Shownotes
Jay Simonds, an environmental scientist with 30 years of environmental remediation, joins us on this episode about the East Palestine/Norfolk Southern derailment, chemical spill, and chemical burn.
What is this chemical, vinyl chloride, and what are we talking about?
Why is it so dangerous? We talk about human acute and chronic problems.
Where is the Ohio EPA in this burning?
Stephen Palmer is the Managing Partner for the law firm, Palmer Legal Defense. He has specialized almost exclusively in criminal defense for over 26 years. Steve is also a partner in Criminal Defense Consultants, a firm focused wholly on helping criminal defense attorneys design winning strategies for their clients.
Norm Murdock is an automobile racing driver and owner of a high-performance and restoration car parts company. He earned undergraduate degrees in literature and journalism and graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of Cincinnati College of Law in 1985. He worked in the IT industry for two years before launching a career in government relations in Columbus, Ohio. Norm has assisted clients in the Transportation, Education, Healthcare, and Public Infrastructure sectors.
Brett Johnson is an award-winning podcast consultant and small business owner for nearly 10 years, leaving a long career in radio. He is passionate about helping small businesses tell their story through podcasts, and he believes podcasting is a great opportunity for different voices to speak and be heard.
Recorded at the 511 Studios, in the Brewery District in downtown Columbus, OH.
info@commonsenseohioshow.com
Transcripts
February 24th, 2023. That means it's only like 10 days after Valentine's Day, so we all have a lot of love for each other 10 days later. But here we are at Common sense Ohio at the Round table at channel 511. And you might ask, what the hell is Common sense Ohio? Well, it's the the of latest and greatest show that employs common sense to all this absurdity that's happening in the world using Ohio as a focus. So what we're doing is we're taking news stories from Ohio, discussing them, and you know what happens? A lot of times they have impact on the rest of the world. Not just the country, but the rest of the world. This is Flyover Country, folks, and that's why we are Common sense Ohio at the Round table. So the normal crew is here. We've got Norm hiding over there. And as always, Norm's got this stack of papers. It's like grad school 1970s paper chase law school edition over there with Norm and he's got a hat on. Nra hat too. Boy. Hubble hubble. You're sad. And we've got Brett over there making all things podcast happen. So he's part of the round table here for Common sense Ohio, but he's got this other life, too.
[:I mean, believe it or not, we don't make a huge living doing Common sense Ohio. We do this for the people, folks. We do it for you. Which brings me to the next topic of discussion. We do have a website, common senseohioshow. Com, and you can be a sponsor. So that's really easy. You just go to common senseohioshow. Com, shoot us an email, and we will hook you up. We're planning on launching the sponsorships very soon, and we've got a couple of people have reached out. If you want to get in the queue, so to speak, then all you need to do is reach out at common senseohioshow. Com. And for those who know me, yours truly, Steve Palmer. I still have Lawyer Talk and there's lots going on there. For now, the feeds are separate, but our feeds are in parallel, but they'll be separate soon, I promise. Now, getting right to the show, it would be almost impossible to have a common sense Ohio or any news or any commentary show on Ohio without talking about a train crash. And you could say the whole world is in a perpetual train crash right now.
[:To some extent, I think it is, which is why we need a good, healthy dose of common sense to begin with. But there is a train crash that has occurred right here in Ohio. And it's funny, you see Ohio all over the news now nationally, politically. I hate to see it, but somehow this has become a polarizing political issue with Trump was in Ohio the other day. And then right on the heels of that, all of a sudden Mr. Buttage comes to Ohio not to be outdone by Donald Trump. I think one of the commentators on the scene up there basically said, Yeah, it's funny. They only come when they want to get on TV and have some political gain about it. I would say that's probably true. Although there is an obvious elephant in the room that has not shown up, and that's Joe Biden, he went to Ukraine instead. Now, all that said, I don't think any of these people are doing anything, really. Now, Trump at least brought water, his Trump water, and bought everybody McDonald's. That's good. But just because Biden shows up and tips his hat at the people here in Ohio, I don't think that's going to change the fact that all this happened.
