East Palestine Ohio Train Crash & Poison Gas Plume Megathread
- Thread starter Bassoe
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Because, quite frankly, rail companies don't have much of a long term. Or at least it's little different than the short term. Expansion of the rails is very difficult. A thousand train derailments is likely cheaper (to them) than actually fixing rails. So why not continue in this manner? And then this happens, which is going to be very expensive, except the train companies already planned for this with lobbying. The train company needs to be completely responsible for cleaning this up, just like oil companies are (definitely some iffiness here on actual payment, but you get the idea) for spills.
Triangle Shirtwaist isn't just about lack of regulation. It's also about inadequate punishment for violating the NAP. The wrongful death payouts were way too low: it ought to have beggared them. Then the problem would have been solved.
Regulation does not work, because businesses will buy off the politicians and infiltrate the regulators, as they did here. People look at regulation as a magic wand that just needs the right words and right magician to say them. But you'll almost never get the right words or right magician, the magician will be chosen by the people getting regulated, and the words will be chosen by the regulated company, after the news cycle changes.
Not to mention, that government regulation, even if it is done right, has invisible costs that add up to prevent good. Because every regulator is inclined to say no, as they can't get in trouble for a no, only a yes that leads to bad stuff. These invisible costs adding up is what cause the regulatory capture of companies, as they realize they must use the levers of government to get anything done, they need to control them. The idea that yanking on the leash won't cause the dog to bite back is absurd.
The government's job ought to be coming in after things have gone to shit, and fucking up the company(s) responsible completely. That's it. Trying to predict every possible problem ahead of time, and then trying to prevent them all, is what leads to corporate control of government or government control of corporations, both of are bad (cronyism or socialism), and usually ends up with them working hand in hand, which is the worst.
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Rail companies and their infrastructure double as national defense assets; they aren't going anywhere, no matter how badly run or managed they are.
Best we can hope for is the situation gets bad enough the DoD bitch-slaps the rail companies for compromising national defense readiness with their shit, and forces them to fix things or get their company liquidated.
And how is that an excuse to insurance companies? Few big payouts like that with hazmat accidents and they would have a damn good reason.
If existing rail lines run like shit, no wonder new ones get easily stuck on red tape and have issues with funding.
Especially when they can and probably do jump on the green grifting for extra money.
Why can't they raise prices to fix both problems?
Competition perhaps?
That sounds like a classic lefty excuse. Especially with how rail company problems are pretty damn common all over the world, state, private or hybrid. You would struggle to find more than few countries where rail companies have well functioning hardware and satisfied workers, but finding countries where workers constantly threaten strikes and the hardware is shitty is absolutely easy.
Look, I wish I had the answers for why US rail operations are such a clusterfuck, but the plain fact is the US rail system and mindset around rail transport is vastly different from Europe, and you guys tend to put more...effort and thought into long term rail longevity than we do.
Also, competition in rail is mostly dead in the US, and large parts of the US are under effective rail monopolies who can set prices and schedules without concern for competition in their core regions.
Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Insurance companies do not work the way most people on the ground imagine.
You might think insurance companies want to minimize how much they pay out in claims, f'rex. This jives with your average guy on the street who gets his claims denied for everything, so insurance companies must not like paying, right? In reality, though, it's just the opposite. Because of how the laws work, an insurance company can only collect premiums equal to a small percentage over the cost of all claims, so if they want to maximize profits, they also have to make huge payouts in claims in order to boost the value of that small percentage.
In practice, this means insurance companies love to pay out massive claims to their biggest and most important clients, well in excess of premiums* in order to raise the total claims paid out. Then they can profit by denying everything they can with their small-time customers wanting insurance on their beat-up 20-year-old car while also jacking premiums up to heaven for said rando on the street to subsidize the big companies. Hospitals and medical insurance work on exactly the same principle, which is how we wind up with aspirin costing seven hundred dollars a pill.
*The probability of kickbacks both ways as well as to politicians who regulate this sort of thing, of course, is yes.
Oh do we?
As i said...
