It's worth mentioning the backdrop of this is the current drive toward PSR (precision scheduled railroading), which has meant overworking train engineers with improved "efficiencies" through extremely long trains, and overworked employees. This has greatly increased the value of the train companies on the stock market, but at the expense of the workers (this came to a head a few months ago with pending labor strikes on the railroads). Insiders have warned about its potential risks, and I'm not an expert so I can't speak to overall accident trends, but the increased number of cars on a given engine greatly increases risk of derailment. This clearly seems like a major environmental disaster and will hopefully bring greater scrutiny toward how the rail companies operate.
Now you're asking that question, you might also ask why we saw more news stories days ago about this derailment in the European media than we did in the US.
The media news cycle in the US was literally staring at a balloon in the sky for days. It's as unsubtle of a distraction from real issues as it can get.
Or why we're seeing so much coverage of random "balloons" being shot over US airspace. It just feels off and convenient, even if not a downright conspiracy.
This is yet another symptom of shareholders becoming the primary customer. The strong incentive for short-term profit results in strategic decision-making that is both financially riskier and more ethically dubious in the long term.
Ok. Do you realize that most of us are the shareholders? This is a Fortune 500 company. Most of our 401ks include blended Fortune 500 holdings.
I keep hearing this rhetoric around social media… Do people not realize that there is a cost to our retirement funds always having to increase in value?
I think this outcome was unintentional, but in hindsight this feels like the greatest trick megacapitalism ever pulled.
A disproportionate amount of equity growth goes to the wealthy but the middle class has also hitched their futures to the stock market through 401ks. This means that "well, grandma's retirement also depends on record corporate profits" is a nearly invincible tactic against anything that diminishes corporate profits. The folks that own a disproportionate amount of equities get to untouchably balloon their wealth and there is nothing to stop them because stopping them would mean blowing up a generation's retirement plan.
The outcome was not unintentional. The current moves overtures to privatize Social Security will seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. "If our share price drops, retirees will freeze to death on empty stomachs - not even the government can help"
I'm not sure. 401ks were not an accident when they were introduced, but it doesn't appear that any of their architects intended for them to completely revolutionize and take over the retirement system in the US.
I do agree that now it is an organized effort by capital and that efforts to move social security to a system similar to private 401k accounts (which has been pushed by the right since before W Bush) would absolutely do what you say - seal the complete subservience of labor to capital. I just think that this was an opportunity seized by capital rather than a change planned from the beginning.
> Do you realize that most of us are the shareholders? [...] Most of our 401ks
Only 60 million Americans have a 401k.
Also, the idea that an American owning a portfolio of stocks in a 401k means that they are responsible for all the immoral actions taken by each company is absolutely and totally ridiculous.
Pressuring engineers, dispatchers and yard crews to stick to increasingly tight schedules, especially while understaffed, is exactly how you end up with more incidents.
They don't care. The costs are minimal compared to the profits, the bad PR can be massaged, etc.
Edit: also forgot that the president and both halves of congress have clearly telegraphed "full speed ahead" after the recent nonsense around the railroad union strikes. These workers aren't even getting time off for sick days or family emergencies (the latter of which is almost certainly a violation of the Family Medical Leave Act.)
>“Smoke and chemicals from the train, that’s the only thing that can cause it, because it doesn’t just happen out of nowhere,” Holzer says. “The chemicals that we’re being told are safe in the air, that’s definitely not safe for the animals … or people.”
>“All the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal background, what you would find in almost any community operating outside,” said James Justice with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The widespread reports of smells in the air, headaches, dead fish and other animals makes it hard to believe that "all the readings are at normal concentrations".
Although what they actually said is that all the readings they've recorded are normal.
The most disconcerting thing is that vinyl chloride is a carcinogen, so there may be many people who have been exposed to enough to give them cancer but who won't know about it for some years yet
It's not just vinyl chloride in the air. It's hydrogen chloride and phosgene, because they decided to set the vinyl chloride on fire to get rid of it.