[:And just because Pete Buttegeage shows up and tips his hat and says, Hey, we're here for you. Great. And this brings up all sorts of discussions that we're not going to get into today, and I'll tell you why in a second. But there's other discussions here involving like, what is the federal government responsibility in such things? Do we need FEMA? Do we need disaster relief? Is there a Department of Transportation that should be involved? Who should fix this? Who should clean it up? Who should regulate it? How did it happen? And whose fault is it? Now, I tend to be more libertarian on this. I know others may have a different viewpoint, but it's become political, but nobody's doing anything, right? It's just still this arrow slinging, and the Dems are still blaming Trump for something he did years ago. And Trump comes and brings water, so he's blaming them for doing nothing. But here at Common sense Ohio, we're going to cut through all that nonsense. Norm, we're not going to play that game. We're going to get right to the heart of this. And we have today a guest, and the guest is going to help us assess the important thing here, which is what the heck is going on with the dirt, with the ground, with the air, with the water, with the environment?
[:And how do we even begin to comprehend how to clean up this mess? What is this chemical? I don't hear anybody talking about this. They're all talking about instead, Boudica nge, whether he showed up or not, they're talking about instead who's bringing water and who's not bringing water. So really, this is more about to me, what do we need to do? Have we taken the right action so far? And if not, what do we to do to fix it. And for that, I have a special guest. We have Jay Simons, who is an environmental geologist. I've known Jay for the better part of, I don't know, a long, long, long time.
[:Man, over 30 years. Yeah.
[:So Jay and I went to college. The College of Wooster here in Ohio, believe it or not, right from Ohio, has a phenomenal geology program. Fred Krop was out there, right, Jay? He was the geology guy. So believe it or not, right from Ohio has a phenomenal geology program. Fred Krop was out there, right, Jay? He was the geology guy. So believe it or not, believe it or not, a lot of people came to Ohio, came to Wooster to study geology, and Jay did just that. He has then gone on to work in all sorts of fields of geology studies. But mostly, I've talked to you a lot about environmental cleanup. And I'll let you speak for yourself with your resume. But the idea here is to get Jay's perspective as an expert who has been involved in cleaning up such messes to tell us what the heck is going on and what the deal is.
[:You're saying, so we're going to get the dirt.
[:We're going to get the dirt. Yeah, we're going to get the dirt. So without any further ado, Jay, why don't you start by just giving us your background a little bit? So people know that you're not just some dude wearing a shirt with a skull on it, and we can.
[:You know what.
[:That is, Steve. I know exactly what it is. And we can start to get to the heart of this thing and figure out what we need to do and what should we be talking about. So start with telling us why you're the person to be talking to.
[:Yeah, well, good morning, gentlemen. How are we? Good to see you guys again. You, too. This is really sad to begin with. And I've stayed away from it because it has been a cluster from the word go. But my background, I have over 30 years in environmental remediation. I started off in geology. I was supposed to be on the oil rigs. And when I got out of school, the oil industry was down. So I migrated to the boots on the ground, environmental remediation industry, which was fairly new at the time. I gravitated towards that because I started off really my hardcore construction career in the Army National Guard in the Corps of Engineers. So I was a combat engineer to begin with. So I built roads in Honduras, did quarry operations in a Hondurs, did all sorts of stuff, built base camps, built bridges, blew them up, started off that way. And I guess I have an affinity for pumps and stuff like that. So my specialty is contaminant groundwater remediation. So that's the long and short of it. I've now migrated to mostly construction. And I say specialty construction because I've owned a drilling company before.
[:Basically, if it's underground, I'm your guy. And also, I have about 10 years of materials testing, which is soil compaction, steel inspections for development, and concrete testing, that type of stuff. So that's really the long and the short of it. The reason why I say this is so sad, and I really haven't even dived into this. In my opinion, they've taken my 35 years of experience and everybody else's thousands, tens of thousands of people like me, and they basically threw it out the window like they did with everything else over the last three years. None of the science matters. None of what we know matters. And what they did could quite possibly be the biggest chemical disaster pastor in world history. And I'm not kidding.
[:Well, I guess let's start by asking you this. First of all, what was the chemical that was spilled? And I'm not going to get into it. It's here in.
[:The context of... That's a good starting point.
[:So start there.
[:We do need to parse that because people need to know what this is. So vinyl chloride was the main chemical spilt. Now, I don't know of... I mean, I don't think there's been that many vinyl chloride giant spills like this. But what vinyl chloride is, it's basically a chlorinated solid. It's manmade. So all the nasty stuff is manmade. And it's in the realm of perchlorate into these chlorinated solvents. So perchlorate is the dry cleaning chemical that we always clean up. And if you'll remember, we had a friend that bought a house near a dry cleaner, clean up. And the products, when perchlorate or vinyl chloride break down in the subsurface, you get what's called DCE and TCE. And they're just really recalcitrant chemicals that do not... It's very difficult to remediate. So that's the long term stuff. The short term... And I've waited on this because I was trying to figure out, is there some new method of remediating chemicals or something by igniting it, because I've never heard of that. That is the worst thing you can do.
