He should have done a hands up, don’t shoot.
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East Palestine, OH train derailment - Any radio station covering it?
- Thread starter Theater of My Mind
- Start date
He should have, out of courtesy, yielded to the Governor. He should not have been tackled and arrested.
Nip it in the bud.
I have been following this closely and think we need more information before taking sides. That's why the Ohio AG has announced that his office will do the investigation into this incident.
One small thing I should add: At one time, a train carrying such lethal cargo had to inform emergency officials if the train came near a populated area. That was the case in Minot ND 20 years ago. We learned this during congressional hearings on the disaster. There's a possibility that those rules have been changed since then. We'll learn more if hearings happen after this. This article says rules changed in 2004:
ble-t.org
Trains still carry lethal cargo through Dallas-Fort Worth - Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen
(The following story by Gordon Dickson appeared on the Fort Worth Star-Telegram website on April 29, 2010.) FORT WORTH, Texas — Railroads continue to haul c ...
ble-t.org
What would be interesting to know is how often such chemicals and substances are shipped. Based on seeing tanker cars with the various "dangerous" codes on the main Los Angeles / Long Beach rail route along I-10 in the Palm Springs area, I'd say this is enormously frequent.
Hazardous Materials Containers: Part 2 – Railroad Cars
Railroad cars that are used to transport hazardous materials are, in many cases, similar to their highway counterparts, but they have much larger capacities.
www.firehouse.com
I also see dangerous chemicals shipped by tanker truck, and they can be identified with the diamond shaped code lettering.
It's not as "often" as the article could be interpreted to indicate, as essentially all the ones I see are in large groups of cars, so that 72,000 figure might actually mean less than 10,000 separate trains with multiple chemical-containing cars.
As I looked for information on this, I was concerned that it is not easy to find easy consumer-friendly explanations of "how to tell if a wrecked train car is dangerous". In fact, a lot of the information is written in obtuse "governmentese" and difficult for a lay person to figure out.
Here's someone explaining how cost cutting ultimately led to this train wreck. if you listen carefully you might hear some parallels to the radio business.
So you think staffing causes "trainwrecks" on the radio? I hate to tell you, but cost-cutting and staff shortages are a problem everywhere. I was at the grocery store last night and saw pallets and pallets of groceries that were waiting to get stocked on shelves. In the meantime, it looks like they're out of stock. It's waiting for someone to unbox it and put it on the shelf. Same with restaurants. I couldn't get a table because they didn't have enough servers to cover the entire room. Everyone wants to save money.
Getting arrested because you're talking while the governor's talking and the cops don't like it has nothing to do with an evacuation. Got it?
The same lack of staffing has affected the utility companies. After Superstorm Sandy hit NJ, the truck that eventually arrived to fix the power lines in my neighborhood -- two weeks later -- came from Missouri.
It has to do with following directions and doing what you're told. When the police tell you to do something, you do it. Got it?
Charges dismissed against NewsNation reporter who was arrested at East Palestine press conference
Charges dismissed against NewsNation reporter who was arrested at East Palestine press conference | CNN
The criminal charges filed against the NewsNation reporter who was arrested while reporting at a news conference in East Palestine have been dropped, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Wednesday.
www.cnn.com
That is not "lack of staffing" and is totally normal. Utility companies only have enough staff to handle normal maintenance, failures and emergencies. When there is a tornado, hurricane, forest fire, flood or other catastrophic event, crews come in from other utility companies.
I saw a report based on the hurricane damage to SW Florida that said, "were utilities to have enough staff to deal locally with once a century... or even once a decade... disasters, your electric rate would increase to over $0.50 a kilowatt hour.
As an example, because Puerto Rico is an island, no outside crews were available to "drive over" there for the 100% system failure in their big hurricane in 2018. Some crews were flown in at a huge costs in transport and lodging, but parts of the Island had no power for more than four months and, over 5 years later, the whole power grid is still immensely fragile and generator plants fail constantly. And that is in the United States!
"The storm caused the worst electrical blackout in US history, which persisted for several months." and "The hurricane completely destroyed the island's power grid, leaving all 3.4 million residents without electricity. Governor Rosselló stated that it could take months to restore power in some locations, with the San Juan Mayor estimating that some areas would remain without power for four to six months. Communication networks were crippled across the island. Ninety-five percent of cell networks were down, with 48 of the island's 78 counties networks being completely inoperable. Eighty-five percent of above-ground phone and internet cables were knocked out.
So consider yourself very fortunate you live in a place where cooperative agreements allow electric companies to share resources in an emergency.
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There is an oft-beaten dead horse in Minot, ND, where a similar event occurred 21 years ago and the EAS was not activated. Because there was no radio alert and because the local stations were all owned by Clear Channel, that broadcaster was blamed for not activating the system.
In reality, the issue was based in the fact that the local and state officials did not know how to activate the EAS themselves due to inadequate training and an sense of a controlled emergency situation protocol. If the authorized people and departments in the government had reacted appropriately, the alert would have been broadcast. Of course, even then it was at about 2 AM and how many people in Minot were awake and listening to the radio at that time?
Even now, when the Ohio event occurred the average is that one out of every 12 persons may be listening to the radio. That leaves most people uninformed unless alerts are issued on TV and through cellular phones.
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When one of the larger hurricanes rolled through FL a few years ago, they showed all the trucks from the various power companies from both other parts of FL and neighboring states, staged in a huge parking lot waiting for their assignments. I noticed that most all the bucket trucks looked almost the same, though logos and decals here and there were different. It was explained back then about the cooperative that exists, which allows power companies, sometimes from several states away, to dispatch crews to disaster areas to assist - and while many of the trucks were from Florida's power company which explained why many of them appered to have an identical configuration, the news agency explained that there was also an effort to specify similar vehicles for neighboring states as well, so when the proverbial doo doo really hit the fan and there was an "all hands on deck" response to a disaster, staffing, bucket trucks and at least some other equipment could be at least somewhat interchangeable and familiar to all staff, regardless of which utility company they were employed by.
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But they don't even have that! When FirstEnergy took over JCP&L, they fired half of the linemen and stopped doing tree trimming and system maintenance. So guess what happened during the next ice storm? The power was out for a week because untrimmed trees limbs fell on the lines, and 50-year-old equipment that failed could not be repaired because it was so old that replacement parts were no longer available for it.
And we all know what happened in California when the power company there stopped doing maintenance and implemented a policy of continuing to use 100-year-old power lines until they failed:
ABC10 Investigation: PG&E knew old power line parts had ‘severe wear’ months before deadly Camp Fire
Evidence used to convict PG&E of the 2018 Camp Fire shows the company knew old parts needed replacing, but tried to show they could last longer.
www.abc10.com
Some people seem to think this is a federal government issue, and that the Secretary of Transportation should be there overseeing things. This is primarily a state government thing. The local emergency officials are in charge, with involvement from the EPA.
www.foxnews.com
Today, the governor requested federal aid, but not from the DOT:
news.yahoo.com
He requested aid from HHS. So really no role for DOT except investigating the derailment, and if laws were broken. Moving forward, there are other departments involved.
Ohio residents erupt at town hall: 'Where's Pete Buttigieg?'
Ohio residents impacted by this month's toxic train derailment are calling for answers and asking about the whereabouts of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
www.foxnews.com
Today, the governor requested federal aid, but not from the DOT:
East Palestine train derailment updates: Chemical plume moves toward Huntington, West Virginia
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has asked for federal assistance in East Palestine. Here's what we know following the train derailment.
He requested aid from HHS. So really no role for DOT except investigating the derailment, and if laws were broken. Moving forward, there are other departments involved.
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