Murphy Siding zugmann Euclid Also, spilled liquid chemicals are bound to leach/percolate into the ground unless it is frozen. So the entire roadbed should be underlain with a liquid proof membrane that will catch any spilled liquid. That way, when a liquid chemical spill occurs, it will flow down into this containment defined by the membrane. Then special excavating and vacuum equipment will remove all track, ballast, and soils above the membrane. In this way, every drop of the spilled chemical will be recovered and safely handled. How would you deal with drainage of stuff like .... rain? With a pipeline. Lord knows people love pipelines.
zugmann Euclid Also, spilled liquid chemicals are bound to leach/percolate into the ground unless it is frozen. So the entire roadbed should be underlain with a liquid proof membrane that will catch any spilled liquid. That way, when a liquid chemical spill occurs, it will flow down into this containment defined by the membrane. Then special excavating and vacuum equipment will remove all track, ballast, and soils above the membrane. In this way, every drop of the spilled chemical will be recovered and safely handled. How would you deal with drainage of stuff like .... rain?
Euclid Also, spilled liquid chemicals are bound to leach/percolate into the ground unless it is frozen. So the entire roadbed should be underlain with a liquid proof membrane that will catch any spilled liquid. That way, when a liquid chemical spill occurs, it will flow down into this containment defined by the membrane. Then special excavating and vacuum equipment will remove all track, ballast, and soils above the membrane. In this way, every drop of the spilled chemical will be recovered and safely handled.
How would you deal with drainage of stuff like .... rain?
With a pipeline. Lord knows people love pipelines.
I was watching a news analysis show (Most shows on the cable news networks are analysis, not reporting, of news.) There was a guest that said the problem is that pipelines are the safest way to ship liquid/gas products. That the current administration, et.al., don't like pipelines.
What the "expert" doesn't realize, the volumes to the end user of these loads doesn't warrant a pipeline. At some point these loads will move via land transport.
It's things like this that make me see coverage becoming more political, agenda driven.
Jeff
The only way to secure and maintain a "news" audience these days is to create a confirmation bias echo chamber.
jeffhergert I was watching a news analysis show (Most shows on the cable news networks are analysis, not reporting, of news.) There was a guest that said the problem is that pipelines are the safest way to ship liquid/gas products. That the current administration, et.al., don't like pipelines. What the "expert" doesn't realize, the volumes to the end user of these loads doesn't warrant a pipeline. At some point these loads will move via land transport. It's things like this that make me see coverage becoming more political, agenda driven. Jeff
It is all very polarized with opposing agendas. It is in every issue that people hear about. It is in the balloons, the war, and certainly this derailment. With the derailment, the agendas are still grappling over how to get hold of it. The story was sleeping for the first week as we dealt with the balloons. But suddenly the story blew up (so to speak).
It seems that the Administration stayed back because the disaster was full of controversy, and they did not want to risk getting blamed for it. But now they are getting blamed for staying out of it and not coming in to help. I expect they will soon come rushing in to take over the whole site with all the care imaginable. That could go in many different directions at once.
I expect a sort of replay of the way the first spy balloon was handled. Keep it quiet, hoping it will go away. But it did not stay quiet. It blew up with controversy, so they shot it down to change the optics. It will be interesting to see how this same dynamic will apply to this chemical spill.
jeffhergert Murphy Siding zugmann Euclid Also, spilled liquid chemicals are bound to leach/percolate into the ground unless it is frozen. So the entire roadbed should be underlain with a liquid proof membrane that will catch any spilled liquid. That way, when a liquid chemical spill occurs, it will flow down into this containment defined by the membrane. Then special excavating and vacuum equipment will remove all track, ballast, and soils above the membrane. In this way, every drop of the spilled chemical will be recovered and safely handled. How would you deal with drainage of stuff like .... rain? With a pipeline. Lord knows people love pipelines. I was watching a news analysis show (Most shows on the cable news networks are analysis, not reporting, of news.) There was a guest that said the problem is that pipelines are the safest way to ship liquid/gas products. That the current administration, et.al., don't like pipelines. What the "expert" doesn't realize, the volumes to the end user of these loads doesn't warrant a pipeline. At some point these loads will move via land transport. It's things like this that make me see coverage becoming more political, agenda driven. Jeff
The information coming out of the Dominion slander suit against FOX is illuminating about that network and its 'news' reporting.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
Maybe time to set up a demostration ? Of course where ? Desert?
jeffhergertIt's things like this that make me see coverage becoming more political, agenda driven.
There's always been a bit of that aspect (yellow journalism, anyone?), but it's really reared its head over the past ten years or so.
Larry Resident Microferroequinologist (at least at my house) Everyone goes home; Safety begins with you My Opinion. Standard Disclaimers Apply. No Expiration Date Come ride the rails with me! There's one thing about humility - the moment you think you've got it, you've lost it...
Has anybody considered shipping hazmat by balloons?
_____________
"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
Euclid Also, spilled liquid chemicals are bound to leach/percolate into the ground unless it is frozen. So the entire roadbed should be underlain with a liquid proof membrane that will catch any spilled liquid. [and what follows . . .]
opinion piece about dangers from rail derailments.
