On February 3rd this East Palestine town witnessed the derailment of a 150 car, three locomotive train from the Norfolk Southern Railroad Company, the train was traveling east from Madison Illinois to Conway Pennsylvania and passing through Salem 30 kilometers from the derailment was captured by a security camera from the metallurgical equipment company Butech Bliss, where a fire is seen in the axles of a wagon, caused by a bearing that, when it broke down, heated up due to friction and caught fire, when it reached the curve at the end from the town of East Palestine, the carriage's axle failed completely, derailing the train.
Of the 150 railcars, 20 contained toxic and flammable chemicals and 10 of these derailed, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and ethyl glycol monobutyl ether are some of the chemicals that caught fire after the accident, but the most worrying were the five pressurized tanks that loaded 350,000 liters of vinyl chloride.
This compound is the raw material that we use to manufacture the PVC that we use in our hydraulic and sanitary pipes, but unlike PVC, vinyl chloride is very toxic, it is considered carcinogenic and mutagenic.
Poisoning with this compound manifests itself in the form of dizziness, drowsiness, and headaches, and due to the cases of workers exposed to this gas at the beginning of the 20th century, it has been linked to an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancer. and blood for this reason the authorities evacuated all the inhabitants of East Palestine within a radius of 1.6 kilometers from the fire, while they tried to control the fire.
Nearly 2,000 people left their homes, the five tanks that contained vinyl chloride pressurized to keep it in its liquid form, could explode at any moment due to the heat of the fire, to keep the gas in a liquid state for its transport it was kept at high pressure inside the tanks, which when exposed to the heat of the fire, their content would expand until the tanks ruptured with very violent explosions, with the risk of their toxic content spreading over the town and its
Surroundings, so a very difficult decision was made.
Using small explosive charges, they pierced the five tanks with vinyl chloride so that it escaped as a gas as it burned, creating an immense column of flames and dark smoke, with this decision the lesser of evils was chosen, the toxic was being allowed to escape and carcinogenic vinyl chloride so that when burned it would produce phosgene gas.
Phosgene gas is a compound that was used as a chemical weapon during the First World War, but the possibility of a large explosion was eliminated, although not all vinyl chloride burned, so a good part escaped into the atmosphere where, when mixed with water vapor in the air turned into hydrochloric acid.
The Norfolk Southern railway company offered to compensate each inhabitant who had to leave their homes for five days with a thousand dollars and announced the creation of a fund of 1.2 million to contain the pollution and repair the damage, to many, including me, it seems that 1.2 million dollars will not be enough for a tremendous mess, especially when the effects of this type of chemical disaster in the long term are not yet known.
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