[:So let me stop you there. So the vinyl chloride is... You've had experience cleaning that up before in the context of, or at least addressing in the context of dry cleaners. And people don't realize this, and I didn't realize this either at first, is that we were working, I was doing some legal work for a friend, and I brought you in to do some expert environmental studies on the cleanup. There was already a dry cleaner that had existed in a strip mall, and it was adjacent to this property, and it had been cleaned up allegedly. And we brought you in to look at some of the charts and the, I don't know what you would call them, but the plot maps of how they did the remediation, where they did the drilling, and what they did. And you basically blew it away. And what I want to get into is this vinyl chloride. What does this chemical do to people, and why is it so dangerous?
[:Yeah. And there's two things here. And whenever you're dealing with environmental exposure to anything, to chemicals or anything, think of like, gasoline. You have acute reactions and chronic reactions. So this vinyl chloride thing...
[:Acute meaning immediate, and then chronic meaning long term problems, right?
[:Correct. Now, globally speaking, there's two facets of this problem. One is the near term when they burned vinyl chloride, when they ignited it. That created... I can't even... This is so unbelievable to me. And the governor knew about this. Ohio has its own Ohio EPA. I haven't heard a peep out of these guys, and they supposedly, I don't know, tacitly approved this. I've never heard of this. To remediate something like that, to burn it. When you burn vinyl chloride, you make two things, three things actually. When it burns, when it contacts moisture in the atmosphere, it immediately makes hydrochloric acid. So they made an acid fallout cloud and phosgene gas. So if you guys remember, phosgene was outlawed after World War I, and that's the main ingredient in mustard gas from Vietnam War. I've heard upwards of possibly 40... They've already counted 44,000 animals that have been immediately killed, including pets in people's homes. What they did is it's just an unmitigated disaster. Now, the fallout also of that has created dioxide. And dioxide are one of the most incredibly potent chemicals that you can make. And this is now carpeted. All the roofs, all the sidewalks, all the grass, all the farm fields around there.
[:Dioxin is exceptionally hard to get out of the environment. Again, these are all manmade chemicals, and these chlorinated solvents are the worst ones. Now, we can get into Dioxins later. That is immediately and nobody's testing for it. So everybody's saying, hey, it's fine, but nobody's testing for it. You need to test the roof. You need to do swipes on the roofs. You need to go into the fields, collect soil samples, all this stuff because it will be in our food supply now.
[:The.
[:Cows will uptake it. The plants will freaking be coated with this stuff. But it is. This is just the nastiest stuff. And I find this so hard to believe that these people did not know this. We know this. We have 50 years of remediating chemicals and spills and all this stuff. We know this.
[:Well, let me stop you there for a second because you made an important point, and it's one of my pet peeves. And I'll make it analogous to a situation I deal with. And that is this that we have in, say, body building, they say everybody's drug free. But what what they're only testing for is like cocaine.
[:If you don't test for it, then...
[:Yeah, you're clean. But they're not testing for steroids. So they're drug free. And I guess it's all about the definitions. It's always in the details. So here they're saying everything's clean, but they're not testing for dioxide. And I just wanted to make that clear because you said they're saying it's all clear, but the testing you do otherwise is not.
[:They just created the biggest Superfund site, probably ever. This is I'm still trying to wrap my head around what they were thinking. Now, what nobody else is talking about, and even on these syndicated shows, are the chronic effects of all that material in the soil which will leach into the groundwater. Now, that is... I don't know anything about East Palestine's water intake or anything like that, but you did hear that the city of Cincinnati, about a week after this happened, shut down their wells. So you have wells that are vertical for water intake and wells that are horizontal. And they shut down their horizontal wells because those are usually set into the banks of rivers. So you have natural filtration, but these things are huge collector wells. Those are probably the ones that they shut down. They still have their true groundwater wells going. But when you get water out of a river, say, or that type of situation, you have these giant collector wells. So the city of Columbus, I think, has 10 or 12 of them in this, I believe, it's the Sion of Water shed. This stuff, number one, it does caparate readily.
[:But you have so much material, I guarantee you it's in the substrate. And the thing is it's heavier than water, just like the gas that they have is heavier than air. So that creates a freaking suffocation situation right away. But this type of material, and it's really slippery, gets everywhere. And it's heavier than the groundwater. It's heavier than the river water. And it will be everywhere.
