Has anyone seen a good analysis on what went wrong? I found a USAToday article with a partial fragment saying that one of the wheels had a failed bearing, and this was the proximal cause of the derailment. It seems to me that (as pointed out in the article) the mean-time-to-failure increases with the length of the train; perhaps nonlinearly? I think the failure rate of bearings is proportional to the length of the train, but you can't "amortize" failure: any failed bearing would lead to a catastrophic error?
To my mind this means that things like ECP (which have been removed) might've fixed the issue, but the fundamental problem is the train length, which has been discussed (in all of its negatives) here, before.
In that sense, the train company is directly at fault: they are engaging in unsafe practices in order to remain profitable, and the practices are fundamentally not safe-able (to make up a word).
The bigger problem is not the derailment but the fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again, at great health and environmental cost to the local community and even several states in the windshed to the northeast (PA, NY, VT)
They burned off the vinyl chloride because the combustion products are relatively benign, it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks, vinyl chloride is quite volatile and acute exposure to high concentrations of vinyl chloride vapor is dangerous, and they wanted to get everyone back in their homes (and yes, get the railroad back up and running) as quickly as safely permissible.
Who told you that? Phosgene and dioxins are "relatively benign"? Dioxins might more properly be called forever chemicals, and will contaminate the soil and water of five states for decades.
I understand they were trying to avoid a bleve. The solution they chose was not based principally on minimizing citizen harm though
Phosgene also has very low environmental persistence. I think the actual amount of dioxin created from combustion of vinyl chloride monomer at atmospheric pressure is very low. In any event, both were dispersed into the atmosphere at concentrations that pose(d) very little danger to people outside of the temporary evacuation zone.
I don't want to downplay anything that happened here, but if you said a train of dihydrogen monoxide derailed and the vapors were spreading through the community, some number of people would come forward claiming to be sick. Statistically, someone is going to wake up with a cold on the day of the derailment. And the brain is a very powerful drug, if you scare someone with a chemical spill, they can show symptoms regardless of whether or not some chemical is acting on their body.
This is a risky comment to make, because it sounds like I am supporting NS's cleanup plan, and I'm not. I'm just saying that people saying they're sick doesn't mean the plan was executed incorrectly.
I think the radius of the evacuation zone should be up to the issuer to justify.
If you want a 1-mile zone it seems that you should be able to articulate why or else it should just get denied. However, it seems that wikipedia et al don't seem to have a citation as to how 1 mile was picked so it's hard to say if a smaller or larger zone should've been done.
Edit: Found a chart from Ohio.gov [1] showing impact areas. It does seem to be much smaller than 1mi.
> Since hot smoke travels upwards, I don't know what making the zone wider would have accomplished.
I mean if hot air only went up the Earth would have no atmosphere after a sunny day.
My first job (1983) was as a bench tech, at a defense contractor (microwave spy stuff/TEMPEST).
We all had these little bottles on our benches, with a funny silver lid that acted a bit like a "birdbath"[0]. You pumped it a couple of times, and the contents would come up, into a shallow bowl. You'd then take a long "Q-Tip" swab, dip it in the liquid, and use that to clean flux off the PCB you were fixing.
They also had open buckets, and people would wash entire assemblies off, in these buckets.
The liquid was trichlor[1]. We had gallons of it, sloshing around. If you got any on your hand, it made the skin turn white, and flake off. It smelled like the demon spawn of acetone and gasoline.
We were assured that it was completely benign, and not to worry our pretty little heads over it.
Let's just say that it can take some time to overcome [in]vested bias.
> Vinyl chloride is a mutagen having clastogenic effects which affect lymphocyte chromosomal structure.[20][22] Vinyl chloride is a Group 1 human carcinogen posing elevated risks of rare angiosarcoma, brain and lung tumors, and malignant haematopoeitic lymphatic tumors.[23] Chronic exposure leads to common forms of respiratory failure (emphysema, pulmonary fibrosis) and focused hepatotoxicity (hepatomegaly, hepatic fibrosis). Continuous exposure can cause CNS depression including euphoria and disorientation. Decreased male libido, miscarriage, and birth defects are known major reproductive defects associated with vinyl chloride.
Yes, they found elevated rates of some cancers in people who spent their careers in poorly ventilated vinyl chloride production facilities. For the sort of concentrations and durations we’re talking about in East Palestine, it’s not carcinogenic.
It's nice to see someone using some logic in here, there is a ton of ignorance. The only issue is that people always need to find someone to blame. Most aren't going to take facts like you have provided and use that in their assessment of the situation. My main concern would be the groundwater if anything, not the byproducts of combustion that have long blown away in the wind, or the fact Joe Biden didn't come walk around the town. I can imagine the town hall meetings are full of ignorant fools who just want to blame and be angry or political.
My friend from East Palestine took a video of the water in a creek that runs outside his house. The water is rainbow like an oil spill. This was yesterday. Whatever they combusted and dispersed, it's very much still there and I sure wouldn't want to be drinking that water.
> There is also the theoretical possibility of burning vinyl chloride forming dioxins which are known carcinogens. So far, no dioxins have been detected.
Yes, they have been testing and sharing with plenty of news outlets if you care enough to seek it out. The chemicals were burned off and have now dispersed, there is no more source to worry about for anything airborne. It's too bad this is an area of mostly poor, uneducated, right wingers that don't probably know much about chemistry or analytical thinking. Perhaps they could put their energy into ensuring the groundwater does not become contaminated instead of carrying on about things that don't matter, such as Joe Biden and air pollution.