Phosgene was a chemical weapon in WW1 and was especially problematic because, drumroll please, it's heavier than air and doesn't dissipate readily. That's one reason they roundabout mention checking air in people's homes.
Air readings could be manipulated simply by taking them from the tops of hills, or upwind, or even a relatively low altitude via plane. People who don't know phosgene is heavier than air would not realize what was going on.
Or the readings could be the usual EPA PM2.5, CO, NOx, and ozone concentrations, and phosgene, vinyl chloride, and HCl are none of the above. (Although a cheap VOC sensor could plausibly detect phosgene and vinyl chloride.)
They say they did test for phosgene at least. https://mobile.twitter.com/MahoningCoEMA/status/162338173074... It’s plausible because phosgene should have been a small fraction of what was produced in the burn, and honestly it’s nasty enough that people would probably notice if they were breathing it.
That quote specifically refers to air pollution. Many other leaking cars were carrying liquid hazardous chemicals. They expect a 100% aquatic life die off in waterways the pollutants reach.
The EPA claims they have a multi-stage containment system in place, and that the ground water and Ohio River are not at risk.
I don’t see how that is possible, but since this is HN, I’m hoping someone will point to an article explaining how modern spill containment works.
Or the people working for the EPA didn't want to get downwind of the plume themselves, so they took their air / water samples upwind of the mess, to avoid exposure (and maybe to make things look less bad as well) and called it a day. Really wouldn't be surprising.
I'd expect anybody measuring things near there to be in full HAZMAT-suits? Especially if this is declared as local state of emergency, and the National Guard involved?
Do we have any reason to believe that happened? There’s been training and response plans for this kind of thing going back to the 70s so it seems like that would be a huge scandal.
I’m not saying the EPA is perfect but simply asking whether we have reason to believe that this case was due to measurement choices, or if that was simply made up for the sake of argument.
Some lube oils are extremely toxic when burned. And there may be reactions between the various chemicals and their degradatoon products. Portable detectors will not be able to detect or quantify many of those. Only more advanced methods like Raman, gas and liquid chromatography with various detectors and mass spectrometry can tell more. And I have yet to see a report using any of those.
In scientific terminology, that's some nasty smelling shit. Toxic too.
If there's enough of it spilled you could smell minuscule amounts a mile away easier than an instrument could get a valid reading though.
It's one of those.
The odor threshold of volatile acrylates is orders of magnitude lower than other flammable toxic chemicals like methanol, but the instrumental detectability of acrylates is not really any more sensitive than regular low-odor chemicals by comparison.
IOW the instrument is better at detecting low-odor chemicals than your nose is, but your nose is more sensitive to things that have a very strong characteristic odor like acrylates.
Given that you can go on YouTube and see videos of the head of the EPA telling the 9/11 first responders that the air was perfectly safe to breathe, I’m probably going to go with the cat owners on this one.
She used every excuse she had: "We weren't going to let the terrorists win" "My son was in building 7 and almost died" "We needed to get the city back on its feet"
I worked a block away and we were back in very quickly. Then the HEPA filters came, then there was a lot of chaos. I learned a lot of how government can go wrong those few months.
More or less the same?? We had 4 years of the largest reversal on environmental protections we've ever seen
The Trump administration had replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and natural gas extraction bans, weakened the Coal Ash Rule, which regulates the disposal of toxic coal waste, and revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards–just to name a few
There are two big things to consider even if Congress didn’t change the laws significantly. The first is that Congress delegates the power to decide exactly what’s covered by a law to the agencies, on the theory that they employ experts and can adjust over time faster than a legal change. Under Trump, a significant number of regulations were changed at the behest of the affected industries:
The second is more subtle: enforcement is only as good as the people doing it. Under Trump there was an unprecedented effort to politicize normal job functions and, especially, to purge workers who were suspected of political disloyalty.
