Where There's Smoke...
...there's a firestorm of distrust, fear, and hysteria in East Palestine, Ohio
On February 3, a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, a small town with a population of about 5,000. Thirty-eight cars jumped the tracks, eleven of which were carrying hazardous chemicals. Though no one was killed or injured in the crash, a potentially dangerous fire broke out. To prevent a chemical explosion, emergency responders drained the liquid chemicals into a trench and burned them: standard procedure in such cases. The controlled burn sent thick billows of dark smoke into the sky, but there was no explosion.
Prior to the burn, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine ordered East Palestine residents to be evacuated. After air quality tests were conducted by the EPA, they were told on February 9 it was safe to return to their homes. And though some of the hazardous chemicals did flow into the Ohio River, the EPA judged the quantity was too small relative to the size of the river to pose any risk. Full service on the affected rail line had been restored on February 7. But that, of course, was not the end of the story.
To be sure, there are legitimate questions to be answered. What caused the accident in the first place? What cleanup measures remain to be taken? What, if any, are the potential long-term health risks to the people of East Palestine? But in the atmosphere of fear, hysteria and systemic distrust characteristic of post-pandemic America, any answers provided by Norfolk Southern, the EPA, and the wider corporate and government expert class are certain to be dismissed as lies in the service of a coverup.
Progressivism being not only the party of government but the party of the expert class in all its facets, progressives should be seriously alarmed by the public, media, and political reaction to the East Palestine accident.
In the mythology of progressivism, such incidents are staged as a three-act morality play. Act One: The incompetence and negligence of some nefarious corporate actor causes a disaster. Act Two: In swoops government, armed with preternatural expertise, energized by righteous indignation. Act Three: The victims of corporate malfeasance are made whole, the evildoers are appropriately chastised, capitalism is once more shown up for its soulless evil, and America applauds. Oh, and of course, the moral lesson is much improved if the cast of characters includes a minority community, and if the disaster involves the environment.
But the East Palestine disaster isn’t following that script. To put it shortly, nobody believes what the experts are saying. The public’s default assumption is that everybody’s lying—an opinion echoed here and there in the media and by various cowardly or opportunistic politicians.
We’re told by the media that the people of East Palestine are “demanding answers” about the accident. Watching interviews with some of those people, I cannot really believe that. Their minds are already made up: A disaster has befallen their town and the truth is being covered up. The EPA says there’s no problem with air quality; residents call that a lie. The EPA says the amount of chemicals that made it into the Ohio River was too small to pose a health risk; residents don’t believe that either. And you can bet that their disbelief, the conviction that they’re being deliberately lied to, is shared by the wider American public.
And why shouldn’t the American public believe that? During the pandemic, the government, the expert class, and much of the media compiled a extensive record of falsehood and deceit. Only now are we learning that the hard lockdown, devastating to America’s economy and social structure, wasn’t really necessary. Only now are we learning that social distancing was futile and that masks were largely ineffective. Only now is it clear that since the vaccines developed on an emergency basis are doubtfully effective, vaccine mandates were a gross abuse of government and corporate power.
The pandemic didn’t just devastate the nation’s economy and social structure, it devastated the credibility of government and the expert class. Trust in the probity of public school boards, administrators and teachers has been shredded by their behavior during the pandemic, which made it abundantly clear that students and their parents are far down the list of the education establishment’s priorities. Trust in the public health establishment was undermined by its dissembling and frivolity, as when it decided that large crowds engaged in violent rioting posed no health risk, but that people gathering for religious services were potential killers. Trust in government was frittered away, first by Donald Trump’s antics, then by Joe Biden’s mush-mouthed authoritarianism.
And in East Palestine, we see the fallout from that collapse of trust: a toxic cloud of paranoia, fear and hysteria among its residents, based on a belief that no one’s telling them the truth.
Let it be clear that I’m not criticizing the people of East Palestine. They’re the ones most directly impacted by the train derailment, they have the most reason to be apprehensive about it, and they have the most to lose. It may turn out that long-term effects of the chemical spill will be injurious to them and their community. But when the Governor of Ohio tells them that (1) testing has determined that the town’s water is safe to drink, but that (2) they should continue to drink bottled water, he’s not being helpful or reassuring—to put it no more pointedly.
The Biden Administration’s response to the East Palestine incident has been characteristically somnolent. Now of course, his handlers would never allow Joe Biden to visit the town—heaven knows what he might say. And the comically inept Secretary of Transportation, good old Mayor Pete, appears to be studiously ignoring the whole thing. Admittedly, that may be for the best—what Buttigieg knows about rail transport and toxic chemicals would fit on the back of a cocktail napkin. It’s true enough that in the short term, there’s not much that Biden or any senior official can do. Still, nonchalance with a dash of confusion isn’t a good look for any administration, much less one headed by a guy who’s supposed to be our Empathizer-in-Chief.
If the wages of sin is death, the wages of dishonesty are paid out in the coin of distrust. In American politics, distrust in government has always been a theme, though not the dominant theme. True, people have always claimed to distrust “the politicians,” and bureaucracies from DC to the department of motor vehicles have never been much loved. But on the whole, American government and the American political system embodied a certain credibility. No more. That credibility has now been squandered and restoring it will be a long job—if that’s possible at all.
Where There's Smoke...
As it so happens, the excellent Doomberg adjacent in my Substack feed has made their post available for free:
https://doomberg.substack.com/p/railroaded
Quick summary: by listed chemicals by weight, the phosgene is not a significant hazard (at the order of a thousandth of a percent). It's simply too little an amount to be an issue. The real issue is (or was) the hydrogen chloride, which is present at the few percent level. However, the controlled burn seems to have come off without real incident. The EPA and the two states are testing homes and offices in the area. And the vinyl chloride itself is (or was) a hazard. Both the EPA and the state have posted detailed manifests and analyses of the train's contents.
The bigger scandal is that we ship so many hazardous materials by an aging and unreliable rail system in the US, as Doomberg points out. They promise a future article on this topic. (Take that, Warren Buffett -- he helped to kill the much safer pipelines to transport oil and natgas -- but they go instead on his rickety and unsafe railroad.) And of course, that we rely on an hysterical and illiterate media to inform us ... but now we have Substack and the web generally to get more accurate information. If only those peddlers of social media hadn't enticed people away from Web 1.0 and into their own hysterical environment of viral mis/disinformation ....