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#pinned postA post describing the incident in a panicked tone has been circulating. That post makes some extremely overstated claims, including that a huge number of animals will die and that there is a media blackout of the story. This is is information that was made as an addendum to the post (OP saw the info and made it their pinned post after seeing the correction) and some people were looking for a way to share the updated info without having to share the triggering post. So, here's why you SHOULD NOT BE PANICKING about the Ohio train derailment and chemical spill:
Here is the New York Times reporting on this on February 4th.
Here are NBC and The Daily Beast reporting on this on February 5th.
Here are People Magazine, the Sacramento Bee, The Daily Beast again, CBS News, Reuters, and Reuters again reporting on this on February 6th.
Here is CNN reporting on it on February 7th.
The EPA response profile has been active and updating since February 4th.
I want to preface this by saying THIS IS NOT GOOD, and we shouldn't act like nothing is happening. This is bad. This is a serious environmental disaster. There are currently risks to humans and animals, and risks to humans and animals will be ongoing for quite some time at various levels.
However I think that "this will kill all the pets in the area and will lay a swathe of poison from Ohio to Mexico, burning the world between" is perhaps something of an overstatement and I'm aware that folks are upset about this but holy shit let's please try not to catastrophize the catastrophe.
The purpose of an intentional burn at the site was as a containment measure, because it is better to temporarily have extremely toxic chemical byproducts in an evacuated area than it is to allow an extremely carcinogenic chemical to slowly disperse.
There was a similar chemical spill in New Jersey in 2012 (still not a good thing! Not something that we should let go lightly!) and it did not result in "all pets dying" or a mass poisoning of rivers and streams.
Here is the DHHS Toxological Profile for Vinyl Chloride, a nearly 300-page document that goes over risk factors and harms caused by the chemical. Given the tone of the original post, here's what people probably want to see right now:
At the moment, there appears to be one man who claims that his pet fox died as a result of exposure to the vinyl chloride, and it sickened some of his other pets. There is some discussion of dead chickens and one dead hawk was found. Dead fish were found in some bodies of water, and the EPA is monitoring other bodies and has issued directives for dams and spillovers to collect chemical runoff to prevent as much downstream contamination as possible. At the moment, it is very difficult to say whether there will be a significant amount of acute animal deaths (wild or domesticated) as a result of this, though I would guess there will be a very significant increase of cancer in the area in the coming years.
One reporter at a press conference from the Ohio governor was arrested, he has been released and the AG's office is investigating his arrest. There are a lot of photos of the derailment and its consequences on social media and other news websites, and it does not appear that anyone is preventing people from taking or sharing photos of the disaster.
Look. I am not someone who thinks that you should blindly trust the government. There are huge issues here. This is a disaster that happened for a number of reasons, many of which are related to absolute shit regulation of chemical transportation and which were probably exacerbated by overworked railroad employees who got fucked over for the sake of the economy in December. There is bad shit here that is worthy of criticism, there are legitimate things to be concerned about.
But just because I don't trust the government doesn't mean I think it's a better idea to trust a shitpost account on twitter that provided "evidence" in the form of an instagram account posting screenshots of text messages from one guy who had a collection of exotic animals he wasn't able to retrieve from the evacuation area and a tiktok video.
There are definitely things to worry about with this, but please don't panic.
Also look, if the news is too miserable and you don't want to look at it too much but you want to at least pretend to stay informed, the Daily Beast's Cheat Sheet is a constant stream of paragraph-long reports on breaking news. Two of the stories I linked up above are from the Cheat Sheet. Just. Keep it open in a browser tab and check headlines once a day, okay? This has been news for an entire week, if People Magazine is doing human interest stories on it there isn't a media blackout please don't get your news from twitter or tumblr please I am begging you.
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If you see someone who is panicking or spiraling because of the original post, please consider linking them to this post.
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