straight into their veins, and are determined that this crisis will not be wasted. Which is strange because the two entities that usually reap the most benefit from doing that — the media and the government — are not following the panic porn model they perfected during Covid. And that lack of panic is proof — proof, dammit! — that it’s all a conspiracy. Or proof — proof, dammit! — that it’s not.
Published in General
I have some stray humans I’d like to bring in to be put out for adoption, or euthanized, or whatever. But I’m out of state. Will they still take them?
Are you denying me my lived experience? Because I saw all those things — in headlines, spam mail, etc.
At times I hate spell check with a passion of a thousand burning suns. Another one of H&R Block’s 17 reasons I don’t post directly to the front page.
I guess it’s a case where one shouldn’t believe their lying eyes. I saw the mushroom cloud after the “controlled explosion” of multiple highly toxic chemicals, by the tanker load. I saw the dispersion of that cloud and its precipitation back down to the ground in videos taken by locals. Maybe the purple-green iridescent colors that pop up when the streams or ponds are stirred with a stick are normal in East Palestine. I wouldn’t swim in it. But, I hope the OP is correct and all is well because however poor these people are, they did not deserve this disaster that has been heaped upon them.
You really know your town is royally screwed – if you think Youngstown Ohio is a greener pasture.
This is all product of an incompetent administration’s ideology. They’re far more interested in identity politics, than actually focusing on their agencies. Can you think of a single Biden official that any relevant experience to the office they’re serving in? Its like they took all the names they owed favors too, drew lots and randomly assigned them to an office…Hey!! Mayor Pete, secretary of trans … No not that kind of trans… but close enough… EPA? FEMA? DoE? Is there a single person in this administration that is competent?
Its funny, I saw a clip of Biden speaking during the transition about the cabinet he was assembling. He was bragging about how it’ll be the most diverse, most female, most gay… etc .. Cabinet ever… I couldn’t help but think of Justine Trudeau who was making the same speech when he assembled his cabinet. But what have the results been? Something shy of disastrous would be generous.
They can’t use this disaster to further their environmentalism agenda. They can’t use it to sell electric cars or solar panels. Since its useless to their narrative they ignore it. Like inflation, immigration homeless crime and unemployment… Until the story becomes too large that the friendly media can no longer swept it under the carpet – then they’ll grudgingly make some statements about the issue… Not actually do anything – but discuss it…
So blame the people, then, Kevin Williamson style? It is all there fault for living there in the first place. Stupid, broken people. Their whole community is a loser community. They should just learn to code?
The problem you are failing to acknowledge is that the Government, at many levels, has just spent the last two years lying to the people about anything to do with health. Flat out lying. I think it is perfectly natural to distrust the government in the good times, but in 2023, it is foolhardy to believe government officials. The government has done this to itself. No Masks. Masks. Vaccinate and be safe. Vaccinate and fear the unvaccinated. 95% effective. 60%. 40%. Two shots. No, three. No four. Masks don’t really work.
The Government has shown that it is not safe to trust them on any pronouncements around health. Blaming the people for not trusting the government this time might upset you, but it is a reasonable response.
Trust, once lost, is very hard to regain. Telling people they are “broken” is not going to do it.
But then again, I am not party of the political elite in this nation, so maybe I get to be “broken” too.
While I know it’s de rigueur to attack lawyers as the cruel, inhuman, voracious monsters we all know they are, it seems more than a little ironic that in a situation with this many genuinely blameworthy players — where to start? The moron in the White House? The little butterfly flitting around calling himself the Secretary of Transportation? The railroad company, Norfolk Southern, itself? All those white people who helped build the railroad? — you have to add a bit of snark for the consumption of all the lawyer-haters in your audience, who I am sure are legion. What, exactly, would you have these people in this pathetically beleaguered town do after a catastrophe like this– just go out in a field and die? Of course, they hired lawyers, as the lawyers are the only thing standing between them and the monolith of ignoramuses who created this disaster in the first place and who are continuing to inflict pain on these people. Those despised, reviled, hated beasts also known as lawyers are, in many cases, and apparently also in this case, the only hope people in wretched circumstances like this have for any semblance of “justice”, or whatever poor remnant of what that word used to mean still remains in this battered and beaten society of ours.
In the slight event that it is not evident by now, I was not only a lawyer for many, many, many decades but I was one of those dreaded, despised, reviled species known as a Trial Lawyer and I am very proud to say that I represented many deserving American citizens whose claims for some kind of justice, any kind of justice, were laughed at by scum like the people who are making light of what these people are going through– and were NOT laughing after their claims were adjudicated successfully. That included some multinational behemoths far larger than Norfolk Southern.
I absolutely do have a very personal feeling for these American citizens whose primary mistake, as far as the real monsters in our current officialdom are concerned, is residing in a red area of the voting public. What is being done to them is quite simply criminal.
