After the 141-car toxic chemical-carrying train was derailed in Ohio on February 3rd, the government called in experts who came up with a seemingly-illogical plan.
The 14 load cars carrying up to 33,000 (yes, there’s that number again) litres of highly poisonous vinyl chlorides came off the tracks at the Ohio town of East Palestine.
Oddly, despite the Wall Street Journal briefly covering the near-catastrophic incident, very few other US mainstream outlets have reported on the story. Why?
Well, according to a Substack article written by Jeff Childers on February 13th, while we were all focused on corporate media coverage of military press briefings about the United States’ new war on unidentified weather balloons, which I will cover in more depth tomorrow, another more important story was quietly exploding in a small Ohio town. There’s little substantive media coverage of the alarming ecological disaster unfolding right now in Biblically-named East Palestine, Ohio. It’s been happening for over a week and you are probably just finding out about it.
To set the table, I searched the Wall Street Journal and found a series of bland articles covering the unfolding disaster that abruptly stopped three days ago. It sure looks like the Journal received orders to forget the story or something.
The WSJ’s first story published on February 5th, headlined, “Ohio Train Derailment, Fire Battle Rural Town.” The sub-headline reassured that “Officials say water and air are safe so far, but urge people to ‘stay away from East Palestine.’”
So far! Remember that, about the air and water. The Journal’s February 5th article described the accident like this: Fifty cars on a Norfolk Southern Corp. train derailed Friday night about 9 p.m., causing a chemical fire. The National Transportation Safety Board said the eastbound train included 141 load cars, nine empty cars and three locomotives. It departed Madison, Ill., and was headed to Conway, Pa., when it derailed. Mr. Conaway and Fire Chief Keith Drabick said emergency-response officials are aware of 14 cars carrying vinyl chloride, a colorless gas that can easily burn and is used to make polyvinyl chloride hard plastic resin. Because of the smoldering fire, emergency responders haven’t been able to access the derailed cars. Kurt Kollar, with the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency’s office of emergency response, said officials were monitoring chemicals that reached some nearby streams, but said there is no current risk to the area’s drinking water.
Each of the fourteen chemical cars carried 25,000 to 33,000 gallons of vinyl chloride. That’s close to a half million gallons, or millions and millions of pounds of the chemical. From Encyclopedia Brittanica: Vinyl chloride, also called chloroethylene, [is] a colourless, flammable, toxic gas belonging to the family of organohalogen compounds and used principally in making polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a widely used plastic with numerous applications… Vinyl chloride can cause liver damage, and it is classified as a known human carcinogen.
A spill of carcinogens would be remarkably bad timing if a population had somehow injured their cancer-fighting immune responses. Just spitballing. OSHA considers vinyl chloride dangerous at 1 part per million (PPM). Here is the NJ Department of Health emergency responder reference for vinyl chloride spills, which says burning the chemical can cause an explosion.
So, reading between the lines of the Journal’s February 5th article, we can visualize baffled, gas-masked EPA bureaucrats standing there in East Palestine, peering dazedly at 141 derailed train cars, watching the chemicals gushing into local streams and, presumably, soaking into the town’s ground water, and wondering what to do. They knew East Palestine’s streams connect to the Ohio River, which feeds the Mississippi River, which dumps into the Gulf of Mexico through a vast delta system.
The bureaucrats almost certainly felt a keen sense of urgency to do … something. But what? A massive cleanup operation, as described in New Jersey’s Emergency Responder Quick Reference, would have been expensive, time-consuming, and even more damning, would have gotten a lot of bad media coverage of something you’d expect to see in the Third World, not in America’s breadbasket. No. They needed something … quicker.
On February 6th, the Journal’s headline read “Ohio Train Derailment Prompts Explosion Concerns, Evacuation Order.” The headline suggests the train could have spontaneously exploded, but the more nuanced truth appears in the sub-headline: “Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine on Monday instructed residents of East Palestine, Ohio, to stay away from their homes as officials planned to release chemical gas from five derailed tanker cars.”
Ah. So, before it all “exploded,” they planned to deliberately release the chemicals. Why?
The answer appears in an “update” on Norfolk Southern’s website and in a second article about the chemical train derailment published in the Journal on the same day, February 6th, which included this initial paragraph: A team of experts released a chemical from five tanker cars and ignited it Monday afternoon to prevent a potentially catastrophic explosion following a train derailment Friday along the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania.
They “ignited it.” In contrast, the Norfolk Southern update said they planned to ‘vent’ the chemicals, and admitted they knew it would catch on fire.
The Journal cited the use of “experts.” They called in the experts! Thank goodness experts were on the scene. I bet knowing the government’s experts were working the job made those fretful East Palestinians feel a lot better. And so the experts came up with a carefully-designed plan with a lot of moving parts: lighting the chemicals on fire, “to prevent a POTENTIALLY catastrophic explosion.”