I haven't seen anything concrete about dioxins coming from the burning of vinyl chloride. From what I've seen, the known dioxin problem is from the burning PVC, which was in bulk cars that were ignited by the derailment (as opposed to deliberately set on fire).
FWIW Only one vinyl chloride car was listed as leaking. I would think the alternative was to bring in mobile pumps, new tanker cars, and possibly chillers. And that should probably be made the default standard, rather than defaulting to "controlled" release in an emergent situation.
Someone else a few days ago linked a paper that measured minuscule amounts of dioxins from burning vinyl chloride. Minuscule as in measurable, but probably not a concern.
If you consider phosgene and HCl to be "benign" based on their half life sure, but this assumes complete combustion. The cloud of visible black smoke emitted shows that clearly didn't happen. Partially combusted vinyl chloride monomer is some horrible mix of carcinogens that will contaminate the area for years.
>it was much safer to remediation personnel to ignite the chemicals in a controlled burn vs having them work around flammable chemicals for weeks
It would have taken weeks for a large org like Norfolk Southern to unload the payload to other containers? Seems like an unreasonably long amount of time.
On the journalism side, the source seems to be extremely alarmist,[0] so I doubt much skepticism was practiced there.
On the NOAA side, it would be interesting to see the full set of assumptions behind this model. I would presume the vast majority of emissions would occur during the burn itself (February 6th, afternoon), but this model seems to assume a significant (undiminished?) outflow at midnight on February 8th.
> fact that they released and burned off the vinyl chloride in order to expeditiously clear the tracks and get them running again
I was under the impression that there was risk of a Boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion which would have been even more catastrophic than the "controlled" release and burn off.
> There are thousands of derailments every year. The bigger problem is not the derailment [...]
I think that's a problem worth discussing as well. Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump, then the rail companies spent billions in stock buybacks and tried to tighten the screws on their labour force even further for cost-cutting reasons.
There are a lot of pathological behaviours that have gone into "thousands of derailments per year" that are worth discussing, and I'd say those are a lot more important than just this one derailment.
The way to put the screws to the rail companies isn’t to regulate better brakes - just have the NTSB have a policy of shutting down any line that has a derailment for months or longer. The companies will solve it themselves.
If they cannot operate safely and they are essential to our national security, perhaps they should be nationalized. I bet the threat of nationalization would get their collective asses in gear.
> Obama passed legislation to upgrade trains braking systems to make them a lot safer, which was then weakened by lobbying, which was then repealed by Trump
I'm not sure it was political. The FAST Act, the legislation from 2015 that mandated that regulators require ECP brakes on some trains also required that the National Academy of Sciences produce a report on the effectiveness of such brakes which would then be used to review the regulation to see if the assumptions behind it were valid. The regulators then had to either publish an explanation of how the regulation was justified or repeal it.
In 2017 the NAS report came out, and found that there really wasn't much evidence either way, and said they were unable to conclude that ECP brakes would outperform other types of brakes.
Given that NAS report I am not at all sure that the outcome would have been different under a Clinton administration.
We know the bearing was on fire for 20+ miles before it derailed, and it passed through at least one hotbox detector in that condition without being detected. On average, such detectors are placed every 10-20 miles. The one in East Palestine spotted the problem but it was too late to prevent the derailment.
Maybe a start would be to adjust regulation such that detectors need to be placed with higher frequency. ECP is a nice idea, but that's a last ditch effort and not a generalized solution.
Do we know it was without being detected? I got the impression somewhere that it was ignored because they frequently are for a while due to lack of sidings of adequate length to stop in.
The length of the siding shouldn't prevent you from using it. It should just require the main track to be signalled stopped for other traffic in either direction while you are occupying it during the set out procedure. If the train is long enough, this could be quite a long time if you have to dump and then rebuild working pressure in the brake system.
There’s also the possibility that mechanical parts will seize up (especially in the case of overheated bearings) and will be unable to get moving again if you stop.
I mean, if attempted to apply the same logic to driving your car I would say you should have your license taken away.
They can always split the train and cart off the working cars to a siding, and then if need be drag the sparkler at low speed with little risk of derailment. Or worst, you bring in a crane and replace the bogie on a siding. Or any number of actions that don't start a statewide emergency. Talk about normalizing deviance in name of profits.
They won't spring for a system to apply the brakes on all cars at the same time. They sure aren't going to wire every axle up with sensors and network the whole train.
The hotbox detector could have seen the bearing overheating and been ignored, or have malfunctioned or just not been sensitive enough to detect the problem when the train passed. It’s old tech that should have caught this in most cases. The even older tech solution would be adding a caboose on trains carrying hazardous materials. Maybe you don’t need a caboose today but someone watching cameras in a cube could do the same thing.
ECP does not seem like a solution, and addressing how hazardous chemicals are moved is something that needs to be done.
They shipped the wheelset to DC for inspection but we haven't seen the report from that inspection yet. They are also going to inspect the actual site, but are waiting until the site is decontaminated.
So we might get a good ruling on the bearing in the coming weeks but based on other reports that I have read (and I quite enjoy the industrial disaster genre of podcast/video) it will probably be a year or two before the full report is complete.
Right. It's all completely harmless and there's no risk to any residents, but the site is also too contaminated for investigators to make even a very brief visit. Makes sense to me.
From what I read the NTSB has not started its investigation because their are waiting for the train cars to finish being cleaned up. After that they will begin and we'll get some preliminary findings and eventually final report
I'm finding it difficult to find objective assessments of the impact of what has happened in East Palestine. It seems like there are interests in dismissing the impacts entirely, but there are others that seems to want to overstate the impacts significantly. Does anyone else feel this way?