About the fee: again, I know I will be the lone voice in the wilderness about this, but your snarky comment about “67% justice” is uninformed and unwarranted, as the contingency fee has been the standard fee for plaintiffs’ lawyers since time immemorial and is the only way many people would ever be able to see the inside of a Courtroom.
Respectfully, Jim George
Thank you! I absolutely do respect you.
It was – during the war. When Youngstown Sheet and Tube operated it was a good place to live and raise a family. That is until “Black Monday” in 1977.
If these were local lawyers I might share your admiration. But the law firms, based in places such as Cleveland, Cincinnati and Sandusky, couldn’t give a rat’s patoot about the people in East Palestine. They weren’t lining up to donate to the local Kiwanis Club, putting in hours at Post 31 of the American Legion or doing fund raisers to build a better high school. This is has nothing to do with compassion or a sense of community. It’s about chasing that ambulance from hundreds of miles away.
The problem is that you didn’t read the last paragraph which acknowledges that – or you just choose to ignore it. What you don’t do is acknowledge what has been done and what is being done. What you don’t have is a specific charge to lay against anyone. You need more than righteous indignation. You need specifics. What are they not doing that is so bloody obvious from thousands of miles away?
When Gov. Dewine authorized the burnoff he called it the best of two very bad options. The other was to let the tankers blow, to shoot shrapnel for miles and potentially spread the contamination deeper into the soil and river, not to mention kill a lot of first responders. Is that what you wanted?
I didnt realize that the “Rust Belt” that Ronald Reagan railed against was such a recent trend. I thought the rust belt set in slowly after the war – as the global industrial capacity rebuilt after the war, that the older plants in the mid-west couldn’t compete against the modern plants built in Europe and Asia. I had placed the Rusting of America at least decade earlier.
I heard Governor Dewine make that statement. That may be correct, or it may be just a repetition of what he was told by the railroad people. He never, while I was listening, cited his source for that statement. Do you have more information? If indeed that statement is correct, I still find it curious to see inspectors wearing hazmat suits telling the residents that everything is fine, drink the water, and breathe the air. It’s bad enough when you can’t see or smell the contaminant, like radon. But when you smell it and taste it and see it and you know where it came from and that source is highly toxic, how much would you, EJ, trust some railroad guy when he tells you not to worry? Up to now, have there been independent inspections? My question is moot for you, but open to those others reading this.
Sounds like a false option…
Why not drain the tanker cars into tanker trucks and haul away the chemicals for orderly offsite disposal?
Sounds like Norfolk Southern was in a hurry to get this line re-opened, so they railroaded the incompetent governments into bad decisions to reduce the down time on this line.
LTV in Cleveland held out until 2000. Bethlehem Steel went under in 2003. A lot of NE steel has been bought, sold, resurrected out of bankruptcy and is now operated by Cleveland-Cliffs, albeit on a much, much smaller scale than its heyday during and immediately after WWII.
The last commercial tire operation in Akron closed down in 1979. Goodyear now only produces racing tires here. They send out 4,000 of them every weekend to NASCAR, more than 100,000 every year.
Because the chemicals we’re talking about have a boiling point of 8° F. And exactly where and how soon do you think they could find enough rated tankers to accomplish this feat? Once the temperatures inside the tanks reached a certain point they were in danger of exploding.
Yes, the Carter years.
Didn’t feel much need to respond to the straw men in it.
You are the one bringing the charges against the people of the area, ascribing to them pretty dark motives. Calling you out on that does not require me to prove anything about anybody else. If you want to refute my charges of lying by the governments, please do so.
I am not engaging in roghteous indignation, I am pointing out facts.
Funny, I didn’t mention any of that. It seems to attack me, all you have are straw men.
Informative. Thank you.
Our pals in Arkansas had a great term for the kind of lawyers you are talking about: “tall building lawyers”!
I dealt with my share of those mega-firms and to say it’s pretty daunting would be an understatement.
However, my sentiment behind my comment still stands: what else would you have these people, whose lives have been all but destroyed and in some cases have had their homes and animals destroyed, do? I can almost guarantee you that no one has made them an offer of one single dime; assuming they have provable losses, where are they supposed to go to collect on those legitimate damages? The Office of the Secretary of Buttercups? The caring and oh so compassionate fine folks at the White House? Chuck Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Your statement about these lawyers not giving a rat’s [ ] about these people in East Palestine embodies, inadvertently I am sure, the entire basis for the contingency fee– they might not give a rat’s [ ] about these people but they sure do give more than just one rat’s [ ] about the very large fee they are almost certain to get out of this kind of class action.
That’s a very Soviet attitude. No, everyone is guilty of whatever charges you’re laying down until someone proves them innocent. That’s not the way things work.
And you don’t get to label every fact you find inconvenient as a “straw man.” Most decisions are easy for those who don’t have to make them. If one of those tankers blew and set off a chain reaction you’d be screaming that it was bloody obvious that if they had only done a controlled burn everything would be have worked out better.