Failure to invest has left Britain’s railways in a mess | Letters
Letters: Delays and cancellations are the result of a failure to modernise rail infrastructure, writes Derek Buttivant. Plus Rob Dark on the £8.3bn lost to dividend payments
www.theguardian.com
Poor infrastructure stops France from exploiting alternatives to fuel-guzzling cars, trucks
Although 90% of all goods in France are transported by road compared to the EU average of 75%, more eco-friendly alternatives, like rail and river transport, cannot fully be exploited due to the poor infrastructure currently in place.
www.euractiv.com
Why are Europe’s railways a mess? Our public diagnosis of the problem falls short | EU | Before It's News
Another day, another earnest column in a broadsheet newspaper listing the problems with Europe’s railways – this time it’s Die Zeit. We should fly less, we need more high speed trains, we need more night trains, plans for more have come to nothing, why is infra investment in Germany so slow,...
SNCF Strike & France Train Strike Dates 2024: Info and Best Tips to Survive | France Bucket List
All about train strikes in France February 2024 and top tips: SNCF strike February 2024, TGV strike February, and other French train strike dates
travelfrancebucketlist.com
Most major EU countries have one or both problems too.
It sure seems like it; I think it's because the average Euro uses trains a lot more than the average person in the US.Oh do we?
As i said...
Failure to invest has left Britain’s railways in a mess | Letters
Letters: Delays and cancellations are the result of a failure to modernise rail infrastructure, writes Derek Buttivant. Plus Rob Dark on the £8.3bn lost to dividend paymentsPoor infrastructure stops France from exploiting alternatives to fuel-guzzling cars, trucks
Although 90% of all goods in France are transported by road compared to the EU average of 75%, more eco-friendly alternatives, like rail and river transport, cannot fully be exploited due to the poor infrastructure currently in place.Why are Europe’s railways a mess? Our public diagnosis of the problem falls short | EU | Before It's News
Another day, another earnest column in a broadsheet newspaper listing the problems with Europe’s railways – this time it’s Die Zeit. We should fly less, we need more high speed trains, we need more night trains, plans for more have come to nothing, why is infra investment in Germany so slow,...beforeitsnews.com
SNCF Strike & France Train Strike Dates 2024: Info and Best Tips to Survive | France Bucket List
All about train strikes in France February 2024 and top tips: SNCF strike February 2024, TGV strike February, and other French train strike dates
Most major EU countries have one or both problems too.
Sure problems exist, however alternative routes and companies exist as well in quantity in Europe; not some much in the US. Here we have Amtrak and freight rail, and that's about it, and the freight rail is nearly monopolized as is.
Rail is far more important for freight than passenger transport in sheer scale (and that's with massive shilling by the greens), which is usually done by separate lines anyway because no one wants to spend hours in a train lagging behind some super slow bulk cargo train.
Again, you are idealizing the grass on the other side of the fence.
Some of the mentions have outright state near-monopolies, like France.
And that's ignoring the elephant in the room, namely that rail works best for connecting high density settlements at medium distances, and that's a description only few very specific parts of USA fit, and on top of that some of them have an additional showstopper, namely... political law and order problems that make public transport unpleasant at best and dangerous at worst, which is something that Japan, probably the most famous country when it comes to widespread use of passenger rail, is a counter-example of.
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Many blame the precision scheduled railroading along with cutting costs in maintenance, for such state of matters in a first world nation. Basically, the personnel numbers are cut to minimum or bellow it (it looks great in quarterly report to shareholders), maintenance is often outsourced to a lowest bid contractor (it looks great in quarterly report to shareholders), while tight schedules leave a little slack for any inconvenience.
when your defense after an accident is I was shit at my job for years....that isn't a good defense.
Karmic Acumen
Well-known member
Well isn't this just perfect.
Why do people have such a hard time accepting the existence of objective evil again?
Because once you accept it your left with what are you going to do about it?
Because once it gets bad enough your going to have to go into some very dark places to make it stop.
The entire rail ecosystem is thoroughly fucked up.
The US rail system is primarily used for commercial transport, and is essentially already at capacity. Any rail line being shut down for any substantial period of time doesn't just cost tons of money, it also has a ripple effect that can impact the entire economy.
Large scale replacement and upgrades of the rail infrastructure (which is very much needed) inherently means closing those rail lines to traffic for a substantial period of time. And unlike the US road network, detouring around the under construction part of the rails is effectively impossible.