[:Down there. So let me ask you, they...
[:And real quick. So what happens is when it gets into the sub, the substrate, microbes and the air in there will break it down to what are called daughter products. So you're not going to necessarily see vinyl chloride per se, but you'll see the DCE and the TCE. And those were the products that our buddy, that's what was in his ground. The guy.
[:The dry cleaner ground.
[:Yes, the dry cleaner. So the problem with that is when it travels through the subsurface and into groundwater, what happens is it'll hit your basement. And remember, his wife was pregnant at the time, it's her first child. And that's why I'm like, You got to get the heck out of there and don't let your wife in there. Because what these chlorinated solvents do is they're horrible for mothers, they're horrible for fertility, they're a neurotoxin. And the chronic effects are liver failure, whatever it does to your brain and your neuro system. And also it affects fertility and birth rates. And this, you had what? A million pounds of this stuff? That is going to disperse into the environment, into the soil and into the groundwater. It's going to be everywhere. I haven't looked at the geology of East Palestine or the hydrogeology to see how far away it is from the Ohio River. But a lot of times that stuff, and there's so much of it that it'll just dive under the river if the geology is correct, if it's a sand or cobbled environment. But it's just I have never heard of... And this is what you would do in 1920 is burn this stuff.
[:To this state...
[:Yeah.
[:I know. Well, let me stop you there because what I want to do is, Norm, give us a... I want to do a little quick blurb or background on what exactly happened. It was obviously rail cars, but were they tanker cars and they derailed? So I think we should probably lay that foundation because it's relevant here and how much of this stuff actually went into the environment.
[:Well, the NTSB has come out with a preliminary report just, I believe, yesterday, made a lot of news that monitoring systems for the railroad as far away as Salem, Ohio, with the 50 car train on its way to East P allestine, had detected more than 250 degrees Fahrenheit above ambient. Whatever ambient was back on that day, what was it, February third or whatever day that was that the accident occurred. Roughly, let's just round it off, 300 degrees Fahrenheit was being detected on the wheel bearings. The theory at this point, working theory, is that's why the axel failed, and that's what led to the derailment. Out of 50 cars, what they say, J, which I'm sure is where you're getting your 1 million pound figure from, is five of the cars were compromised and leaking. Go ahead, Jay, you had something.
[:Well, yeah, it was actually 149 rail cars, and they had two upfront engines, and now they put an engine midway through these streams.
[:Okay. And yes, that was correct. There was some failure in a wheel bearing.
[:So was.
[:It 50 that left the rails then?
[:And the other one... You know what? I don't know that.
[:That must be where the...
[:38, it said D rail, 38 rail cars on main track one. Yeah, I read this report. What a piece of crap this is. It says vinyl chloride is a flammable petro chemical. No, it's not. Vinyl chloride is a chlorinated salvant and it's manmade. They basically use that stuff for making PVC pipes, which is basically an part, unless you burn it in your backyard, and then you'll make de oxons just like what they did. So for the life of me, I can't understand why or how they came to the conclusion that it was the correct thing to do to leak this stuff into a pit or a trench.
[:Well, let me stop you there. What did they do? What did they do?
[:This is how I understand it. Like I said, I didn't dive real deep into this just because it's a maddening situation and it's sad for me. I just can't believe it. What I heard is they had four rail cars laying on the ground, vinyl chloride seeping out, them. They made a trench to collect it all. Then once it was in the trench, they made the decision to ignite it. They called that a controlled burn. It was only controlled in the fact that they threw a flare in there and they controlled when they ignited it. That's it. In order to do what they thought they were going to do, like I said before, you would need to have an oven controlled environment, 2,000 degrees to properly incinerate this stuff. No, they just lit it on fire. That's an uncontrolled burn. They made phosgene freaking hydrochloric acid and a dionoxin fall out from this. This is exactly what they did. It's unbelievable.
[:To me. Steve and Jay, Brett, what I had heard early on when they were trying to explain this within the first day or two was, and they used the word glimmering, which probably means something to a chemist, but the authorities put out press release that the chemicals in the tanks were glimmering and were tantamount to exploding. So the analogy that they gave was like a soda can pulling the tab and letting it slowly out so that it would go into the trench and then, I guess it should have been then pumped and recontainerized, but they decided to burn it. But the explanation for why they did a... Why they pumped the chemicals out of these tanker cars that were compromised was that the chemicals were glimmering, and I guess that means getting heated up somehow and we're in danger of going kab. And then a chain reaction of lighting other non leaking container cars full of other chemicals that would then set off a domino effect, I guess, is what they were worried about. What they have done now, almost three weeks later, what they've done now is pinned that decision to use the flares to catch the trench on fire on the local fire chief.
