The Ohio River is contaminated, people are evacuated, the economic impact is high, and the WH is quiet. Why wouldn't they cover this? It's debated whether the water is safe for a large population who are finding vinyl chloride traces in their lawn. Seems like it would make the list.
Oh :eyeroll:
Hey, sometimes it's good to care about the environment! At this rate we'll have our dear friend asking for a stronger EPA and tighter regulations so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again.
This blame for this event Is most likely going to fall under the jurisdiction of the DOT and their regulations but of course the EPA will be the entity responsible for addressing the aftermath.
The blame lies fully on lobbyists who petition all governments to cut regulations that prevent these things from happening and the politicians that agree to do so. There have been numerous ways to limit these types of things from happening that used to be in law or were proposed to become laws and they have been chipped away at or not enacted by lobbyists and politicians. Unfortunately that’s the reality. We wouldn’t have to endure these things if people weren’t so beholden to shareholders.
Yep and they almost always result due to human error (over loading the cars or improper speed). Unfortunately, I have had to be involved in several train derailment cases involving cleanups and the associated insurance claims. Regulations are great and needed but when the railroad employees don’t follow procedures correctly this is what can happen. Of course this is not just an issue for the railroads. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve seen instances where employees are well trained, safety protocols are detailed and in place yet a human being can still manage to cause havoc because they didn’t follow what was laid out for them.
Absolutely, thats why its imperative that there be secondary and tertiary levels of containment or protection or redundancies built int to systems. Until we as the general public speak up for ourselves and stop letting these companies/politicians get away with the bare minimum while they buy back stocks... nothing will change.
Understood but I cant help thinking the same company that spent $6million to get the Obama brake rule will ultimately pass the cost of their negligence onto the people of the US in cleanup, testing, and labor... Probably gonna end up being hundreds of millions in damages and property loss.
There are plenty of instances where the company in question could and should do a much better job in managing their environmental and other risks. However, there are just as many others where people are…..for lack of a better word, stupid. I‘m going to give you an example that you will find amusing and sad. We handled the risk management for a crude transloading and logistics facility in Texas. Part of the operation involved cleaning and de-gassing the rail cars before they were loaded again. The worker climbed into the railcar in order to start the de-gassing procedure (assisted by two co-workers outside the car). Before he was done, he decided to spark up a joint and guess what? Yep, he incinerated himself and killed both of his co-workers. There was a third that survived but was badly injured. He also caused a couple million dollars of property damage. He was trained in confined spaced protocol as well as specifics to rail car work. He was even taught not to smoke or use an open flame near the rail cars. How do you prevent someone from being an idiot? Ultimately, it is up to imperfect beings to not make mistakes. Accidents will continue to happen and we can blame the politicians, the lobbyists and anyone else brought to the table. There are truly times when they are at least partially responsible, I totally agree. However, the individual workers still have to perform as directed.
Forgive me because this is very serious to me. I spent many years of life working on contaminated sites, researching a sites history as part of property transactions and generating remediation plans for sites that needed to be cleaned up. UST sites all the way to a BRAC navy base that operates for over 100 years. I’ve seen so much shit that could have been avoided if there just minimal adherence to handling things in a somewhat safe and controlled manner.
I've spent a couple decades working in a field that is very similar, if not the same from a safety perspective, and this is spot on.
You are correct…..there is almost always a way to minimize the number of situations like what has happened in Ohio and the event I mentioned in Texas. My background was in environmental consulting then on the governmental regulatory side as well as environmental insurance underwriting but ended up focusing on risk management (primarily related to environmental issues) so I know where you’re coming from. I’ve seen many many many examples of people performing their tasks poorly with disregard of the consequences.
I wouldn’t really call it an accident either…….I would say the employee willfully violated company policy which resulted in an unintended explosion. However, this would usually be reported as a workplace accident in the world of risk management.
I’ll be quiet after one last note…….I have worked on a couple pretty large train derailments that involved crude oil transport. Both of them resulted from the train traveling at a higher than allowed rate of speed at the time the derailment occurred and the cause was determined to be operator error. Let’s hope that the Ohio event will make the rail transporters double down on preventing repeat occurrences.
