Julie did an audio this morning discussing the railway derailment. The written version is below:
Some followers told me they were having trouble listening to the above embedded link on their hand-held devices. However, there were no disruptions when listening on the computer. The original live-feed was from Facebook, so click this link and you should be able to listen to it without any technical issues:
https://www.facebook.com/bookofours/videos/966616180995389/
Written version:
Let’s talk about the Norfolk Southern derailment that took place in East Palestine Ohio. The fact that the name of the town is “Palestine” should not be lost on you. If you follow the horrific stories of abuse that the Palestinians have endured over the years, including forced evacuations from their home, this story of East Palestine Ohio has echoes of this oppression at the hands of a military action. In fact, when we first saw a blip on our Twitter feed that “Palestine had been evacuated” we thought it was yet another new set of abuse and fuckery in Palestine, in the Middle East. But, it happened here, an hour from where we live.
The derailment took place on the border of PA and Ohio about an hour from McKees Rocks, PA where I live currently. East Palestine Ohio residents were told to evacuate on February 5, the day my husband and I were flying back to Pittsburgh from our trip to the southern gulf coast. It’s been said locals say the axel was on fire for up to 20 miles before the derailment finally happened. Yet reports to the operator and engineers were being ignored. An axle or axletree is a central shaft for a rotating wheel or gear. On wheeled vehicles, the axle may be fixed to the wheels, rotating with them, or fixed to the vehicle, with the wheels rotating around the axle.
The reporter who was seized, cuffed, and arrested was for a platform called “News Nation” and the claim is that he was being disruptive at a press conference being given by Ohio governor. The truth is he was probably asking too many probing questions which would have indicated this axle on fire for 20 miles before the derailment was probably an act of sabotage.
Nick Drom – who’s full name is Nick Drombosky lives in Los Angeles but is from Pittsburgh is an engineer who sometimes studies industrial disasters as part of his personal educational pursuits. He’s also from this region and has friends in this town.When his friends reached out to him to ask for his advice on who they could sue and to explain the media wasn’t even covering this story effectively he made a tiktok video describing the derailment, its contents and gave some more pertinent information on the derailment itself.
Keep in mind the evacuation of residents out of East Palestine Ohio has been going on for a week now.
Some of what he discloses and I’ll add my bits to it as well:
The railway that derailed is Norfolk Southern. There is a Norfolk Southern train that runs right through the town I currently live in, McKees Rocks, and it goes through E. Palestine Ohio. In looking at photos of East Palestine Ohio it looks as if it’s the same demographic as McKees Rocks: working class, poorer, one of those forgotten industrial cities.
Five cars that crashed contained vinyl chloride which is used to make PVC pipes. Vinyl chloride is very hazardous and flammable. Although polyvinyl chloride is derived from vinyl chloride it’s a plastic that is used in everything and is virtually harmless. However, vinyl chloride is a carcinogen and one of the most deadly carcingens out there and can cause rapid liver cancer. Vinyl chloride boils at 8 degrees Fahrenheit so it must be shipped in its liquid form; so when the train derailed and the crash occurred, and the vinyl chloride started leaking they weren’t just leaking liquid, they were spewing boiling gas. OSHA claims that during an 8 hour shift, a person can only withstand 1 part per million (one PPM) – now others have argued with Nick saying this part per million calculation is wrong and an individual could withstand as much as 3 parts per million in an 8 hour shift. Either way, one shouldn’t be anywhere near the vicinity of the boiling gas of vinyl chloride which is why the town was evacuated. Prior to this spill in East Palestine Ohio the biggest chemical spill of this nature (vinyl chloride) was in New Jersey where one train car spilled about 23,000 gallons of vinyl chloride but unlike the derailment in East Palestine Ohio, it didn’t catch on fire. Compare this New Jersey crash to the East Palestine derailment, which has 5 tanker train cars which can carry between 25,000 and 33,000 pounds so we’re looking at approximately 250,000 pounds of vinyl chloride and that’s PER TRAIN CAR, so there could be over 1 million pounds of vinyl chloride spilling into the ground, the rivers and boiling off into the atmosphere, the air, the environment. But no one is mentioning that the fact the vinyl chloride catching on fire turns into hydrogen chloride which is a very unstable compound that latches onto water or even water vapor (think, fog) in the atmosphere which then turns into hydrochloric acid. Hydrochloric acid in contact with skin or other tissues can cause chemical burns that can be severe. Hydrochloric acid in the eyes can cause blindness. The severity of the burns depends upon the concentration of the acid and the amount of time it is left in contact with the tissues. It’s an aqueous solution of hydrogen chloride. It is a colorless solution with a distinctive pungent smell. It is classified as a strong acid. It is a component of the gastric acid in the digestive systems of most animal species, including humans. So while the Governors of Pennsylvania and Ohio and the media are saying that burning the vinyl chloride in order to reduce the risk of it, they are burning hundreds of thousands of acid in the air, which can cause further health issues to people as close as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, other parts of Ohio, etc.