I think part of the problem is that a really thorough investigation from the NTSB (https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20230214.as...) will by definition not be quick. We'll definitely get answers, but it will take time. As a result, we have an information gap which is quickly filled with tons of speculation.
I think it's fair to be concerned until we know that the impact was somehow limited. Toxic fumes and spills are incredibly dangerous. Not just deadly in the short term, they can cause severe long-term health problems. It's not like the spillage/smoke just simply disappears, so it's good to be concerned about them until there's proof the impact is minor.
Other than introducing FUD about the cleanup costs, why would you believe there is overstatement on the impact of the disaster? What metric has you doubting the impact statement? What are your qualifications to make this assessment?
I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event. The posts getting the most engagement/traction are convinced this is larger than Chernobyl. However, relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.
But I have no environmental sciences credentials to speak of.
> I'm thinking about what I've read on social media (twitter, reddit, etc) about the event.
Social media is social media. It requires critical thinking skills to navigate what you can trust versus what you cannot. I would have put this point in your GP, though. The GP otherwise reads like it has an agenda.
> relevant authorities do not seem to agree with this.
They're (probably) a more reliable source than social media, so I'd have to refer to the relevant authorities.
Social media (likely) isn't out there gathering soil samples, air quality metrics, and water quality metrics in a uniform or scientific method that would qualify 'social media' to make a judgement call about the impact of the disaster.
I think the overt issue is that both state and fed gov completely bungled their response. Their absurd, stubborn silence, even after the issue has been lighting up social media for a week, gives the impression they know it's deadly but don't care -- whether or not that's the truth.
That is the "conspiracy" non-conspiracy minded people like myself agree they bungled their response but that just confirms my long held position that the government is completely incompetent and we look to them for guidance, or solutions to a given problem at our own peril.
As the famous axiom goes... "Government: If you think you have problems now, wait until you see our solutions."
Their bungling of the response is completely predictable, extending a long long history of bungled responses to emergencies. Of course the predicable reaction to this bungling is not to simply acknowledge the reality of government incompetence, no.. it will be as it always is a mix of not enough money, not enough power, and capitalism / lack of regulation that will be to blame. Government agencies are always pure as the driven snow, and with out fault
Government is always measured by their intentions, never their results.
Eh, the problem here is you're taking 'government' as a single entity, but it's not at all.
If it were up to the singular 'government' there would have been better brakes on the trains and the company would have been following the law on transporting the chemicals. All the issues at hand were well known about for years.
The problem here is very little government but instead for profit corporations going "How can I squeeze more blood out of this penny" and look for ways to get out of the regulations that prevent disasters in the first place.
Really no one does a 'great' job of dealing with disasters, hence why they are disasters. The best regulations/forms of government prevent the damned disaster based on the inevitable outcome of human greed in the first place.
Right on schedule here we have exactly that I predicted. Government is good, they just did not have enough power to stop the evil capitalism... because the evil capitalism forced other parts of the government to stip the good parts of the government of power...
Responses like that should be laughable but far too many people believe that narrative. Never mind that rail is one of the most heavily regulated industries, and even if more regulation was passed the next disaster will be again "well there is still not enough regulation" because again government is measured by intention not results
There is never "enough" regulation, there is never "enough" power transferred to government, and it could never ever be that government failed in their duty to enforce existing regulations, or failed to use their existing power. No it is always evil capitalism corrupting the pure government preventing the noble public servants from protecting us all...
Never mind that the regulation that everyone talks about (the brake system) has been shown that even if that regulation was in place it would not have applied to this train at all
Never mind that we do not even know what the cause of the derailment was at this point.
It has to be that norfolk southern tried to "squeeze more blood out of this penny" as evil capitalist, and the good pure government could have stopped it if they were just given more power, more money, or more regulation....
Same story over and over again through out time, Authoritarian Statists have no other tale to tell
"Chronic libertarian eaten by bears after no other libertarian neighbors want to pool together for trash service. His last words were 'at least the communists didn't get me'."
Someone would think this is larger than Chernobyl if they were critically uninformed on just how big and stupid Chernobyl was. Burning the contents of the train cars will destroy a lot of the dangerous chemical compounds you originally had. A vast amount of the danger by weight is gone. The biggest issue is determining the dioxin output.
With a nuclear fire that is not the case. When things go out of control you make even more radioactive stuff, and you can't even clean up the mess in the first place without dying and killing all of the equipment that is working on it. It is just an unimaginable disaster that most of us can't fully comprehend.
It's being pretty actively done by politicians on one side. I've seen lots trying to somehow blame Biden for it for example even though it's completely irrelevant.
This is a similar discrepancy between the technical meaning of language as used in statistics, and the popular usage of language as the layperson understands it when they read it in the news as happens with the term "mass shooting".
When a layperson hears "train derailment" they think of what happened in Ohio. When a layperson hears "mass shooting" they think of what happened at Uvalde.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a train derailment is ANY time a train has a wheel that goes off of the track which is not part of a planned maintenance. These are rarely catastrophic.
In actuality, as far as the statistics are concerned, a mass shooting is ANY time a shooting has more than 3 victims, regardless of location. 99% of these are gang shootings in the inner city, in the 1.3% of US counties that make up 90% of all violent crimes. Arguably, these are always catastrophic, but the cause/solution/surrounding issues are vastly different than the popular topic.
As usual, technical language used in the media is misconstrued and misunderstood by non-technical reporters and lay audiences.