Then you have the capital costs. Rail lines are expensive. The workforce doesn't currently exist for large scale rail construction in the US at the moment. Nor does the infrastructure to build all of the rail at the needed scale in a reasonable time period at a reasonable cost.
Then you have the regulatory environment. Short of the federal government passing laws that explicitly override state and local regulatory and approval processes and streamline the federal process, you are looking at years of regulatory obstacles before you could even start doing any kind of large scale, substantive, upgrades to the rail network. And note that this assumes that you don't need any new land or right of ways.
Then you have the next big issue. Upgrading the trains themselves. Not the engines, but all of the cars. That is another massive infrastructure project to build the facilities to make the needed number of train cars in a reasonable time period.
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In terms of lawsuits, those have their own issues. In this case, who ordered the burn? Legal responsibility for that decision isn't on the rail company, it's on whatever government authorities decided to order it. That won't let them wholesale avoid liability, but it will let them avoid a good chunk of it (I'm not conversant enough in the relevant legalities to be any more specific than that).
Then you have the liability for the accident itself. That, to a large extent, depends on what specifically caused the derailment. An issue with the tracks means the rail owners as opposed to the train owners are more liable. Except if the government inspectors/certifiers had certified that the rails met or exceeded all relevant legal standards then it gets a lot harder to make liability stick to the corporation; at the very least, negligence gets a hell of a lot harder to prove.
But lets say that you get a class action lawsuit (which you should) and that a settlement is refused and that a jury finds the company liable. Realistically speaking, the damages in this case will exceed their ability to pay. Insurance policies have a cap on how much they will cover, and that will easily be exceeded. Assuming a badly structured corporation so that a lawsuit can actually get at the underlying corporate assets/wealth, you will get a bankruptcy. The assets will be bought at relatively distressed prices and life will go on. The lawyers will pocket a lot of money, the government will get a lot more of it in fines/their own lawsuits, and whatever is left will end up shared out amongst everyone with a claim (which is potentially a substantial chunk of the US population).
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If you really want to fix US infrastructure, any of it, then you need to get Congress to act. And not just in appropriating money, but in actively interfering in state and local regulatory regimes.
The very first step? Establish a federal permitting and environmental impact assessment process that explicitly overrides and bars any state or local interference and explicitly bars the federal government from revoking an issued permit without first going through a long and difficult process. Oh, and explicitly puts a time limit on how long the federal government has to render a decision with a failure to meet that deadline automatically granting approval.
Because right now? Any kind of infrastructure project is going to require local approval, state approval, and federal approval. And anything that crosses jurisdictions? You need approval from every involved jurisdiction, each with their own idiosyncratic process and their own time scale.
As a general rule, any kind of infrastructure project will spend longer in the regulatory approval process then it will take to construct. And that's without accounting for the expected lawsuits.
The US rail system is primarily used for commercial transport, and is essentially already at capacity. Any rail line being shut down for any substantial period of time doesn't just cost tons of money, it also has a ripple effect that can impact the entire economy.
Large scale replacement and upgrades of the rail infrastructure (which is very much needed) inherently means closing those rail lines to traffic for a substantial period of time. And unlike the US road network, detouring around the under construction part of the rails is effectively impossible.
Then you have the capital costs. Rail lines are expensive. The workforce doesn't currently exist for large scale rail construction in the US at the moment. Nor does the infrastructure to build all of the rail at the needed scale in a reasonable time period at a reasonable cost.
Then you have the regulatory environment. Short of the federal government passing laws that explicitly override state and local regulatory and approval processes and streamline the federal process, you are looking at years of regulatory obstacles before you could even start doing any kind of large scale, substantive, upgrades to the rail network. And note that this assumes that you don't need any new land or right of ways.
Then you have the next big issue. Upgrading the trains themselves. Not the engines, but all of the cars. That is another massive infrastructure project to build the facilities to make the needed number of train cars in a reasonable time period.
