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 ....
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 ....