The obvious thing people would worry about is political ideologies being installed in what are normally supposed to be neutral, science-based jobs but if your goal is simply to prevent normal government operations it’s almost as good to let things stagnate by driving away people who are tired of having their day to day job involve ethical conflicts or simply not rehiring after normal attrition.
It’s the same reason Republicans were trying to fight staffing at the IRS: if you say rich people shouldn’t pay much in taxes, you have to take the heat for that with the voters. If instead you ensure that the auditing division is understaffed and their pay scale doesn’t stretch to the kind of high-end accountants who can go toe-to-toe with a billionaire’s, you get close to the same result without having to stand for it, and you can probably even get a political win by claiming that they have enough money but are wasting it.
The content of the cars was not owned by the epa. Look at how close those corps are to the epa.
Like the history of cigarette health. Or how axon claims tazers are safe by hiring docs to publish they are safe and inventing things like “excited delirium”…
Given the fact it’s going to affect things downstream & across state lines… probably at least the level that “Chinese spy balloons” are getting.
Might hinge on how bad the first impending acid rain ends up being.
I think Jackson Mississippi still doesn’t have clean water, & you haven’t seen that in any headlines for quite some time. Most things that actually matter don’t get very good news coverage, lest people become concerned about how hard they’re being swindled by corporations.
Ohio just got completely swindled by JD Vance, so nobody should be surprised when bad things continue to happen to the general populace with zero accountability from those causing it.
Also, keep in mind that this is the land of a river (Cuyahoga aka Cleveland) catching on fire at least 15 times. Environmental disasters with no accountability are our groove.
He’s a grifter pushing policies that lead to disasters like this. And a significant portion of Ohio roots for them.
Surely you can understand the correlation between policies that take away safety measures for (marginal) profit increase & catastrophic disasters happening because of a lack of safety measures.
Nothing is going to change (in this case railway/environmental disasters) until lawmakers that care about implementing proper safety measures are elected. Or any sort of accountability at all.
Here’s my attempt at a steel man: JD Vance is one of the bad guys on the bad guys team. Whenever bad things happen it’s the bad guys’ fault.
I’m aware that sounds like a pretty poor alloy, but it’s internally consistent, matches the observables, and I can’t really honestly do better.
Edit: The point of this is to explain what this derailment has to do with JD Vance. Any reply that fails to explain why JD Vance is somehow personally involved is failing to do better than the offered steel man. Just generally supporting policies you disagree with merely makes him a bad guy. You do think he’s bad for supporting these policies you believe are bad right? Next you have to show that a freshman senator in the minority who’s been in office for a month is somehow responsible even indirectly. I’d like to see a better effort to steel man that than mine.
If bad guys are what you call politicians that repeatedly call to strike down industrial safety measures & corporate accountability, then I could perhaps say that you are on to something
I wasn’t able to find anything about striking down industrial safety measures in JD Vance’s campaign platform or voting record. Can you? If not then what does this have to do with JD Vance?
If you were actually trying to "steel man" wouldn't you say "policies which make this type of industrial accident more likely" rather than "policies that are bad/you disagree with," which makes it sound childish and random?
I can’t find any evidence of JD Vance supporting such policies in either his platform or his voting record. I don’t think just making things up counts as steel manning.
Incidentally, in the USA Congress has delegated the power to regulate rail safety to the Executive branch which last I knew was controlled by the Good Guys. So I’m really at a loss how to show that this has anything to do with a freshman senator in the minority. I begin to think nobody else knows how to either. The miasma theory of Vance’s affiliation with the Bad Guys somehow making bad things happen in his state really is the best argument anyone has presented here.
That's the best you've got? He was endorsed by someone formerly from an agency that has nothing to do with the US Department of Transportation that regulates trains? That's literally the Bad Guy on team Bad Guys makes Bad Things happen argument I already gave.
If you'd dug even a little you'd see that the classification of these trains at a lower hazard level than probably warranted dates back at least to the Obama administration and probably further. So again, what does this have to do with JD Vance other than the steel man argument I already gave?