[:That's unbelievable. Yeah. So the US EPA, the Ohio EPA, whose director has been on scene, just so you know that J, she's been out there. But I don't want to get into the competency because I'm not sure if she's just not good on camera or on mic or what the deal is. But she seems to not really have a grip at least her public pronouncements on what the deal is. But she, the national EPA guy, Michael Reagan, Budit Jed, all these people are basically saying Governor DeWine, all of them are basically saying that it wasn't their call, that they gave the fire chief some information and he had to make the call. So you can just imagine being in his role and having people give you information incomplete. Norfolk Southern said they didn't make the call. The fire chief made the call to light it on fire. And what information he got that led to him making that decision, if it really was his decision, right? Or was he convinced to do it? I think all that has... We're going to have hearings on this thing, and I guess we'll find out down the road. The other thing you had brought up, Jay, local farmers have been on the news.
[:Local people who know the area in East Palestine generally know the hydrology or whatever the correct word is, have made statements which need to be, again, verified by people like you. But they've made statements that there is not a good clay layer. And of course, farmers having to irrigation their fields know all about whether or not the soil is going to hold water. If there's clay underneath it, like there is here in the Columbus area, we have a good clay layer, for example, where I live in Licking County. I think the type of clay is Pihuamo clay. At any rate, it really holds the water, and they have to actually lay a drainage pipe in to get the water out of the soil because it won't drop down into the aquifer. But they're saying out there in East Palestine, it's the other way around, that basically you put water on the field, poof, it's gone. It goes right through the soil and there's not a good clay layer. So that probably adds some urgency, would it not for these Dioxan, the TCE breakdown going right through the soil, right to the bottom of the water, I guess.
[:Yeah. And that's what I was getting at before when I said I didn't know really the geology or hydrogeology. That's the intricacies of a cleanup once it hits soil and starts to basically seep into the soil. I'll get to that in just a second.
[:Yeah.
[:So they're saying they left it all up to that poor fire marshal out there in East Palestine. Oh, my Lord.
[:Population 4,700 people. And you know?
[:What freaking lack of leadership at our upper level? That is unreal.
[:So what I don't understand about this whole thing, and I will defer to the whole glimmer or whatever. My whole thing is, why not construct a quick trench that has some, for lack of a better word, sheeting underneath plastic sheeting or something like that. What I don't know about vinyl chloride is can you pump that back into another rail car? Is it that Voldo? I don't think it is. There are many pumps out there that are non sparking that are or non that will not cause a fire. What I don't understand is why couldn't you pump out of that trench into something else and then just control the leakage from those tanks? It says in the DOT documents right here, eliminate all ignition sources, no smoking flares, sparks, or flames from the immediate area. All equipment must be grounded. Yes, we do that all the time. Stop the leak. This is like spray the other cars to keep them cool. It was 10 degrees out there. So the ambient temperatures were actually very conducive to keeping everything cool. Now, they now have drone water dispersement technologies. You could just have that drone keep everything cool. If it does go, well, then it goes.
[:But you didn't light, what is it, 115,000 gallons of stuff on fire. They did have evacuation. I just read protocols in place. I just don't understand how it got to that point where they couldn't recover the product and decide to light on fire. That's unbelievable. That's like 1976. Hey, let's just throw a flare in there. It'll be good.
[:Let me ask you this. First and foremost, I can't imagine there was not some protocol to deal with this should it occur. I would think somewhere in the middle, somebody would have said, Look, we're hauling all this many gallons of this stuff that if it spills, it's really bad, and everybody knows it's really bad. So if it does happen, what's the protocol? And then secondly, it happens. There's this spill. Do you have any insight or experience on what should go on or what is typical to go on? In other words, this awful spill, what happens next?
[:Yeah. That's why I mean, this is so sad, Steve. It's like they threw out 50 years of health and safety and environmental training right out the window. That's what it.
[:Seems like to me. Do you think that's because of just panic? Do you think it's because of something else?
[:I don't understand why because all fire and rescue personnel have drilled on this. Norfolk Southern, I'm sure that they have their own document dealing with this. I'm reading off the DOT cut sheet here from the National Library of Medicine, NIH, of what to do in a vinyl chloride tanker spill. We have all of this stuff.