So what do you suppose happened next? Remember: the GOVERNMENT’S experts were deciding what to do. Ohio’s EPA is packed with diversity hires and nepotistic appointments. And they were being advised by FEDERAL experts and officials as well as the chemical industry’s public relations damage-control team. So we are NOT talking the country’s best and brightest, who were all laid off for not taking the jabs anyway. As the headline explained, the plan to stop the chemicals from quickly draining into the Ohio river, sorry, I mean to “PREVENT a catastrophic explosion,” the government’s bumbling, industry-captured experts wound up CAUSING a catastrophic explosion.
New Jersey’s Fact Sheet says burning vinyl chloride makes it into hydrogen chloride, which easily binds with water to make hydrochloric acid, and phosgene, a deadly gas, the use of which is a war crime. Hydrogen chloride is not much fun either, as the Encyclopedia Brittanica points out: Exposure to 0.1 percent by volume hydrogen chloride gas in the atmosphere may cause death in a few minutes. Concentrated hydrochloric acid causes burns and inflammation of the skin.
On February 6th, the same day the experts detonated the chemicals, CBS News ran a story reporting dead fish appearing in creeks up to five miles away. The sub-headline read, “A couple who live about five miles from where the train derailed spotted dead fish in Leslie Run on Sunday night and Monday morning; KDKA’s Erica Mokay reports.”
The Ohio River is only fifteen miles from the site of the accident.
On February 7th, two days after experts blew up the vinyl chloride, the Journal reported a mandatory evacuation in East Palestine was underway. Note that they didn’t evacuate folks BEFORE they blew up the chemicals.* In other words, they didn’t predict the fallout. A commenter who lives in the area said there was a pre-venting evacuation within a one-mile radius. Officials failed to foresee the need for the larger evacuation.
On February 8th, the Pennsylvania Department of Health published a fact sheet reassuring residents there was no danger to them or to their animals.
On February 9th, the Journal reported residents had been cleared to return home and start baking casseroles and making hot chocolate. Nothing to worry about. It’s fine.
Meanwhile, social media posts by locals were telling a completely different, much more dramatic, and wildly alarming story. Locals have been reporting a massive wildlife die off. Fish dying in streams, flocks of birds falling out of the sky, chickens and cows dying on farms, pets dying in people’s yards. Reports of animal deaths up to 100 miles away were appearing as of this morning.
On the fourth day following the explosion, the corporate media narrative started mutating. The Journal ran its final story on the derailment on February 10th, three days ago, and the headline read, “Train Axle Was On Fire Before Derailment, Video Shows.”
Since that pathetic excuse for a story ran, there’s not been a single article in the Journal about the crash, the chemicals, the ecological impact, the response, the cleanup, or anything else related to the derailment after that. There’s absolutely nothing after the February 10th’s lame attempt to make it sound like the train was going to detonate anyway. I had to find other sources to continue the timeline.
Also on February 10th, social media erupted after Ohio police arrested NewsNation reporter Evan Lambert while he was trying to cover a local briefing. The bodycam footage does not make it exactly clear whose fault it was. It also seems like other media were covering the briefing, so it wasn’t completely closed to reporters, which is what some of the hot takes suggested.
While some online pundits already consider the derailment story “old news,” the story continues to develop. Local WKBN news ran a story headlined, “3 Additional Chemicals Discovered on East Palestine Train Derailment.” According to the story, the U.S. EPA said ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate and isobutylene were also in the rail cars that were “derailed, breached and/or on fire.”
There was no reference to the experts’ intentional venting, burning and exploding. And we can also safely conclude that they have no idea what the environmental impact will be yet.
On the 12th, Reuters then ran a story on the derailment quoting Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator, who said it was “unconscionable” that the EPA hadn’t publicly listed ALL the chemicals that were in the trains. The agency, she said, should launch a website showing local water and air test results “in a way that is easy for the public to understand.”
Then the U.S. EPA posted the full manifest. There were lots of chemicals on that train, not just four…
Local WKBN quoted Silverado Caggiano, a hazardous materials specialist, who explained “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open.” The specialist recommended that everyone in East Palestine should immediately get a health check-up, to make a record of where their health stands now, so that moving forward, they can document any injuries possibly related to the train derailment.
Norfolk Southern, the railway operator responsible for the accident, posted a long FAQ. They are offering financial assistance and home testing to anyone in the area.
My guess is that, to receive financial assistance, folks will probably have to sign something. If so, people should read the fine print carefully, and make 100% sure they aren’t releasing the railway from liability.
Norfolk Southern acknowledged the fish kill, but told residents not to worry about that…
Although US corporate media isn’t covering it, a regional cleanup operation appears to be underway.
Jacqui Deevoy has been a full time freelance journalist for more than three decades. Over the last few years, she’s lost faith in the MSM and now prefers to work for news outlets that deal in truth, not lies.
In 2021, she launched a personal investigation into euthanasia in the NHS and this resulted in her producing the shocking documentary ‘A Good Death?’ She is currently crowdfunding for a second film – ‘Playing God’ – due for release soon.
She produces and presents the UNN Friday night show – a sometimes serious but often irreverent chat-fest with an array of fascinating guests talking on a wide range of subjects. She’s also one of UNN’s lead reporters.
Follow Jacqui on Twitter @JacquiDeevoy1