Most derailments are in train yards. Few cause injuries, fewer cause deaths, and only a handful involve hazardous substances. I don't say that to downplay the mess in OH/PA, but just to make sure the base-rate is understood.
And if you want to compare to europe it looks like US freight rail volume is at least 6x as large. Also no idea if/how they count "fender bender" derailments in switching yards. US standard is >$12k in damage according to TFA.
A couple months ago I watched an amateur train nerd on youtube cover a derailment that dumped a load of bitumin/tar into a river and destroyed a bridge. This kind of thing happens pretty commonly. No national news covered it, only a couple of local news stations, at least from what I could find on youtube/googling.
It's confusing to me why this specific incident got so much attention.
Link? That sounds like a channel I’d be interested in
And this got the attention it did because it’s far more severe then one load of tar/bitumen in a river - and far more toxic made potentially worse from the choice to. Burn it off to clear the tracks faster
"Wheel off track" is a derailment. Doesn't have to mean a huge wreck and pile-up. Can happen at low speeds. The vast majority aren't that big a deal.
(my dad ended his career in middle-management with a railroad—not Norfolk, but for all I know Norfolk owns the one he worked for now, there was a lot of consolidation—and for a few years he had to travel to derailments in his region, when they happened, and derailments happened somewhat often)
Goddamn I love government websites. A simple form, with clear and common styling, with no place I have to put my email, with no popup about joining a damn mailing list, with no ads, and when I click the submit button, the response is instant and a clear table that doesn't do anything stupid with javascript.
Every time the government spends my tax dollars developing a web page with a form that generates reports, an angel gets it's wings.
How much less than 1000 (my German is pretty rusty)? e.g. 900 vs 1100 is not really statistically different, and doesn't suggest a systemic problem. Especially given the heavy focus on shipping for the US rail network versus passengers in the EU. Tracks in the US that are used for passengers are maintained better than shipping-only tracks, for sure.
I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).
This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.
It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).
The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
EDIT:
Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.
>So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?
You have to take in a much larger number of factors than that.
The railroad industry is currently pushing their new just in time paradigm which has been leading to attempted strikes in the US (Uncle Joe says no) by the railroad workers. The railroad operators are pushing for longer trains, less engineers per train, and less inspection time per car while also playing computerized shipping optimizations that put the number of 'hazards' on a train just below the regulated minimum number of cars so they don't have to declare it.
It's just ironic that this incident that got national news happened so quickly after the railroad co's got their no right to strike validated. It looks like it could very well be their undoing.
How does this compare to Europe, or the rest of the world? I can spot numbers like 'every other day' in Europe, but getting comparables is proving difficult. Given the different nature of the tracks, usage, and geography, it may be difficult to draw a meaningful comparison anyway.
I do see that the rates are broadly similar between Canada and the US, which is not a surprise but does suggest a correlation.
Most derailments are completely uneventful. The train just barely goes off the tracks and slows to a stop, remaining completely upright. I've heard from people that they were on a passenger train that derailed and didn't even know it until the conductor told them.
Why isn't the EPA offering trailers outside of town to any worried residents?
News reports indicate that people seem to be being poisoned in their homes and staying because they have no other place to go.
Edit: Jeesh, of course I mean "why aren't the Feds overall offering trailers". I get the impression the EPA is currently organizing the remediation but that's a side-issue, darn it.
I'd say FEMA are best known for responding to emergencies, and not poisoning people who have stayed in temporary accommodation far longer than it was intended for
I have read that the governor of the state isn't requesting much in the way of federal assistance, and hasn't yet declared a state of emergency, which may or may not be a prerequisite for such federal action.
That being said, it seems to me that the entire situation is being used as a political football, which makes things murky. What everyone seems to agree on is that the residents on the ground are not getting the assistance they need.
"Hasn't yet"? You do realize that things have completely dispersed at this point and the very transient burn was weeks ago right? The event is long over.
What types of assistance would require action at a federal scale? it seems like a pretty manageable problem at the state level.
It seems like there is a huge outcry that "something must be done" without really examining what that something would be or reviewing what is already being done.
Do people have shelter or need it ?
Do people have access to medical care or need more?
Money. Most states have very little funding for emergency recovery, so it's routine to use a federal emergency declaration to authorize federal funding. In general with civil emergencies, the state has the authority but the feds have the money.
The Ohio state budget is 24 Billion dollars. I think they could come up with a million dollars or two to cover housing and transportation for those that want it. We are talking about a small number of people here. If every family wanted to stay away, they could give $10,000 to each for with 0.1% of the state budget.
I would assume most of those funds ($24B) are already allocated to various programs. The US Federal government OTOH has departments and funds set aside for such larger scale unexpected disasters. Let's also not forget the infinite money printer.
It was not obvious to me. You clearly said one thing calling out the EPA in an thread about the EPA. How am I supposed to infer you didn't mean the EPA.
That's FEMA's role, but otherwise that's a damn good question. Yes the company that caused the mess should rightly be on the hook for cleaning it up, but there's still a need for federal disaster assistance.
> Before the bankruptcy filing, J&J faced costs from $3.5 billion in verdicts and settlements, including one in which 22 women were awarded a judgment of more than $2 billion, according to bankruptcy court records.
Around the same time as the LTL shenanigans, on 2022-09-14 J&J announced a $5billion stock buyback[0]. It's not that J&J didn't have the money which led them to do the "Texas two-step" and push liability to their soon-to-declare-bankruptcy LTL subsidiary. They just wanted to line their pockets with the money instead. Isn't that pleasant.
None of this strikes me as nefarious. The point of the bankruptcy filing wasn’t to bilk creditors. It was to get them all equal payouts instead of a bunch of random jury-dependent judgment amounts.
