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So we're all aware of this thing, and its' possible effects, but I would like to throw in a different viewpoint. I was a firefighter for 32 years and held a Haz Mat respone certification (among a million other certs) and have handled some minor to not so minor transportation problems of haz mat.
Some of my credentials..
First off, the stuff that is being transported, Polyvinyl Chloride is used in everyday industry, most haz mat stuff is, the thing that worried me most was always the shipment of chlorine. This stuff is chilled to where litterally thousands of pounds of it can be transported efficiently, problem is, if the refrigeration fails or the container is compromised, instead of an evacuation area of a 1/4 mile, you are now looking at maybe 3 to 5 miles, depending on the wind direction. One of the problems with methanol, that the transportation industry has to overcome is it cannot be shipped via pipeline, and must be shipped by truck, adding to the cost of it's production, although methanol is a pretty benign haz mat. These are just some of the trransportation challenges of commodities.
The point is, things used by humans in everyday products have to be made someplace, using raw materials that have to be transported. Take a UN/Haz Mat guide with you some time to a railroad crossing, and using the UN transportation number, just read off some of the crap that is being transported.. Cyanide (white rail car with red stripes) Sodium Hydroxide, LPG and other raw materials travel across this country everyday without issue.
Humans at our level, cannot live without the commodities produced by hazardous materials.
So we have this derailment in Ohio that is causing massive issues.. excuse my dark viewpoint, but.. of course it does, that is what hazardous materials do when they are released. The fact that railroads travel in very rural areas leads to some of the issues.
To fight this fire, you would need millions of gallons of water.. all at once. You see, the way fire works, is that it will continue to increase in size until the fuel is burnt, to stop that release of BTUs, you must create a cooling input that will pierce that rate of heat building, and.. keep in mind that some of that input (usually water) will be lost to rapid evaporation, on the way to the fuel that is burning, thanks to the excessive heat. So, you would need, "X" ammount of water (in this case) to overcome that heat production and get ahead of the fire. Keep in mind, you will loose some to evaporation, you will also need to keep a lesser ( flowing) amount of water to continue to cool the metal that is involved to prevent reignition. So you have this incredible amount of water that has to be introduced to this fire.. AT ONE TIME to overcome the fire. To do so sparingly, gets you nowhere, as the heat will eat up the cooling ability piecemeal.
There is nothing that can do that.. There probably are not enough fire hydrants in a rural community to deal with it, not enough lakes, rivers, or means of transportation to get that water where it needs to be. Not going to happen.. but... even if there was, would it improve the situation?
If you were to magically find a way to dump that much water on that fire and extinguish it, would it make things better? sure PVC is buring, it looks nasty with the big cloud and all, but there are other things burning, probably fuel, some other liquids, (for your information railroads stack their cars so that non compatible or reactive materials are not next to each other in the railcars and on the train) so a lot of other stuff is involved, if you were to magically dump...say 2K gallons per minute on that fire and extinguish it, all that runoff would leach into the environment and cause all sorts of environmental problems, many miles away. To be sure, some of this will happen anyway, but it will be a heck of a lot less than dumping tons of water on it, making it even worse. I think those crews are taking the appropriate action, they are allowing, for the most part, the fire it to burn itself out, depleteing most of the haz mat. Yes, it's going into the air, yes the Greta Turdberg types will be squealing about the environmental impact even as they use the very products that are created by this type of material, but that strategy is a sound one. I'm sure the incident commander is under all types of pressure , out side of the incident, to "do something!!" and since it involves the feds they are probably applying their sometimes but not always, but with a political spin input on it as well. But evacuating the locals and letting it burn itslf out, for the most part, is the best way to handle this... messy, but true. I'm tired of seeing this being hammered on both sides in the blame game but it happens. part of the deal, if you don't want to use this stuff then go back to using lead pipe for plumbing in your house...errr oops, uhm,..wait .
This from Fox news...
Quote from article..
"Five railcar tankers of vinyl chloride were intentionally breached; the vinyl chloride was diverted to an excavated trench and then burned off. Areas of contaminated soil and free liquids were observed and potentially covered and/or filled during reconstruction of the rail line including portions of the trench /burn pit that was used for the open burn off of vinyl chloride," the EPA wrote.
Norfolk Southern told WKBN that in the company's initial response at the site, some soil was moved around as workers moved equipment and began cleanup. "We will continue to remediate the site, including the removal of soil, to reach or exceed regulatory standards. Soil taken from the site is moved to a separate site for testing before being safely disposed of," the company said, pointing out that a hazmat team was at the scene within an hour of the incident. "
So exactly what else would you like them to do?
this is EXACTLY how this gets fixed..
In one of the pics above there is a burning fuel barge, caused by a ship collision, in Tampa bay. That fire was "managed". USCG cutters from Port St. Pete were used to fight the fire, but not extinguish it, so a tug could push the barge to a better location, this opened up Port Tampa, saving probably millions of dollars an hour in commerce, it also put the barge in an area of where the environment would be affected less. The fuel was left to burn itself out for the time being to cause less of a problem in cleanup. In the meantime several fire departments, counties, and federal FEMA resources (MacDill AFB)were used to load... get this.. Several fire trucks on military landing craft, stocked with enough foam (at about 4% per gallon of water). So we're talking tons of foam (in 5 gallon containers which had to be carried over the beach) of foam, the fire trucks were loaded so they could pump seawater from the bay (which is why landing craft with drop gates were used, you can only pull a vacuum on a fire engine from 10 feet of lift, 20 feet of length to attain the pumps rated gallon per minute (usually 1250 to 2K, and more length/height results in less GPM, something that was really needed).
So you can see, from my statement above all the information which has to be considered in going after sonething like this, and we had the most important part in droves... water, it is huge, and something as simple as ...oops the gates on the landing craft won't let the intake hose close enough to the water, fouls the whole plan. (in fact the only way thousands of gallons of foam containers could be loaded was over the beach hand to hand for hours, the LCVs would continually rotate in for foam and fuel for the trucks).
So IMHO, these guys are doing what they need to do, as long as industry responds to consumer demand there will always be haz mat ,( just like as long as there is a market for illegal drugs there will always be transportation of it) and haz mat is highly regulated, but these accidents will still occaisionally occur, The safest way to transport a lot of haz mat is via pipeline oil, gas and other liquids could easily go from one place to anothe via pipe and people would never know it, pipeling damage rarely occures and usually only where the pipe is exposed. but the greenies, who use haz mat created materials in their daily life EVERY FREAKING DAY always go up in arms over pipe and force this stuff to be transported in a far less safe way such as rail or truck. Then they complain when there is an accident, largely of their own making.
I'm pretty sure Buttigiege is wetting his pants over this and will be the first to condem the strategy used to fight it, mainly because his handlers are not beholden to reality. And really, I shouldn't complain, politicians doing dumb things has provided a decent income for me over all of this time.
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