I saw people on social media saying "wow this looks really bad" and had to put a fair amount of effort into finding stories on Apple News (where I usually read news stories) giving a rundown. Social media can certainly be prone to Chicken Little-ism but nobody seems to be questioning the line officials are giving here. If anything I think this might be a sign of how weak local news reporting has become. No doubt this would be of interest if it happened in the vicinity of New York City or Los Angeles.
Which group of the wealthy/powerful would attention to this issue benefit?
Like to be clear not only is it not an issue that's going to be addressed, the Biden administration is actually looking at loosening safety regulations further. Republicans are not going to go against industry. It's an industrial state that flagrantly does not care about pollution issues (like building a shopping mall on top of a toxic waste dump level flagrancy) and nobody involved wants to rock the boat right now.
The fundamental underlying issue is there's not enough people to run the trains. The train lines don't want to pay a high enough salary that the supply would meet demand, and DOT weed testing regulations are reducing the pool of eligible applicants as well, pushing that curve downwards further. They've been running fewer and fewer people per train and longer and longer trains, and it's getting unsafe.
(it's the same reason freight trains no longer yield to passenger in america despite being statutorily required to - the freight trains are too long for the sidings, oops, guess we can't pull over, you'll have to! Trains have just gotten longer and less staffed and much closer to the safety capacity of the equipment as they get longer and heavier, and this is just one of many exciting ways this is playing out!)
There is no way out of this without getting more people into train crews and reducing the size of the trains. The brakes on these trains can't safely stop a train of this length, and the derailleur equipment currently installed can't even safely derail trains of these lengths if they break loose, so when they go they go into a big pile of other cars and you get a massive industrial accident. It is. not. safe. to. run. trains. this. long. You need more crews and larger crews running smaller trains again. This is an issue that has crept up in the last 20 years and become a critical issue in the last 5 years.
But pushing back on industry is a big no in America these days, Republicans aren't going to do back a union let alone go against industry (name a single ohio republican that would not have leapt on the framing of "Biden picks unions over rail jobs and christmas") and this isn't the fight the Biden administration wants to pick right now, they want this to go away. They already slapped down the union, which really pissed off quite a few of the base... but what are they gonna do, vote republican? The biden admin wants the trains to run on time so people get their amazon shit.
And the local elected officials are on the 'locking up journalists who try to report it' level here, not actually doing anything that would inconvenience industry. And Biden just wants the trains to run on time, he's already made that very clear.
So again: which set of powerful people are going to be making a big ruckus in the media? Everyone is OK with this. Ohio is an industrial state, they keep voting in Republicans (even in statewide offices) and fighting against unions. This is what Ohioans collectively signed up for and continue to sign up for every election. Open for business, right?
Remember this when Intel wants you to move to Ohio for those new fabs. You're moving to an industrial hellscape and nobody's gonna care if your wife's shopping mall is built on a superfund site or an unsafe train running on a skeleton crew crashes and explodes and dumps a cloud of poison gas into the air. It's Ohio. Let alone any sort of fun genotoxic effect or pregnancy problems in the middle of abortion-war central. And it's not just this one place either, Ohio is a mess of all kinds of industrial shit. Ohio DGAF, is Intel worth your family getting cancer over?
Economists have this idea called "revealed preference". The revealed preference here is that winning the War On Egghead Intellectuals, this year's installment of the War On LGBTQ, and the War On Climate Science is more important than not having dead kids. This has been repeatedly been made clear for 3 decades now. And Biden is just past the point where he cares about forcing angry toddlers to do the right thing, he's not gonna deathmatch SCOTUS over this of all things for people who don't even want him to and will frame him as just doing it for the union. People want their fucking amazon packages, they want Dow-Corning and 3M and Duke Coal jobs, if you wanna kill your kids or give them turbocancer so that parcel delivery line-costs go down 5% then nobody's gonna stop you, Amazon thanks you for your service to America's profit margins. Uncle Joe has always been a lot better at politics than people give him credit for, why make drama where none exists?