The problem with doing something illegal is that the consequences of your actions include having to pay out a bunch of random jury-dependent judgement amounts.
Great, if you’re in the first random set of plaintiffs who get billions of dollars. Not so great if you’re a later plaintiff when the money’s all gone and the company is bankrupt for real.
The thing that protects them is limited liability, as it does many corporations. They can only lose everything the company has, and not more. If you, random HNer, have some holdings of this railroad in your stock portfolio, they cannot come after you for millions. Thus stock ownership is safe for non-billionaires.
Bankruptcy, rather — the serious kind — erases all ownership, sells the company off to new owners, and pays outstanding debts with the proceeds, in order of priority. This tends to result in more paid debts than an uncontrolled shutdown; fewer people want to buy a stopped business and it can’t make much money.
The thing that really protects them is refusal to use anti-trust law to break these large uncompetetive monopolies up. A signal is when these companies begin to engage in massive stock repurchase programs.
Returning money to investors is great, whether it’s buybacks or dividends. It’s the core purpose of a company. The primary alternative is growing the bigcorps ever bigger, more powerful, and dangerous. Ever-expanding bloated conglomerates.
The good argument against buybacks is that companies tend to do it when the stock is high, and that’s bad for the shareholders.
I feel like there’s probably a more meaningful counterpoint to be presented here than a legal document which describes the purpose of J&J as, quote, “to engage in any activity within the purposes for which corporations may be organized under the New Jersey Business Corporation Act.”
Do you have a document stating that J&J's purpose is to buy back stocks?
As it stands, I have a legal document under penalty of perjury that says their purpose is to do business as allowed by NJ. And you _just_ have a statement made by yourself without penalty that their purpose is to return money to investors.
Sure, my document doesn't say they can't do buybacks. But to say the document calls it their purpose is highly misleading.
Stock buybacks are economically equivalent to paying dividends, but they’re less costly from a tax perspective. Are dividends also to be banned? If so, what is even the purpose of a company, and who would possibly invest in a it knowing that it can’t pay any returns?
Buybacks don’t interfere with public ownership. They just boost the share price. Any member of the public who wants to remain a shareholder just… doesn’t sell his shares.
If buybacks and dividends are the same thing, then why even allow both to exist? Just eliminate buybacks and enjoy the higher tax revenue. And maybe also accompany it with a tax cut on dividends to even things out slightly. We want companies to become more efficient and increase productivity, but we also want society to benefit from that in the form of higher tax revenue. Eliminating buybacks accomplishes both.
Buybacks juice earnings per share. Stock valuation uses P/E ratio as an input. Meaning buybacks disproportionately benefit upper management, whose compensation is tied to the stock price. There's a principal agent problem here. Management may elect to do a buyback even if it's not in the company's best interest. Dividends don't have that problem.
I suspect your question is rhetorical but I, and quite a few other Marxists, would say yes. Dividends, stock buybacks and other types of profit should be banned.
My issue is with the concentrated control of where the surplus value goes, I see the existence of dividends & stock buybacks as more of a side-effect of the system than a core-problem.
They could always just not do it. The release says that if this happens, the gov will do it instead and "compel" NS to pay them triple the cost, but I don't really see that happening, given that they just "compelled" the rail workers union to not strike against them.
I'm hopeful that they will just clean it up, but this is a massive corporation owned by hedge funds we're talking about. The rules don't apply to them.
Bankruptcy protects the corporate entity, but not shareholder equity.
That is, shareholders can lose all equity claims. But that doesn’t mean destroying the business. It can be sold off to new shareholders and then sale proceeds used to make creditors whole.
This is a completely broken system though. These cleanup fees should be paid for during the waste generation. Just being allowed to pollute everything and then paying out the owners and declaring bankruptcy leaving it to the tax system to clean up is nonsensical.
When "the system" is working properly, hazardous waste is contained and disposed of appropriately, and sites don't become polluted. The Superfund program exists to remediate situations where that system failed.
in cases like that: if the owners are still around (meaning: not deceased) the courts should be able to pierce the corporate veil and go after the directors for unlimited amounts
Sorry that's not how this works. These organizations bring in a few handfuls of middle wage jobs. If they eventually pollute the site and move to Mexico to save $0.11 a unit, that's my successor's problem
i remember getting a little flyer on my doorknob. 'the soil here is toxic. wear shoes when walking outside. dont attempt to grow food. otherwise its all good. really.'
Glad to see this, and if Norfolk Southern goes bankrupt, all assets go to the cleanup and high level execs are changed or are forced to pay the difference.
Also, with this being in Ohio, I hope people in Ohio realize how valuable the EPA is and stop voting for people who want to cut every Gov Program except for Defense.
I'm really hoping the residents and rail workers realize they need to come together for this common cause. Unfortunately, busting the rail strike as both parties did only contributes to this problem in a major way. Nobody is coming to save us. These issues can only be resolved with people coming together in collective action.
As a side note, i hope they go bankrupt and we expropriate them. Railroads are too important to leave largely to the private sector. Our rail infrastructure compared to really any developed nation is abysmally sad.
Essentially, the US government undermaintained the railroads (the modern public transit scourge of "deferred maintenance" practiced a hundred years ago). It ran the railroads with a more or less single-minded mindset to supplying war goods, and after the war was over, kept a heavy touch on the railroads which made them unable to adapt to the increasing competition from heavily-subsidized highways and airlines, which combined with the headache of "deferred maintenance" meant that railroads suffered from about 1920 to 1980. (It wasn't until the failure of Penn Central that things really started getting better.)