Some things to note the responsible party in this disaster , which is unlike any disaster we’ve ever seen, (it’s worse than the Flint water crisis by the way) is Norfolk Southern. They scratched off a check to East Palestine Ohio for $25,000. That is an insult, considering there may be states, counties and other areas within the region that may be effected and essentially evacuated, including mine. The money they should pay out immediately to cover medical costs, relocation costs and other damages should be in the billions and it should be spread out across all the regions. Obviously East Palestine Ohio is the most effected since the derailment occurred right there. Norfolk Southern Railway, local governments and the media will always play down the severity of the toxicity of the situation. Remember when Obama drank the Flint water and said it was fine?
Throughout this covid operation I’ve been pretty consistently talking about what I like to call “Little 9/11” – I’ve even said repeatedly your life will be a series of catastrphic events and 9/11 moments that will seize your pragmatic side, force you into an emotional response and suspend logic. I also said some pretty outlandish things will play out.
Regarding this latest event in biowarfare, because that’s what this derailment is, it’s biolware, was a warning that it was coming. A movie was released on Netflix in the fall of 2022 about a town in some flyover part of the country of Ohio or Pennsylvania that needed to be evacuated due to a train crash that caused a toxic spill in the environment. Rumor has it that some extras in the movie were even from East Palestine Ohio.
I also mentioned that there would be different ways we would continue to see the cannibalization of humans, especially in these poorer communities. The cannibalization we saw in McKees Rocks was in the form of the Damar Hamlin story, where his mother’s daycare center was used as a ruse to cover naked fraud and slush funds for the billionaires, and to play on the emotional nature of local citizens, her son, Damar Hamlin, took a fall in order to pivot him into the role or the face of further health exploitation of athletes for the benefit of stakeholders in the medical industrial complex.
In this particular situation with the derailment, the railway industry has purposefully over time eroded from within. Railroad unions warned that freight trains were understaffed, that job cuts were creating severe safety issues. Corners were cut. Standards were lowered and inspections that failed were allowed to be covered up or worse yet, no inspections were even done to ensure the safety of railway cars carrying toxic and deadly carcinogenic materials. This was done so that the railway industry, like Norfolk Southern, could continue to amass obscene profits and it’s easy to imagine that they paid off officials to get away with it. Who is our current Secretary of Transportation? Pete Buttiegieg. And under his supervision, the The Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) which was created by the Department of Transportation Act of 1966, is one of ten agencies within the U.S. Department of Transportation concerned with intermodal transportation. Who dropped the ball? Who was getting paid to allow this disaster to happen?
The point I’m trying to make here is that there are a series of different events, and crises and horrific accidents or acts of violence that will take place. A series of smaller 9/11’s if you will. On our Friday episode of Footnote we will discuss another horrific event: the brutal murder of a Bay Area pacifist and activist, Jen Angel and what it really means.
In our very first video in early 2020, where we addressed User Nation my husband and I sat in a park in Pittsburgh and I said very clearly, “You’ve been dropped.” I tried to explain that our government has dropped us, ghosted us, broken up with us and through this act of shrugging us off has sort of waged benign war against us. What I was trying to explain is that all systems of protection, all regulatory agencies and all that we’ve become accustomed to that always made sense to us in the last few hundred years in this country, have been released and inverted. A seismic act of benign neglect if you will. We saw this evidenced with the military deployment of bio-weapons and how every safety precaution was simply stamped unnecessary because it all fell under a military operation as opposed to a health response.
For years now I have been repeating over and over again that we will see more acts of random violence, sabotage and benign neglect which will turn things like railway derailments into things like forced evacuations, or military martial law or other examples of fascism in the form of “safety” for the civilian population.
I never in my life thought I may have to be evacuated from my own home, but since we sit only an hour or so from the worst toxic disaster in the history of our country, this is now a very real thing for me personally.
Compounded with the fact that an outdoor cat who we were caring for and who became very attached to us suddenly went missing Friday night and hasn’t returned, and the fact that our pet cat, a small kitten sized, although full grown, cat has stopped eating and is lethargic only adds to my sense of unease.
But as I’ve been saying since the onset of the National Emergency on March 13, 2020, this is what war looks like. We are all becoming casualties of war.
Recommended reading: https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/ignition-monday-february-13-2023
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