United States Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has blamed the Trump administration, as well as U.S. Congress, for hampering rail safety amid growing criticism over his lack of response to the catastrophic East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment.
“U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg blamed the rollback of safety regulations under President Donald Trump for the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train earlier this month in East Palestine, Ohio. After over a week of silence on the subject, Buttigieg suggested the Trump administration was responsible for the accident and the subsequent controlled chemical explosion.
Insisting his agency had improved railroad safety through ‘historic investments’, Buttigieg claimed the Department of Transportation was nevertheless ‘constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration)’ in a tweet on Tuesday. Ten days earlier, the 150-car train carrying 10 cars of hazardous materials derailed, allegedly due to a mechanical issue with a rail car axle and an emergency brake failure on a straight stretch of railroad.
The braking rule in question required trains carrying some hazardous materials to use high-tech electronically-controlled pneumatic brakes. It was rolled back in 2017, after a law passed in 2015 – long before Trump became president – initiated a requirement for cost-benefit analysis for new safety regulations.
The Department of Transportation explained in a statement on Wednesday that the 2015 legislation ‘makes it challenging to reinstate the rule in its previous configuration – due to threats of litigation and opposition in Congress’. The agency nevertheless promised to ‘evaluate action to prevent this from happening again’.
As the derailed cars released the chemicals, including carcinogens, into the air, water, and soil, Norfolk Southern initiated a controlled release and burnoff of the highly toxic gas vinyl chloride from one of the cars. The company insisted that failing to do so could turn the derailed train into a ‘bomb’ that would send shrapnel and poisonous fumes rocketing through the surrounding community. When burned vinyl chloride turns into hydrogen chloride and phosgene, a chemical weapon used in World War I.
While local authorities lifted an initial evacuation order and have declared the water safe to drink, some residents have complained of alarming physical symptoms as well as dead pets, livestock, and fish.
The Environmental Protection Agency has accused Norfolk Southern of failing to properly dispose of contaminated soil and has found toxic butyl acrylate in the Ohio River, which supplies drinking water to about 10% of the U.S. population. At least five lawsuits have been filed against Norfolk Southern over the derailment accusing the company of negligence”. -RT
In the past, Pete Buttigieg has also blamed the country’s infrastructure problems on the COVID-19 crisis.
Now, not only does it appear politically expedient to cast blame upon the previous administration, but, to invert Hanson’s razor, it would certainly be unwise to attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by malice. And, given the shady set of circumstances surrounding the East Palestine ecological disaster, one can’t help but wonder whether the party responsible for the toxic outcome of the chemical train car derailment did so intentionally.
Oddly enough, perhaps the craziest piece of information to come out of the latest set of unsettling revelations came from a 2022 Netflix film adaptation.
Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise“ starred Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig as the parents of a family of five whose lives are upended when “a train accident casts a cloud of chemical waste over their town”. The family is forced to evacuate after the “Airborne Toxic Event” and the rest of the film deals with the lack of media attention surrounding the disaster as well as the couple’s overwhelming fear of death after the spill.
Along with the fact that the images of the derailment and the plume out of Ohio look eerily similar to the images foreshadowed in the film, the most chilling instance of life imitating art, in this case, would be the movie’s filming location.
Would you believe that the movie was actually filmed in and around East Palestine, Ohio, the very city that is now going through its own form of “Airborne Toxic Event”? Well, it was.
Even some of the background actors in the film’s evacuation scenes are residents of East Palestine, Ohio, which means they filmed a fictional version of the exact environmental emergency they’re currently experiencing.
While anomalies such as these make the task of assigning blame all the more complicated, they tend to indicate that whoever is behind these catastrophic derailments has been preparing this grand scheme for quite some time and that there’s seemingly nothing anyone can do to stop them.