According to the wikipedia article, Conrail actually inherited a terrible maintenance situation when the railroads bankrupted and were nationalized. Conrail then proceeded to manage maintenance and got things profitable.
It was doing just fine when Reagan decided to privatize for some reason.
Nationalizing actually fixed the situation so I don't kmow where you got the impression that it made things worse
I'm talking about nationalization during WW1. Conrail didn't nationalize all the railroads (which did happen during WW1), just the bankrupt Penn Central.
Yeah. The Wikipedia page isn't all that great on this topic; I'm going off of my recollections from the book American Railroads, although it's been a few decades since I last read it.
It used to be any railroad that wanted to carry US Mail, so all of them, was required to hitch at least one passenger car onto their trains. The railroad executives insisted that this was so burdensome it would put them out of business so the law was changed. But before that change you could take a train to literally anywhere in the USA where freight trains go, which is basically everywhere including many small towns.
E.B. White wrote a marvelous essay on the subject called The Railroad.
Our rail infrastructure is abysmal. Nationalizing it is perhaps not the way to go, but a serious change needs to happen. Speaking as a former Ohioan who grew up in the Ohio river valley.
Japan privatized their railway in the early 90s. It's really good. This is not an endorsement of privatization just a counterpoint to the argument of national vs privatized transport systems. What it means is leadership and management has to be truly held accountable.
Worth pointing out that a major part of why it works in Japan is that rail companies also own real estate around stations. High foot traffic allows them to charge high rent to stores.
This is also the business model for the private rail in Hong Kong, Singapore, and now Florida with Brightline.
The Brightline model is surprising because it shouldn't work. Miami and Orlando aren't well thought of for there public transit systems. Yet, this premium intercity train is expanding. I'm not convinced they are profitable as a train, but they own the property around downtown train stations which is really hot right now.
A classic example of this strategy being used in the past 10-20 years outside of the US is the UK's NHS.
It's been slowly crippled, putting more and more pressure in the system, and eventually the solution to be proposed when the system finally collapses through malicious maladministration will be to privatise it.
If this idea were completely backwards, there would be no way to tell the difference from what you’ve suggested. In fact, there isn’t even a basic counterexample that holds without predominant confounding factors.
In other words, unfortunately, this is theory is a non-falsifiable conspiracy theory.
Edit: It is rather validating when poking a pet theory produces a negative yet non-substantive response. Sure, go on believing in fairies and yeti. Best of luck to your children.
I'd like to see your rebuttal to this book, genuinely [1].
Edit: also this op-ed contains some more examples of the process going on [2].
Please, refrain from name-calling and instead point exactly where I'm wrong on what you so called a "conspiracy theory". It's a baseless comment and you haven't provided me anything to look further.
Merely pointing out that a theory for attacking the system exists is not equivalent to attacking the system; you have to assume malicious intent. There is no way to differentiate merely scarce resources from supposedly adversarial depletion. This market is fixed. Abject failure is indistinguishable from success, in any form. You are merely saying, “I assume you are malicious,” which is a premise—not a conclusion. The same phenomenon exists with the Piven-Cloward opponents. There’s no ‘name-calling’ here. The point stands on itself.
To prove malicious intent without doubt would require me to have access to the minds of the perpetrators of a plan. I don't have such access, I do have access to their intentions through an agenda document and their further actions afterwards in government, such a plan would not be presented as malicious so I can only derive its intents from their agenda and actions to the results in reality.
The results in reality is a system that has not coped with its usage, one such example is presented in the op-ed article I shared on [2] which states that McKinsey was commissioned to provide a report which they concluded there would be less need of nurses, which was false, that report was used to reduce the budget for nurses which as a result caused further reduction in force of nurses as they quit because of lower pay. I can only derive that it's malicious since the report is wrong and no action was taken to correct the government's actions when reality hit. The same op-ed links to another analysis with this exact question [0].
> “In other words we didn’t have enough nurses before to provide a high quality service? Ah!” said John Humphrys in shocked tones - as if this was a revelation the BBC’s flagship news programme had never heard before.
> But the BBC failed to ask the key question – why were all the warning signs about nurse shortages, ignored?
> After all, NHS chiefs and ministers had been warned clearly for years that there would be a shortage of nurses, as a result of David Cameron’s coalition government cutting training places for nurses and doctors from 2010 onwards. From 2010 through to 2013 the numbers of nursing places commissioned at universities in England were cut by 12.7% – resulting in 2500 fewer places. In 2012 experts warned that this would result in a “disaster” in two or three years. In all, the 2010 cutbacks (reversed only relatively recently) meant that around 8000 fewer nurses were coming into the system.
Can you point me to any counterpoint to this where the government's actions align to a non-malicious plan to actually help the system, as misaligned as that plan might be? Because every action I can find points to a plan where the system is put under further struggle without giving a good reason why it is sensible to, for example, train less nurses when they were advised by NHS chiefs and specialists they will require more. You can't say that ignoring your chief specialists is not malicious.
You might have got more traction had you provided at least one alternative explanation, or at least provided more detail as to why you believe the given explanation to be non-falsifiable.
It seems obvious to me that it would be falsifiable by looking at a statement like "putting more and more pressure on the system" and seeing if that has actually been happening.
I think you’re overestimating the cost of this cleanup by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude. Vinyl chloride is not particularly toxic, has low environmental persistence, and does not bioaccumulate.
Well, yes. But there was also several tank cars of acrylic ester that were breached and whose contents are now on the way into the groundwater. Anyone whose water is from a private well is not to be envied.
