Name: East Palestine Train Derailment: Aftermath of the Ohio Chemical Spill
Uploaded: 2023-02-15T18:13:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'East Palestine Train Derailment: Aftermath of the Ohio Chemical Spill' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'East Palestine Train Derailment: Aftermath of the Ohio Chemical Spill' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-15. Transcript available.

Now I don't know if this if they have to take additional precautions due to
traveling with hazardous waste and whether or not those precautions were or
not taken that's what I'm hearing about this case is that they that this is
something that they were trying to cut money by transporting these things that
are hazardous waste in a way that perhaps maybe they shouldn't have been
transported that way or maybe the regulation should be different I don't
know even hazardous waste though I think it's just chemicals that we use in
plastic oh it's very hazardous it's not waste right hazardous materials right
right it's very hazardous material I don't think it's like a byproduct yeah no
it's it's very dangerous materials but that's why there's this one kid Nick
drum who's been doing these amazing tech talks that I'm obsessed with because
it's
that he's like a chemist and he's great he's great he's actually taking what
the
APA is releasing and he's trying to make sense of it and he's like why am I
I think I said the person who's doing this why am I the person who's asking
these questions because what he mentions is when you look at the manifest of
the
chemicals that were on there why what we're looking at is this they're doing
you
know what's in the air but also he was saying there's petroleum so we're
talking
about an oil spill too but no one's talking about that well let's play what he
has to say rewind that he has a bunch well just let's play this one put the one
you
okay and rewind that stop sound play yeah I don't know if that's his take it
hasn't been very good so let's talk about the trail derailment in East
Palestine Ohio these palestines about an hour north of Pittsburgh almost
halfway to
Cleveland Norfolk Southern has a rail line that goes right through town and
this
derailment happened right on the edge outside of town on the border of PA in
Ohio the cars that crashed fine for them contain vinyl chloride it's a monomer
used to make PVC the reporting on this has gotten vinyl chloride confused with
polyvinyl chloride the polymer made out of vinyl chloride now the reason that
this
distinction is really important is vinyl chloride is very hazardous and very
flammable polyvinyl chloride is a plastics that's used in like everything the
other thing about vinyl chloride is that it boils at 8 degrees Fahrenheit so it's
shipped in its liquid form meaning that when these trains crashed and these
started leaking they
weren't just leaking liquid but they were spewing boiling gas so vinyl chloride
is really
toxic OSHA has the permissible limit of how much you can be exposed to it
during an
eight-hour shift as a one ppm part per million average over eight hours so
prior to
this the biggest spill of this chemical was in New Jersey where one train car
and
about twenty three thousand gallons of vinyl chloride were spilled but it
didn't catch on fire now this crash in Ohio has five train cars these kinds of
tanker cars can carry between twenty five and thirty three thousand gallons let's
call
it two hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty thousand pounds of vinyl
chloride
that's per train car five train cars there's maybe a million pounds of this
toxic chemical
spilling into the ground and also boiling off into the air but then it caught
on fire i think this
is where the reporting is really bad because no one is mentioning what the byproduct
of vinyl chloride
burning is of the many byproducts of burning vinyl chloride one of them is
hydrogen chloride hydrogen
chloride is really unstable and latches onto water like just water vapor in the
atmosphere and that turns
into hydrochloric acid so right now government officials officials from the
railroad both the
governor of pennsylvania and ohio are calling burning off the million pounds of
this stuff a success
but not mentioning that it means that we have hundreds of thousands of pounds
of acid in the air
potentially now ever since engineering school i've studied a lot of industrial
accidents i just find
it really fascinating and organizations like the chemical safety board ntsb and
osha all have like really
good reports available to the public i think as a designer it's really good to
learn about mistakes
when looking at these kinds of industrial disasters across time there are a
couple things that are
pretty universal across all of them one the responsible party in this coast norfolk
southern railway
always plays down the reality of the situation politicians also just repeat the
same lines and then
news outlets just repeat the same so all we're hearing is the responsible party's
word this hasn't been getting
so jamie i also sent you a video that shows what it looks like in the area
where these clouds are passing
over and it is horrific it's apocalyptic it's so terrible there's a man who's
on the ground who's
screaming that these aren't storm clouds this these are the clouds that of this
that they're burning
from east palestine and he's freaking out and you know like animals are dying
pets are dying fish are
dying in the rivers it's the idea that they only evacuated a small area yeah
you're talking about
like miles and miles away from this yeah animals are dying this is it look at
this play this go full
screen with this because these aren't these aren't storm clouds this is the
that they burn off the
they burn off in east palestine this is not storm clouds look at this i know
look at it this is over darlington
it's it it's insane if you if you're just listening what we're looking at is
just intense black clouds
covering this area and it's daytime yeah and you can't see you the sky is
completely covered in black
play give me the volumes from east palestine they're controlled burn
yeah the idea is a controlled burn is so crazy well i guess because they were
worried that it
was going to explode that's why they felt they had to burn it but it did
explode right no they were
felt it was going to be a massive explosion and this would have happened anyway
but there's no other
options and they they like in one of that kid's tick tocks later on he talks
about how they just buried
it and so people are saying they did this just to get the trains running again
basically which again the
cynic in me wouldn't doubt but i don't know i just sent you a text from um my
editor joe donatelli
who i loved from playboy he now lives in ohio and he's on does local news and i
will say local news has
been great on this they're actually reporting and he like he said to me you
have to be able to like
muster the resources fact check things it it isn't as fast as the internet
where there's a void of
information that gets filled and he did a long thread about what they've
learned in his at the local
news station where he is that's really good and i recommend people go check it
out because i think
local news is actually pretty good on this but some people in ohio are saying
they didn't even know
about it there's like people who you'll see online they're like i'm in ohio and
i didn't hear
about this but maybe they don't watch local news