Again, you lay out no argument that anyone is failing to do what needs to be done.
“Broken” is just a half-pint buzz word used when no other word with any meaning makes sense.
Where does one go for reliable investigative reporting on things like this?
Can you blame them? I live in one of the loveliest parts of the country and we often refer to the area where we live in the Florida Panhandle as “the bubble”– in other words, my life is the polar opposite of these poor people in East Palestine, Ohio, and I also think “Everything is a lie, everything is a coverup, everything is a conspiracy.” I agree with Bryan in that the Government in the past couple of years has proven it is not to be trusted on almost anything. They have forfeited the trust of more and more citizens every day and that will become a very dangerous situation before much more time goes by. This kind of collapse of trust in our leaders simply cannot be reconciled with a free society.
You give me another word that describes a society that acts on this level of paranoia. Every act of the media and the government is a power grab and every crisis is used to that end. Except when there is a crisis and a golden opportunity to grab more power. Then the failure to grab power is an obvious conspiracy to abandon the people which haven’t been abandoned because the government and private enterprise is cleaning up and testing everything but obliviously the results are a lie because of the lies of last power grab that obviously should not have been done and we’re upset that they’re not doing enough but we don’t have any specific ideas of what they’re not doing because they’re obviously not doing it!
Right on the mark Bryan. I did leave my hometown (here in Appalachia) right after I ETS’d from the Army in 1968. In the three years I was gone, the town’s largest employer, the steel mill, closed down. To replace it, the State of Ohio build the state’s largest prision; hardly a suitable substitute.
So, I headed north to college, followed by a migration south. However there was no doubt in my mind that I was coming back.
I’ve seen some of the smart-a&& comments concerning the people of East Palestine. “Yokels” from some little keyboard coward. Even worse from others.
To each and every one of them I would give a fully extended middle finger and an earnest “Foxtrot Yankee”. The folks of East Palestine do not deserve what they have gotten: a greedy, careless railroad, a bumbling state government and a jerk-off Federal government, all looking down at them.
There’s been plenty of coverage. Think about what you absolutely, positively know about the situation: Red state with a Republican governor. Eeeevil corporation in the railroad. An obvious liberal bias in the news rooms of America’s media.
The media have all the incentives to play this up big. I mean CNN-Malaysia Airlines big. But they haven’t. Ask yourselves why. Probably because the authorities are actually doing something right. The testing is showing what they say it’s showing. The governor probably made the right call on the controlled burn.
Think about the Covid porn that eroded your trust in media and government. You think they’ve given that up for lent? If they thought there was any there there the coverage would be unrelenting. There would be talks of nationalizing the railways!
The biggest complaint against the railroad has been that they did not file proper notice with the state of the cargo they were hauling. But filing those forms would have had no impact on preventing the derailment.
Everything’s Soviet today, apparently.
How about “paranoid”. Or would that be too specific and too refutable?
All true but I would question your last paragraph. Everyone around here who pays attention to the railroads knows that they’ve cut back so far, they’re now cutting into the bone. Car Inspectors? Few and far between. Train crews? Cut from five to two and the railroads are actually trying to cut the conductor position leaving only the engineer. Track conditions? Most of the company maintenance people are gone in favor of contractors.
Since this train originated in Illinois (and had a crew change in Toledo) that rail car could have caught fire anywhere; maybe in Cleveland. It was just the misfortune of East Palestine to bear the brunt of Norfolk & Southern’s greed and incompetence.
Query re the Code of Conduct: if one said this or something like it to or about me, I would consider it a smear. I was recently informed by the esteemed Editor in Chief of this esteemed platform that a post of mine which garnered 13 likes and, at last count, 164 comments would not be promoted to the Main Page because parts of it could be construed as “misinformation”, a true Deep State buzzword if ever there was one, and a “smear.” (It is to be noted that not one of the 164 comments contained even a scintilla of a hint that any of the commenters thought anything about my post was a “smear”)
How is calling one’s attitude like that of a Soviet not a smear? Or is that particular appellation just below the Hitler/Nazi line of demarcation of civility?
Just trying to find out where the lines are being drawn so I don’t accidentally set off yet another tripwire.
While I have your ear, assuming I do, I sure would appreciate someone in management responding to my question on the Member Feed about the content of my comments being “disappeared” by the Great Comment Monster.
I don’t believe the woman I saw talking to reporters killed her own chickens for some kind of settlement. I also don’t believe there’s no downstream contamination given Senator Vance’s video showing dead worms and fish and an oily flourish when stirred. Nope, I believe my lyin’ eyes until someone convinces me otherwise.
I also don’t care if all 5,000 residents of East Palestine walk away with a million dollar settlement even if the water is “safe to drink.” It’ll be a pittance compared to the money we’re pouring into Ukraine for yet another never ending war.
Printing presses go brrrzzzz.