Opinion: Ohio's train derailment — not spy balloons — is the real national security threat (msn.com)
Wonder what the owner and maybe lessee of the hot box is going to do ? A quick trip into bankruptcy ? Cannot see the owner having enough legal depth to get NS 's lack of maintenance ?
blue streak 1 Wonder what the owner and maybe lessee of the hot box is going to do ? A quick trip into bankruptcy ? Cannot see the owner having enough legal depth to get NS 's lack of maintenance ?
I'm sure that there will be plenty of lawsuits to go around. NS, the car owner, the manufacturer of the car, the manufacturer of the truck (bogie), the manufacturer of the bearing...
The opinion piece didn't call out PSR by name, but certainly referenced it. Accidents and equipment failures happen, but causing such focus on PSR isn't going to bode well for it from a legislative viewpoint.
I expect the EPA (under an Administration that hates fossil fuels) will be quite sober about the risks of spilling such large quantities of highly toxic chemicals; then allowing them to drain off into the watershed, and disposing of a large portion of them by burning them off in an explosive fireball over a town full of unprotected residents.
The final thing in liability is this who was operating or moving the car at the time it had the accident. In this case it is Norfolk Southern that better get ready for some serious legal pain. The ring camera footage of this thing burning 20 miles from the derailment is one hell of a mitigating factor for the car owner along with the bearing company and the axle maker. For 20 miles minimum this car was on fire prior to derailing. If I was in the legal department of Norfolk Southern right now I would be going to the CEO and saying forget about your bonus and stock options for the next few year's. They literally better whip out the checkbook and start writing them in large amounts.
Perhaps the East Palestine derailment, spill and misapplied response is simply a wake up call and/or the last straw. There has been a fundamental change in rail operations the last ~25 years that has left safety and capabilty as a major part of our transportation infrastructure increasingly compromised.
Driven by a delusional attempt to make rails high flyer growth stocks like techs, etc., there has been an emphasis on short -term gains through the cost cutting progriam euphemistically called PSR. But trucking can always undercut rail costs and give more reliable and faster deliveries. This leaves the rails with bulk goods that aren't time sensitive, like coal (a diminishing niche), oil and chemicals and low-profit intermodals. Someone needs to take a look at the big picture of structural anomalies and not just put another bandaid on it.
mudchickenMaybe now the newsworkers and other brainless wonders will back off enough to let FRA and NTSB get into their work without all the hysteria.
In a sharply worded, three-page letter sent Sunday to Norfolk Southern Railway president and CEO Alan Shaw, Buttigieg accused the Atlanta-based company of repeatedly prioritizing profit over safety -- a problematic ethos within the larger transportation industry that the secretary said has contributed to a number of derailments over the years.
"The future must not resemble the past when it comes to your company's and your industry's follow-through on support for stringent safety policies," he added. "Major derailments in the past have been followed by calls for reform -- and by vigorous resistance by your industry to increased safety measures. This must change." - - Pete Buttigieg
"The arithmetic suggests Norfolk Southern can remain extremely profitable while also complying with a higher standard of safety regulation and offering better consideration to its workers," - - also Pete Buttigieg
My real point there is that I frequently am amused with the way we cite government as an impeccable authority whenever they sponsor ideas we ourselves endorse, yet we readily turn and discredit them as "clueless bubbas" when they don't.
charlie hebdoPerhaps the East Palestine derailment, spill and misapplied response is simply a wake up call and/or the last straw. There has been a fundamental change in rail operations the last ~25 years that has left safety and capabilty as a major part of our transportation infrastructure increasingly compromised. ...
...
At this point in time we don't have enough information in public to know if the derailment response was 'misapplied' or not, and likely will never know. Would the loads that were permitted to 'control burn' have BLEVE'd had not the control burn path not been taken. If they would have gone the BLEVE path, how much worse would those 'uncontrolled' burns have been.
Derailements with breached HAZMAT cars do not have 'clean' solutions. There are BAD solutions and there are WORSE solutions.
Just like smashing and burying 50 new Cadillacs while loudly proclaiming “Nothing must stand in the way of reopening the line,” in this case, NS in pursuit of quickly reopening the line, may have smashed a town. They may have even smashed NS.
Euclid Just like smashing and burying 50 new Cadillacs while loudly proclaiming “Nothing must stand in the way of reopening the line,” in this case, NS in pursuit of quickly reopening the line, may have smashed a town. They may have even smashed NS.
Fred M CainWell, of course they were pressured to reopen the line ASAP. What choice would they have had there? Not only was their own business under pressure but the businesses of numerous manufacturers and facilities that were in need of continuing rail service. You might even be able to make a case that reopening the line was a matter of national security. One point I'd like to make here, is that the railoads have torn out way too many rail lines during the last 60 years or so. In 1960, there would've been at least one, maybe two or more parallel secondary mainlines they could've fallen back on while keeping the East Palestine route closed for a longer period of time while more extensive cleanup was done. For most of my life I have strongly believed and continue to believe that the loss of so many of our rail lines was a most unfortunate mistake. Again, I come back to the playing field here. Taxpayer-funded highways, punitive property tax assessments and more. The odds were stacked against the railways long ago. That really needs to change. But until state, local and national policies are changed to stop dicriminating against the rail mode - ain't gonna happen.