I take you have never handled acrylic esters - the stuff smells distressing, it's likely a sensitizer, and from its reactivity it just can't be good for you.
If I drank private well water in east Palestine I would make sure that contamination was closely monitored and drink bottled water for a while. Drinking water from the tap? Yes I would do that.
wait for the civil suits for all the animal die offs for ag industry, and medical bills from exposure... then tell us how cheap it will be. I hope they end up in Jail.
The medical costs alone should be an eye popping number.
Its going to be interesting to see the interplay between infrastructure/healthcare/environmental regulations with this completely preventable, entirely foreseeable accident over the coming years.
What medical costs? The town has ~4000 residents. If they pay for several doctors visits and checkups, we are talking about a couple million dollars.
They could cover health insurance for the entire town for a similar cost per year.
Replacing the train is likely to be more expensive.
The real cost will probably be environmental testing and remediation. Even if there isn't an big impact, it will take a lot of money to collect the data to prove it.
I was thinking lifetime costs. Every future case of cancer is going to be looked at and traced back, whether it's known to be directly attributable to the event or not. This is just a huge (un)natural experiment.
Which animal die offs? Like I said, vinyl chloride has very poor environmental and biological persistence. Any die off of livestock that was going to happen would have happened 2 weeks ago.
Fines need to start being paid in company stock, its the only thing companies are beholden to. Everything else is just a price to wreck havoc.
The more the company purposefully puts people in danger, the more nationally owned they are. Especially when it comes to infrastructure like this.
"Sorry, you've been nationalized due to your continued efforts in proving you cannot be trusted". Fines large enough to matter would arguably hurt infrastructure and safety. Start taking shares.
This doesn't really make sense. If the company owes more in fines than it's worth, existing shareholders get nothing and the company belongs to its creditors. If it owes large amounts to the government, those claims convert into ownership too.
Rather than converting the liquid operating budget into paid fines, it converts the shares retained by the company.
A company this big doesn't need to sell shares to get operating capital. This should apply to any company that does stock buybacks to inflate stock price, rather than reinvesting into their company, employees, etc.
Depending on the details, this is the same as charging a fine in money or it's worse.
Say the company is worth $1B and has 10M shares that are trading at $100 each. Now there's an accident that will lead to a $100M fine. This get priced in, the value of the company is now $900M, and the stock goes to $90/share. Whether they send $100M to the government in cash or by issuing 11M shares, either way the stock price stays at $90 and investors are equally affected.
On the other hand, if the amount of the fine is higher than the value of the company you'd much rather be a creditor than a shareholder, since in bankruptcy the stock goes to zero.
Oh I'm aware, this is more a general idea for "too big to fail" companies in general. Our infrastructure is rotten and often privatized. No one has the funds and ability to hold companies like this accountable except for the federal government.
Look at Steven Donzinger. He reported on toxic spills by Chevron in Nicaragua that poisoned indigenous water supplies. Chevron hired a private prosecutor and found a judge in their favor to force him into house arrest(for over a year) for not supplying a document.
Large corporations have the cards stacked in their favor.
It's almost like we shouldn't allow companies to grow so large, and that a company being larger than most countries doesn't provide any benefit to the consumer.
"Can" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do not find it a credible threat, and doubt any of these companies do either. Perhaps one could argue that the 2008-2009 TARP handling of some banks or automobile manufacturers was a "light nationalization", as the US took control of _some_ stock of the affected companies. (This stock was later sold off for a profit.) But other than that, and _maybe_ the creation of the TSA in 2001, there isn't a nationalization in my living memory.
The nationalization of railroads under Wilson lasted from December 1917 to March 1920. During this time, operation (including expansion and maintenance) of all railroads was organized by the federal government. When the nationalization was repealed in 1920, the US paid rail companies for lost profits.
This is a great idea. And I like the idea of fines being X% shares outstanding, not X dollars as that proportionally penalizes shareholders for not being good corporate owners. It's a win in so many ways.
This probably doesn’t do the thing you want it to do
1) if there is a demand to have something, it usually raises price of that thing. You could interpret this as a forced buyback, which may raise prices of shares (and thus reward bad behavior)
2) what does the govt do with the stock after it has the stock? It doesn’t have a system for processing it, as it does with USD
Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders? In the future they’ll think twice about investing in companies that cut corners to juice short term gains
"Also, why shouldn’t you penalize shareholders? In the future they’ll think twice about investing in companies that cut corners to juice short term gains"
That creates an incentive structure for regulators to fine valuable companies and to do no harm to their long term value. It’s the opposite incentive structure you want in regulators.
I wonder if expanding our definition of defense would help...EPA defends the air and water and other public sources from things that will harm the environment and us. Literally has "protection" in the name. Maybe we think it's only protecting the "environment" and that we are separate from the environment.
I think the left usually has very weak messaging (as opposed to the right which has strong messaging but is sometimes just blatantly false).
Maybe you could call voters to action by saying we need to “protect our -lands-“ (stronger ring than air or water) or even better, “protect our -people- from having to live in a toxic environment”.
In my experience, conservatives care way more about the environment than anyone. They are the people who live, hunt, hike, farm, fish in the woods. The average conservative farmer/hillbilly has a much more personal connection with "the environment" than the average urban liberal.
But all things environment became associated with the left, so republicans have to reject it as a matter of course.
I think we need one good advertising campaign to seriously change people's minds. Something like, "Be a good steward of God's green earth". If we spoke their language, it would click.