Everyone just metaphorically wants to go have dinner, can we please just not fight about this for once? That's why nobody is talking about it.
(Michigan also had that same plating company dump a bunch more hexavalent chromium into the Huron River again, so to be fair Ohio is not alone in midwest toxic spill stories flying under the radar! But it seems likely Whitmer/Nessel will put the hammer down, I am guessing the remediation is going to get a lot quicker and a lot less "voluntary"/"self-reported".)
It wasn't supposed to make you feel good. I ain't feel good writing any of that shit either, I hope nothing there makes you think I'm anything other than a deeply unhappy person, it fucking sucks and it just continues to get worse every year.
It's just, it's the same dead kids every week. This week they died in a super cool explosion or got super cool cancer instead of dying in a super cool school shooting or choked to death by a couple super cool cops or died of a super cool preventable illness because their medication costs $2k a month, or gotten super cool lead poisoning from an emergency manager after being stripped of their democratic process. We shrugged about helping 9/11 first responders, you think people really care about some dead kids?
People don't care, not really, they say they do but they don't vote like it. The whole "thoughts and prayers" meme is a nod to just how little we really care. You wanna see people get real unhappy and start voting some fuckers out, make the flow of amazon packages stop. The dead kids don't matter, not like the packages do, people will line up and vote on that shit. If there is the perception of things going back to the way they were in 2020 with the supply chain people are gonna lose their fucking shit and vote in some really despicable motherfuckers (oh, it can always get worse). The trains gotta run.
The revealed preference of american society is stability above morality or dead kids. And we're willing to go pretty authoritarian too to get that stability, if it comes down to it, like the emergency manager shit. Biden's doing a great job catering to what americans really want and vote on, which is making the damn amazon packages show up.
America just wants to have a normal dinner for once. Yep, some kids died, that happens every week here and we just move on. More kids are gonna die next week, and the week after that too. Open for business, buddy, did I fucking stutter?
Shikata ga nai. There just isn't. Not unless an awful lot of people suddenly start being cool about an awful lot of stuff.
> At the end of his news conference, [Gov. Mike] DeWine said he didn’t authorize the arrest and reporters have “every right” to report during briefings.
> “If someone was stopped from doing that, or told they could not do that, that was wrong,” DeWine said.
Seems OP's statement is a bit generally misleading statement for a single incident, without also knowing the full details that prompted the arrest in the first place.
Things like "he was told to stop speaking during the governor's remarks" and "asked Lambert to stop his live reporting because they believed it was loud and disruptive" seems to indicate it's a situation escalating because ... I don't know, I wasn't there, and there doesn't seem to be any footage of these incidents. Hard to tell who is "at fault".
A single journalist, among many attendees, being arrested for allegedly being loud in a gymnasium during a news conference is a bit of a stretch to state as evidence that authorities are generally arresting journalists reporting on the derailing.
Given the amount of people affected and the toxicity of the chemicals, you'd think they'd give it commensurate coverage --such as Chinese balloons, Biden documents, Trump documents, Police beatings, etc.
Aren't there several of these situations ongoing at any given time? It has happened twice near some aunts of mine. Train derailments leaking chemicals do not seem that rare.
The Vinyl Chloride Monomer is often referred to as VCM.
It is a gas which is liquefied under pressure in a similar way to propane, so tanks and rail cars must be completely airtight at all times.
Otherwise the entire liquid cargo will rapidly be expelled under pressure as a liquid from any opening on the bottom of the vessel, or the entire liquid cargo will still evaporate quite rapidly and eventually all escape as a gas stream through defects or open valves on the top part of the vessel.
Any VCM liquid spilled will act like propane and rapidly turn into a gas which will disperse much wider through the air much more rapidly.
Not much is going to soak into the soil or be carried away by water drainage channels.
If it was an acetone spill or something like that it wouldn't evaporate nearly as fast, nor present as widespread an atmospheric content downwind, and you would have to get a lot closer to the spill to detect the vapors or smell it yourself even for a briskly evaporating liquid like acetone.