---
In terms of lawsuits, those have their own issues. In this case, who ordered the burn? Legal responsibility for that decision isn't on the rail company, it's on whatever government authorities decided to order it. That won't let them wholesale avoid liability, but it will let them avoid a good chunk of it (I'm not conversant enough in the relevant legalities to be any more specific than that).
Then you have the liability for the accident itself. That, to a large extent, depends on what specifically caused the derailment. An issue with the tracks means the rail owners as opposed to the train owners are more liable. Except if the government inspectors/certifiers had certified that the rails met or exceeded all relevant legal standards then it gets a lot harder to make liability stick to the corporation; at the very least, negligence gets a hell of a lot harder to prove.
But lets say that you get a class action lawsuit (which you should) and that a settlement is refused and that a jury finds the company liable. Realistically speaking, the damages in this case will exceed their ability to pay. Insurance policies have a cap on how much they will cover, and that will easily be exceeded. Assuming a badly structured corporation so that a lawsuit can actually get at the underlying corporate assets/wealth, you will get a bankruptcy. The assets will be bought at relatively distressed prices and life will go on. The lawyers will pocket a lot of money, the government will get a lot more of it in fines/their own lawsuits, and whatever is left will end up shared out amongst everyone with a claim (which is potentially a substantial chunk of the US population).
----
If you really want to fix US infrastructure, any of it, then you need to get Congress to act. And not just in appropriating money, but in actively interfering in state and local regulatory regimes.
The very first step? Establish a federal permitting and environmental impact assessment process that explicitly overrides and bars any state or local interference and explicitly bars the federal government from revoking an issued permit without first going through a long and difficult process. Oh, and explicitly puts a time limit on how long the federal government has to render a decision with a failure to meet that deadline automatically granting approval.
Because right now? Any kind of infrastructure project is going to require local approval, state approval, and federal approval. And anything that crosses jurisdictions? You need approval from every involved jurisdiction, each with their own idiosyncratic process and their own time scale.
As a general rule, any kind of infrastructure project will spend longer in the regulatory approval process then it will take to construct. And that's without accounting for the expected lawsuits.
Scooby Doo
Well-known member
They aren't defense assets. They are useful, yes. But just calling infrastructure a defense asset is a bad idea that leads to future problems, and screams of a lead up to nationalization to me.
As for who is liable, IMO even if it was a genuine accident despite using the best of safety equipment, the railcar ought to be presumptively liable (though if you want to say the owner of the chemicals or the rail road owner, that's fine by me). This ensures that the moral hazard is always there, unless they can prove a different person caused the problem (i.e. a terrorist or another company). This preserves moral hazard and ensures that unavoidable risks are accounted for on balance sheets.
DarthOne
☦️
Alleged image from the Ohio area; seems that Norfolk Southern is going for the Pfizer method. You cannot interact with them unless you first sign away your rights and hold them blameless.
Infuriating Ohio Train Update: Officials Buried Critical Health Risks Until After Residents Returned
flagandcross.com
Biden Admin Rejects Ohio's Request For Disaster Aid After Toxic Train Derailment
dailycaller.com
Infuriating Ohio Train Update: Officials Buried Critical Health Risks Until After Residents Returned
Infuriating Ohio Train Update: Officials Buried Critical Health Risks Until After Residents Returned
The train that derailed in Ohio was carrying even more hazardous chemicals than authorities initially realized.
flagandcross.com
Biden Admin Rejects Ohio's Request For Disaster Aid After Toxic Train Derailment
Biden Admin Rejects Ohio’s Request For Disaster Aid After Toxic Train Derailment
The Biden Administration turned down Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine's request for federal disaster assistance after a train derailment in East Palestine.
dailycaller.com
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Look, I'm not sure anything short of nationalizing large amounts of the rail infrastructure, and putting it directly under the Corp Of Engineers ability to order work on at will, will unfuck the US rail network as is.
It's just that bad now.
Yep! For such a critical part of your country's infrastructure, it's a goddamn decaying, decrepit mess.
However, it's just a symptom of a far greater problem: US infrastructure on the whole, and that includes banking systems, is at least thirty, forty years behind everyone else. It's all decaying and obsolete.
DarthOne
☦️
The price of being an Empire that cares more about foreign nations and peoples instead of its own. Well that and having a political class that is badly out of touch with reality.