I agree with both of you. I talked with a friend about this a while back and it seemed that so much of the language about climate change focused on evoking fear of apocalypse, and overlooked so many other emotions related to the environment. I wondered what it'd look like if instead of showing photos of ducks in oil, we talked about what pristine nature looks like, feels like smells like. Crystal clear waters, creeks one can drink from, etc. Maybe the combination. Something pulling on other emotions besides just terror.
The EPA wasn't looking like they were gonna do much until the situation was so fucked, or at least fucked looking, that there were potential political brownie points to be earned crapping on their inaction at which point they cleaned up their act and did something.
Environmental protection has been a very mixed bag for middle America over the past ~60yr. This disaster is doing anything but endearing the EPA to the people of Ohio or Middle America generally. I think at best it's a lateral move.
Why would high level execs be forced to pay a difference? They are ultimately just employees. Does a senior software engineer get forced to pay a difference when a critical error results in damages to an end user?
Why defense? If someone seriously attacked the USA, Ohio would be one of the last places they would go for. It would be the Democrat states like CA and NY that would be hit first. You would think they would be in favor of having less defense so those liberals in CA can be taken out.
There is no credible threat of invasion of the mainland US, even with a much smaller military, so the difference in threat to CA/NY vs Ohio is pretty small. And, at any rate, Defense budget support is more due to economic implications of bases/contractors in the states/districts of people in congress and military worship/nationalism in the US than it is any sort of logical assessment of threats.
> Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources.
So, the EPA isn't going to identify which soils and waters were contaminated? This is going to be like a pharmaceutical company running their own safety trials. "Nothing to see here."
The order states that Norfolk is paying for this, but the EPA is supplying the contractors.
> Identify and clean up contaminated soil and water resources.
> Reimburse EPA for cleaning services to be offered to residents and businesses to provide an additional layer of reassurance, which will be conducted by EPA staff and contractors.
> Attend and participate in public meetings at EPA’s request and post information online.
> Pay for EPA’s costs for work performed under this order.
The problem is that the EPA has no credibility. They demonstrably lied after 9/11 about the air quality in Manhattan. Maybe you could say that it was a necessary lie to encourage people to clean up, join the rescue effort, get back to work, etc. But now why should I trust the EPA to not lie about Palestine? All of the same arguments for a good lie apply. The people in charge today are only going to worry about the immediate short term risk, and definitely will not care about long term risk- by the time you get cancer, they will have been long out of power.
I'd like to see the head of the EPA, the transportation secretary, the executive team at NS, and anybody in the Biden administration who was involved in blocking the rail workers from striking move into East Palestine and live there, with their children.
Don't want to do that because it isn't safe? Then buy these people all new homes. We can start the bidding at $1M per household.
I cannot overstate the fury that I feel watching this unfold. The people living in small midwestern towns, the type of town where I grew up, and where my family lives, are not disposable, and their lives matter exactly as much as the peoples lives who live on Martha's Vinyard, or any other rich enclave.
Can you imagine a tanker load of toxic chemicals spilling into the neighborhood around one of Biden's homes? Or on Mar A Lago? Do you think there would be this much feet dragging about cleaning it up?
It is further demoralizing to watch our President on a tour of Ukraine, giving away tens of billions of dollars to fight a proxy war, when we are having citizens of this country lose their homes to an industrial disaster. No acceptable. If there is money to fund a proxy war, then there is money to make the people in East Palestine whole.
I'm from the Northeast Ohio area, and also from a small town like East Palestine. The lack of response from Governor DeWine and malice to not declare a state of emergency is infuriating.
Vote democrat and only see the elite placate the working class. Vote republican and see unions and the facade of environmental protections decimated even further.
The fact this isn't covered in NYT or headlines on cable TV is insane. How is this unprecedented disaster affecting a major watershed not higher urgency than fucking balloons.
> The fact this isn't covered in NYT or headlines on cable TV is insane
Seriously, where is this idea coming from? Search the NYT, there's been coverage of the incident almost every day since it happened - not just the incident and its causes, but also on potential environmental fallout and meta-coverage of journalism and conspiracies around the whole thing. Many times it's been the top-line headline, at least when I am logged in.
I've seen continuous coverage on NPR, in fact the subject of this post is the current top headline on npr.org.
Every time I've been at a relative's who watches MSNBC I hear it brought up at least once during news hour.
My local paper a couple hundred miles away, despite thin coverage these days, has even had articles about what/any impact the fire has in our region.
The only event I've seen the has had anywhere close to the amount of coverage is the Turkey - Syria earthquake, which is a global level natural disaster that's killed 46,000 people and counting. I think that rightfully deserves coverage as well.
What national outlets are you following that you haven't seen coverage of this?
Yeah, they did an equally convincing photo op this time too. OhioEPA forgot to crop out the bottle of smartwater when they claimed to drink from the tap... and everyone immediately noticed.
For what it's worth, while we are sending billions of value to Ukraine, we're not literally just sending cash. Many of these things have already been manufactured anyways, the money has already been spent. Might as well use it instead of throwing it away in another decade or two.
It's the same thing with space ships. The probe development cost $565 million, but we're not just launching that money into space. We're paying people and companies that money to produce a probe, which supports our economy and lets us go to space.
note: I'm not trying to draw a comparison in mission goals between a rocket ship to Pluto and funding the war in Ukraine
> It is further demoralizing to watch our President on a tour of Ukraine, giving away tens of billions of dollars to fight a proxy war
Because this made it sound like on this trip he gave them "tens of billions of dollars", that's not correct.
> In his remarks alongside Zelensky, Biden said the United States would provide another half-billion dollars of assistance to Ukraine, including additional ammunition for the artillery systems the United States previously provided.