But the VCM is not only flammable, it is actually a highly toxic gas.
VCM smells exactly like most brand-new PVC shower curtains, because VCM's exactly what you're smelling in very small concentrations, as any residual monomer often outgasses strongly the first few days after hanging the curtain.
In an unventilated bathroom I would think that's often beyond the recognized working VCM levels allowed in industrial facilities.
Reports seem spotty but five tanker cars full of vinyl chloride, aka chloroethylene is no joke. That's a really nasty monomer (feedstock for making PVC pipe). Once polymerized it's a pretty harmless by all accounts, but the monomer is highly unpleasant (MSDS):
Inhalation:
Several minutes of exposure to high, but attainable concentrations (over 1000 ppm) may cause difficulty breathing, central nervous system depression and symptoms such as: ataxia or dizziness, drowsiness or fatigue, loss of consciousness, headache, euphoria and irritability, visual and or hearing disturbances, nausea, memory loss. Prolonged, high concentration exposures may cause unconsciousness or death. Cardiac: Acute intoxication may cause irregular heartbeats.
Chronic Effects:
Chronic exposure to vinyl chloride monomer (VCM) may cause damage to the nervous system, respiratory system, musculoskeletal system, and lymphatic system. Occupational overexposure has produced a specific cancer. (angiosarcoma of the liver) and is associated with hepatocellular cancer. Repeated prolonged exposure may damage: skin (scleroderma), bones (acro-osteolysis), blood vessels in the hands (Raynaud's Syndrome). Suspected of causing genetic defects. Suspected of damaging fertility or the unborn child. Reproductive effects and testes damage occurred in rats exposed to vinyl chloride. These endpoints, however, were generally noted at concentrations greater than those necessary to cause liver damage.
Looks like a lot of cost-cutting (not shipping on trains with the most modern safe braking systems?) and regulatory shenanigans (not classified as highly hazardous material?) were involved in this... oh wait, it gets better...
> "Thousands in East Palestine, a town of about 5,000 people, evacuated, and officials warned the controlled burn would create a phosgene and hydrogen chloride plume across the region. Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble, and was used as a weapon in the first world war."
> Phosgene is a highly toxic gas that can cause vomiting and breathing trouble,
I'm a mathematician, not a chemist, but I do know about about phosgene.
The memorable thing about phosgene is not that is causes "breathing trouble" but that it will kill you dead, dead, dead, and once you have a lethal dose, there is no effective treatment, and that it's a "linear poison" - small concentrations over hours and days have exactly the same effect as large concentrations for minutes (many poisons don't work that way).
Grew up 30 miles west of East Palestine. My family is still there.
So sad to see another struggling Midwest town dealt a death blow.
It’s beautiful country even though it’s considered fly over and “blue collar” which is politically correct terminology for post-industrial poor.
The EPA has roots from the Cuyahoga River fires. There was great progress made cleaning up the river and even turning portions of Northeast Ohio into a national park.
Proud to be a Northeast Ohioan. There has been great steps forward since the industrial hay day.
This whole event makes me so sad. This community will most likely never recover and I’m hoping against hope there aren’t serious health consequences or birth defects from this. Though I highly doubt it.
It's probably a good idea to have your family members visit a doctor to have blood drawn and tested for likely by-products of this accident and fire. To have a baseline proof of exposure could be handy later.
I've always understood it as a sort of historical anchoring bias. Compared to the areas that were settled during colonial times, Ohio was indeed "West" in people's minds, just less so than the Pacific coast.
If you look at a map, it's clearly not. Not "mid", which would be from Chicago to Denver, and even more not "west", which would be west of Denver.
But "midwest" is a term for a region, and terms last longer than the reason for the term. When the term was coined, the US essentially ended at Chicago, and Ohio was midwest.
Hmm. I must be in a mellow mood today. I've made the exact same complaint you did when others said Pittsburgh was "midwest".
