East Palestine and Vinyl Chloride:How Anti-Strike and Anti-Worker Legislation Led to Toxic Environmental Contamination
On Monday, February 6th, a feathery plume—or black billowing cloud, or toxic air event, whichever you prefer—rose above the 5,000-resident Ohio village of East Palestine. The previous Friday, a preventable train derailment erupted in a half-mile-long trail of fire and black smoke, as multiple cars of flammable material ignited in a fireball that could be seen ten miles away. The derailment is the fault of eastern US rail megacorporation Norfolk Southern, notable for several things to our readers, including attempting to buy Cincinnati’s municipally owned railway, working with the Biden administration and the US Congress to break the organizing efforts of rail workers' unions and force them to accept unsafe staffing ratios and inhumane working hours, making $12.7 billion in revenue last year, and in 2017 successfully lobbying President Trump to repeal a 2015 rule requiring safe braking systems on trains transporting hazardous materials.
To avoid an uncontrolled explosion of vinyl chloride, after the 141-car derailment, Norfolk Southern began an intentional controlled breach and burn of five cars’ worth, or about 150,000 gallons of vinyl chloride, resulting in an emergency evacuation and the colossal black toxic plume. Vinyl chloride is a highly volatile, toxic, and carcinogenic substance, whose byproducts from burning include toxic and irritating phosgene gas and hydrogen chloride, which turns into hydrochloric acid when exposed to water vapor in air, creating acid rains. While vinyl chloride is becoming better known to those following the story, a February 10th letter from the EPA to Norfolk Southern also revealed twenty total rail cars, carrying additional toxic substances including ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, being released into air, surface soil, surface water, and storm drains, and accumulating in trenches that the railroad apparently just built back over.
Many of the substances on the train were volatile and flammable, leading to the initial explosion, and were situated at the tail of the 141-car train. Rail Workers United members have criticized the lengthening of trains since at least 2017. Meanwhile, staffing ratios have dropped. In East Palestine only two workers—one a trainee—were managing a mile and a half train. As train brakes, bearings, and staff are neglected while trains lengthen, we can expect more derailments, as Amit Bose, the Administrator of the Federal Railroad Administration, told Congress last June. Unsurprisingly, these were the exact claims of the striking rail workers.
As footage of dead fish in the waterways hits social media, as residents of East Palestine, suffering with headaches and nausea, wonder what to do with the pittance of $25,000 that Norfolk Southern has offered to the entire town, most people will focus on what appears to be governmental bungling of an environmental disaster. However, the thing to keep in mind here is that this catastrophe was preventable. It isn't an accident or a fluke—just as Flint, Michigan, Deepwater Horizon, or the impact of Katrina were not flukes. Rail workers have repeatedly warned us of the dangers of understaffed trains, some of which carry substances even more dangerous than vinyl chloride. Liquified natural gas, in particular, poses risks to entire cities. According to The Guardian, US trains can run 100 or more tank cars filled with 30,000 gallons of LNG. As Guardian writer Betsy Reed points out, “Just 22 train tank cars filled with LNG hold the same amount of energy as the Hiroshima bomb.” On February 24, 1974, a single tank car in one of these so-called “bomb trains” underwent a BLEVE (boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion) in Waverley, Tennessee. The blast killed six people immediately, with sixteen people dying of their injuries thereafter. The blast destroyed or damaged twenty-six buildings.Such incidents are all the direct consequence of legislators siding with major corporations, developers, and their own financial interests over the health, well-being, and human rights of poor and working people. This will keep happening until we take away their power to make it happen. Keep this in mind next time you hear about a labor strike, the police murder of a protestor, or another step into our global ecological crisis. It will keep happening until we stop it, and we can only do that through mass action.