>

Yeah and the winds shifted north so they are scrambling to see who is in what danger.
You can thank the railroads for cutting a lot of the jobs for track inspectors. Many of the jobs of car inspectors have also been slashed. Rail cars are being used without proper inspection and the same with the tracks. Derailments are up across the board because of this. Train lengths are in many cases double and in some triple of what they were. This causes very long waits at crossings, if an emergency vehicle is waiting, people can and will die. All of this because hedge funds decided 10 billion a year profit is not enough. 
Best wishes to everyone involved. >

It pisses me off so much that there will be zero meaningful repercussions for the corporate executives and the company for this.
We will eventually find out that the cause of this will be some combination of deferred maintenance to save a buck, increased time pressure on crews due to a lack of staffing and a pressure on crews to not report minor things for cost and scheduling reasons.
All of which will tie back to the management setting policy and incentives to only favor shareholder profit over everything.
And no executives will go to jail. At worst the company gets a fine that's less money than they've saved doing all this >

Thanks to sleepy Joe. >

Thanks to Wall Street owning the railroads and using priority loading with trains too long for their sidings with ever dwindling crews. Totally the fault of a geriatric former Delaware senator and vice president. Yep. >

I live about 20 miles away from there and they were telling us to shelter in place earlier because the wind picked up and shifted toward us. These mother fuckers quite literally said “the air isn’t toxic, but you will likely experience lung irritation”. Like, dude, that’s a symptom of air toxicity. Best part: it’s supposed to rain tomorrow and the air pressure is keeping that cloud from rising. I’ve heard people recommending sge150 masks for this shit. We may be fucked over here. >

Good luck, like I don’t even know what to say to somebody in this situation. There are like so many people who can’t just like get away from the toxic air so there’s just gonna be a bunch of people who have to deal with their lungs bleeding or whatever? I am very sorry that you live near this and I really hope that nobody has any long lasting effects from this. >

What they lit up was vinyl chloride and some other chemicals. One of the burn products of those chemicals they torched releases phosgene gas, used as a chemical weapon in WW1, which is just casually floating over all of my area right now. I sincerely appreciate your concern. The funny thing: EP is a blink and you’ll miss it town. A place that most people here only know of because it’s a hot spot for people to throw themselves in front of trains. We actually had a morbid joke at work today (for context, I live in a nearby city that is mostly known as a huge mobbed up place from the 50s-80s and whose greatest accomplishment in the last 30 years was having the highest murders per capita for 3 years straight in the 90s) “never thought we’d be knocked off the map by East fucking Palestine, but here we are”. >

Y-town