The situation is really, really bad, and in a better world, might become the foundational precedent to new laws on letting corporations regulate themselves.
In a book today I stumbled on a similar accident almost ten years ago in New Jersey[1]. This one seems much more hazardous due to the combustion as well as scale of the accident.
Stress responses and hysteria can also cause numerous health problems (see wind turbine syndrome, EMF sensitivity, etc.). People misattribute cause and effect all the time, and they notice sicknesses they would normally dismiss if there were no obvious cause that understandably heightens their paranoia.
Which isn't to say nothing is going on either, this was a colossal regulatory failure letting these companies overwork train operators and not forcing rail operators to upgrade the braking systems. But let's also not jump to conclusions.
It’s like people are living through "White Noise" by Don DeLillo. Thanks ChatGPT for helping me remember the book based on the general scenario:
"White Noise" is a darkly comic novel that explores themes of death, consumerism, and technology. The story takes place in a small Midwestern town where a poisonous cloud, known as "The Nanny," is hanging over the area and threatening the lives of its residents. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is a professor of Hitler Studies who becomes obsessed with the cloud and its effects on the people around him. "White Noise" is widely regarded as one of DeLillo's best works and is considered a seminal work of postmodern fiction.”
Interesting observation. I've read White Noise and a couple other DeLillo novels, it's a little difficult to describe, but I was put in a very strange state of mind after reading his work, kind of like glimpsing some hidden inner reality. Somewhat like The Stand by Stephen King.
We had a fertilizer plant go up in flames last year about this time in Winston-Salem, NC, which is 50 miles from us which was alarming even at this radius.
> When Ben Ratner’s family signed up in 2021 to be extras in the movie “White Noise,” they thought it would be a fun distraction from their day-to-day life in blue-collar East Palestine, Ohio.
The film adaptation of White Noise is about a freight train crashing and releasing toxic chemicals in the air and was filmed in Ohio around this area so yeah it seems like a very apt connection to make
Anyway, the poisonous cloud is perhaps metaphorically hanging over the town, but only during a short section of the novel is there actually a cloud. Though maybe in terms of pages the cloud isn’t over the town very long, but several weeks pass?
Its like a summary someone who hasnt read it would make.. Its such a funny thing to ask the chat AI, You can just read the summary the publisher writes!
It's pretty common throughout the US, but there's a section of Ohio that I recall driving through which has several cities named for European and Asian countries.
I had a girlfriend early in college who's grandmother lived deep in rural Ohio; we visited the area frequently and it involved driving past several.
A bit of obscure trivia I learned while down there, "Russia, Ohio" is pronounced like "Roo-She". I was told this was because of the Cold War but even in my late teens "I wasn't so sure". The dialect of Southern English spoken by Grandma and the local population was a cross between deep Appalachia, slowly spoken and ... I don't know ... English-like words[1].
[0] Nice to see Wikipedia had the goofy pronounciation. It did not explain "why", unfortunately.
[1] She had an English (only) speaking neighbor who had the most "articulated"/"exaggerated" variant -- I remember having "Tonne Cohwa" or "Tonne Cohs" (plural) translated for me after several attempts to figure out WTF that referred to... Yeah. It was the word Taco. We were talking about the cold weather, I thought.
I’m about 40 miles from Russia, OH. We’ve also got Versailles (pronounced like the “ver” in “verb” and “sales”), Houston (pronounced “house ton”), Lima (long I, like the bean), and Eldorado (long A) all in a 100 mile radius. We have some Native American names for cities and counties, too.
Theres a Vienna in Illinois that the locals pronounce VAI-enna, Mexico Indiana, and of course Notre Dame college, pronounced Noder, then dame like an old married woman.
There is a town called Elkader in Iowa. I thought it was something to do with Elks. In fact, someone else also made this error, since there are nearby towns called Elk Run etc.
Turns out, it was named after the famous Algerian revolutionary, Abd El Kader, who was widely respected in the West, including France, who he fought against:
