Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear declared a state of emergency in Rockcastle County following a multi-car train derailment on Wednesday that his office said resulted in a chemical spill.
Around 16 train cars were involved in the incident, including two carrying molten sulfur that ended up on fire, according to CSX, which operates the train.
“At approximately 2:23pm today, a CSX train derailed north of Livingston, KY. Preliminary information indicates that at least 16 cars were involved, including two molten sulphur cars that have been breached and have lost some of their contents which is on fire,” a statement from the company to ABC News read.
If only we could do something about this problem which got inexplicably worse when we worsened regulations and working conditions…
Consumers will choose to buy products from companies who don’t spill molten sulfur so the invisible hand of the market will fix this situation any moment now.
Aaaany moment now.
A few years ago, a CSX train carrying acrylonitrile had an axle snap and derailed in my town, igniting in the process, and creating a huge plume of cyanide gas. It was a damned miracle nobody was killed.
The response from CSX was impressive. I have no complaints about how they handled it AFTER it happened. However, and it only recently occurred to me, but that response that was so well oiled, rehearsed, and organized… they’ve CLEARLY had WAY too much experience doing this; way too many times they’ve had to sweep into a town and “handle” things after a derailment of a hazmat train.
Maybe… just maybe they should consider putting a little more emphasis on upgrading and maintaining their equipment. Maybe they wouldn’t have to have so many teams ready to sweep in and manage the medium-sized ecological catastrophes that happen so often.
Two different teams. Sounds like the response team has some real winners on it and the maintenance team doesn’t, or, lacks budget
Cheaper to respond once in a while than to prevent fleet wide. Capitalism alone settles on cost efficacy.
Maintenance teams are discouraged from marking trains and rails for maintenance because delays impact profits.
https://www.propublica.org/article/railroad-safety-union-pacific-csx-bnsf-trains-freight
Bradley Haynes and his colleagues were the last chance Union Pacific had to stop an unsafe train from leaving one of its railyards. Skilled in spotting hidden dangers, the inspectors in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote up so-called “bad orders” to pull defective cars out of assembled trains and send them for repairs.
But on Sept. 18, 2019, the area’s director of maintenance, Andrew Letcher, scolded them for hampering the yard’s ability to move trains on time.
“We’re a transportation company, right? We get paid to move freight. We don’t get paid to work on cars,” he said. “The first thing that I’m getting questioned about right now, every day, is why we’re over 200 bad orders and what we’re doing to get them down. … If I was an inspector on a train,” he continued, “I would probably let some of that nitpicky shit go.”
“I would probably let some of that nitpicky shit go.”
I’m guessing ‘nitpicky shit’ is things like ‘loose wheels.’
Perhaps we can pay large sums to the companies to fix the infrastructure, if they feel like it.
Here we go again…
When molten sulfur is on fire, it releases hydrogen sulfide, a poisonous gas. So that’s fun!
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Unless it burns our your sense of smell, then you’re pretty much dead shortly after.
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Will they be able to flee it in time?
not likely.
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Until Trump comes out and talks about only betas fleeing the smell and real Americans sticking it out for the economy.
Ahh yes, transporting hazardous chemicals on antiquated infrastructure. What a time to be alive.
The free market cannot provide safe railways, they must be nationalized!
mobile molten sulpher. wtaf
Yep. I live in a big train town. Molten sulfur trains pass through all the time. And don’t I feel good about it!
My dad was working for a company that moved liquid molten steel by train every day.
That’s actually safer. It will only do pretty localized damage. It won’t spread a huge cloud of poisonous gases.
Not to mention, in theory, moving something on a fixed track seems safer than any other alternatives we have. WAY safer than by truck or by plane.
If only we didn’t have such an outdated and monopolized rail in this country. THAT is what makes it unsafe. Capitalism.
I question how much work there has been in eliminating the need to transport these sort of chemicals long distances at all. I imagine it has a lot to do with cost, which, again, is a capitalism issue.
There is room for improvement, but I don’t think it should be characterized as “unsafe.”
467 people have died from train accidents in the US since 1975.
https://usafacts.org/articles/are-train-derailments-becoming-more-common/
No one died in the immediate aftermath of East Palestine. Let’s talk about 10 years on.
OK, it will cool down eventually and leave a mess that would probably a nightmare to remove, but at least no poisonous fumes, that’s right.
i know people have done the math… money talks… but that seems so inefficient!
Just imagine you have a tight spot on the map full of industry. You need to expand, but there simply is no space around the existing site. But you cannot move the original site, as it is vital to be next to the harbour. So you have to open a second site somewhere else and get the logistics right.
So just like wheat and flour moves from the farmer to the mill and on to the baker, they moved liquid steel from the blast furnaces to the foundry and rolling mill.
Why is molten steel transported? That sounds bonkers. I’ve never heard of it.
Is it like a cement truck situation?
The original plant with the blast furnaces is directly at the harbor. As this site is surrounded on all sides with other industrial zones and the cities themselves, they built new foundries and rolling mills on a second site. They get (or got, IDK) the liquid steel delivered in rail cars designed for this one purpose. Obviously they are heavily insulated, so they are “just warm” on the outside.
I have to admit that my knowledge of this is old, I don’t even know if the blast furnaces are still running there…
I love that we’ve switched to reactionary response. US is slowly transitioning to reactionary air travel as well.
The more we can get people to react poorly to the thought of rail lines the more government money we can funnel into highways and kick backs for the auto industry!! Woooh!
Aviation has always been reactionary. Change comes from finding the cause of accidents, and unfortunately it’s somewhat difficult to do until after that type of accident happens. In the 60s and 70s it was common for passenger jets to just crash in to mountains when there was nothing wrong with them. We implemented better navigational technology, and warning systems that detect obstacles in the plane’s path to prevent this from happening.
Everyone who is harmed by this is a sacrifice the government was willing to make in order to maximize profits for their owners.
Quick read if you want to know a little bit more about molten sulfur:
when I was a boy in Spokane, we would walk down the rail tracks and collect the sulfur that fell out of trains
watching that yellow chunk turn to red when you light it on fire and then melting every fucking thing in sight… Sometimes I am still surprised I have all my fingers
He should declare a state of emergency regarding the general safety of the trains instead.