NS did have, and did use some of their Detour options - over CSX. That being said what held back large scale Detours was the PSR implemented manpower reductions on both carriers. You can have all the parallel lines in the world, but if you don't have a excess of people to operate the Detour traffic you still have nothing.
An apparent major part of the evolving story is that -- supposedly -- several of the vinyl-chloride tankcars had 'malfunctioning' relief valves. The NTSB reportedly has retrieved them to a sealed container (!) to be transported unopened to a facility for testing. I am not an industrial expert on vinyl chloride abatement, but I would NOT want to be around -- or have a town exposed to -- the uncontrolled hazard of a reasonably full tankcar load without relief valving, let alone 5 of them that will likely all let go within a few moments of the first to fail.
If you look at the pressure of heated vinyl chloride, it will curl your hair. Most of that will nucleate boil, just as in a steam-boiler explosion but with tremendously higher sustained pressure, with similar shockwave nodes causing 'rapid unintended disassembly' of the tank walls, and of course in the presence of any ignition source this will promptly develop into a BLEVE in the ejecta.
One point being: note in the drone video how long it takes after the 'shaped-charge' breach before the evolving plume catches fire. Then note how promptly the plume goes black for relative lack of combustion oxygen. It will be interesting to see what trace materials turn out to have been generated in that plume, or how much 'fallout' of monomer or reacting product actually condensed and plated out downwind.
The real shame is that this occurred in winter, when liquid vinyl chloride can 'sink' in area streams and then be roiled up from the bottom. The only real way to 'remediate' that -- before spring is far advanced -- is to do what they're doing: dam above and below, pump the stream flow around the 'area of work', and dig out and pyrolyze the streambed, banks, etc. that may have trapped the liquid at low temperature.
Convicted One My real point there is that I frequently am amused with the way we cite government as an impeccable authority whenever they sponsor ideas we ourselves endorse, yet we readily turn and discredit them as "clueless bubbas" when they don't.
Some people are consistent in their need to denigrate lawyers and government officials who disagree with their Weltanschauung. The logical conclusion of the direction Buttegieg suggests is that the profit motive doesn't work well in infrastructure endeavors.
"One size does not fit all."
Before the 5 loaded tank cars were breached with explosives, was the vinyl chloride in liquid form or was it a gas?
Also, where was the open fire in relation to these 5 tank cars? Was it possible to extinquish this fire?
When you come to HAZMAT derailments with release of the HAZMAT there are in reality only two types of solutions. There are BAD solutions and there are WORSE solutions. If there were GOOD solutions, it would not be HAZMAT.
As Balt points out, there are no GOOD solutions in a hazmat situation, so you have to choose the least bad.
Allowing the hazmat to flow into the ground and local waterways was clearly a very bad option. I saw one map that pointed out that the local is in the Ohio River watershed. Not a good thing.
Burning the spilled/spilling product may produce undesirable by-products, but they are then dispersed over a wide area. Air monitoring was taking place, so presumably there were no significant concentrations of said by-products.
As bad as this incident was, rail is still about the safest method for transporting these materials. Since it occurred, thousands of rail miles have been covered by hazmat, with no untoward consequences.
It's not just the media who gets it wrong, by the way - a post on FB slamming the government response to the wreck had "Palestine, Ohio" as the location. Palestine does exist - a small village of less than 200 people - but it has zero rail presence... And it's a couple hundred miles west of East Palestine...
Euclid The only solution is a tank car that cannot be breached by forces encountered in any derailment or collision. Forget about the spill pan. Just keep the hazmat bottled up. Nothing will spill and nothing will catch fire. Nothing will sink into the ground water and go to New Orleans.
I agree. The longer I live the more I realize that I know little to nothing about most things, especially roadroad tank cars, but what you say makes sense.
Rio Grande Valley, CFI,CFII
PJS1 Euclid The only solution is a tank car that cannot be breached by forces encountered in any derailment or collision. Forget about the spill pan. Just keep the hazmat bottled up. Nothing will spill and nothing will catch fire. Nothing will sink into the ground water and go to New Orleans.
charlie hebdoThe logical conclusion of the direction Buttegieg suggests is that the profit motive doesn't work well in infrastructure endeavors
What we are witnessing here, IMO, is the birthing of "regulation". It has always been popular here on this board to grouse about regulation, as though it was some parlor game devised just to thwart profit.....overlooking the reality that the regulations in place were created to address problems deemed significant enough to justify attention.
I have little doubt that 100 years from now, whatever regulation is spawned by this event will likewise be reviled as "senseless hostility to incentive" or some other doublespeak. Ce la Vie.
Euclid wrote: "They may have even smashed NS."
I wouldn't be surprised if the cost of this wreck eats up NS' profitability for a year or two. The company is certainly gonna be taken down a notch (or two, or three)...
Just wondering...
The line on which East Palestine is located -- is this the old Pennsylvania main line, or is it another?
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