CODVIP
luckydf777 This Deadly Chemical Should Be Banned
Like a scene out of some postapocalyptic movie, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio convened a news conference on Feb. 5 to deliver a stark warning. “We are ordering them to leave,” he said of residents of the small rural community of East Palestine, Ohio, and a neighboring part of Pennsylvania. “This is a matter of life and death.” To emphasize the point, he added: “Those in the red area are facing grave danger of death if they are still in that area.”
In this case, the “grave danger of death” was not a zombie fungus or lethal bacteria but chemicals. The red area was an area one mile by two miles surrounding the town, on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border about 40 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Two days earlier, it was the site of a fiery derailment of train cars carrying the gas vinyl chloride and other chemicals. Freight trains typically transport more than two million carloads of hazardous materials each year, including many chemicals. Vinyl chloride is particularly dangerous and increasingly common, used primarily to make polyvinyl chloride, better known as PVC, a hard plastic resin used to produce pipes, wire, cable coatings and packaging. We should begin phasing out the use of this chemical.
It was a particular concern in East Palestine after the derailment. Because vinyl chloride is so flammable, it created a risk of an explosion that could launch deadly shrapnel as far as a mile. To avoid such a catastrophe, railroad officials vented the vinyl chloride and burned it off.
But shrapnel wasn’t the only risk. Inhaling vinyl chloride fumes can be deadly. Even people in neighboring towns were at risk. On Feb. 10, seven days after the crash, the Environmental Protection Agency said that chemicals were “known to have been and continue to be” released to the air, surface soil and surface waters.
Residents complained last week of rashes, headaches and a lingering odor. Thousands of dead fish turned up in streams near the crash site.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.luckydf777