[:Does any of it say put in the trench and burn it?
[:No, never. No, that's what I'm saying. I've been waiting to see what the excuses and all this stuff, every single person I've heard now on national TV, guys like me, guys who specialize in rail car freaking cleanups like this, they're just shaking their head like I am. They're like, This is absurd what they did.
[:Well, can you share with us... So, Jay, Columbus, Ohio, I go out my back door and there's a tanker that spilled and I say, I'm the governor. I say, all right, call the expert. So they'd say ring a ring, ring a ring. This is like a law school. They used to do this, ring a ring, ring a ring. You're the lawyer and you get the call at midnight. What do you do? So I call Jay and I say, Jay, what do I do? I've got this stuff. It's spilling. I'm the governor of the state of whatever.
[:So what I was of my first jobs out of college was at this company called hand dex. We did emergency responses. We drilled on this stuff. This is 1990, '92, '93. You go there, you assess the situation, you have incident commanders. This is all prescribed.
[:There's 24 7 guys on call.
[:Yeah. They're all over the place. This is nothing new.
[:You get called to the scene, you assess, what do you do?
[:Yeah. You assess, you do exactly what I'm reading off here. Eliminate all emission sources. They did have evacuations of one to two miles. They should have kept all that and kept people. I know people are going to be mad, but this.
[:Is well, we talked about it. You tell people, you get them out and you tell them, you warn them. And if they don't leave, well, then that's on them. At some point, people have got to make a decision. But the protocol would say get evacuations going.
[:Yeah. And then what you do is you assess the situation. You prevent entry into all the waterways, all surface waterways, basements, catch basins, all that stuff. They have all that equipment to plug all that up. You do that. This is isolated area until the gas is dispersed. Guys go to class on this stuff and drill this stuff. We've done it for.
[:40 years.
[:So the magnitude may be greater, but for life and me, I just can't understand why somebody would throw a flare in a trench and burn this stuff. They made it a million times worse. Well, maybe.
[:The trigger was the glimmering piece.
[:Maybe it comes.
[:Down to that.
[:But we have derailments with petro chemicals, and they're sitting there shimmering, they're heating up. Got you.
[:And here's the thing. And there was a fire, right?
[:Right. Yeah, there's fire. But they were putting.
[:It out. They were putting it out.
[:They actually had drone technology.
[:And I guess that is, I'm not trying to explain this for them, but just trying to understand what they were saying. And it seems like what they were saying, what the governor was saying is this was the least worst decision they could make. In other words, the way Governor DeWine has explained this is that all that he was getting was bad decisions, and he had to pick the least worst. And now he picked the worst.
[:He literally ignited a chemical bomb.
[:Right there. Let me ask if this helps you further analyze that it could have been handled differently. In the news today is that the wastewater, I assume, from putting out the front...
[:Oh, I was going to.
[:Get to that. The wastewater has been collected, or is in the process now of being collected, and it's being trucked to Texas to be dealt with by a contamination company there that...
[:They'll incinerate it. They'll incinerate. So the fact that they were able now to collect wastewater from this incident supports... Again, I'm not an expert, but it supports your point of view that the chemicals to begin with could have been somehow corraled or stored. Because if the wastewater can be recovered, that means the wastewater is there. They're able to somehow suck that up or vacuum it up. They could have been doing that with the vinyl chloride, I guess.
[:I heard that there is 50 VAC trucks there on site and they still ignited it. Wow. That's why I don't understand the properties of vinyl chloride. Somebody would have to prove it to me that you couldn't recover that. It seems like that they didn't wait too long. They just freaking did it.
[:It's unheard of.
[:It's unheard of in my industry.
[:The other small factor that they claim went into the decision was the prevailing wind at the time was away from the town. And whoever made the decision may have felt like, oh, this is like, normally the wind blows the other way. And since we have right now the wind blowing away from the town, heck, let's throw a flare in there.
[:So how many hundreds of acres of Amish farmland did they just contain?
[:Diamondate. Yeah, bingo. Right. Dioxins.
[:When dioxins fall out like that, this stuff doesn't go away. Show us...
[:You had a diagram that you showed us off the air, a little bit of what happens when this stuff gets into the ground. If you can share the screen with us and show us what happens now because of this.
[:Also, I forgot to, in my background, say I got my Masters in geology and data analytics, which means I'm really good at cleaning this stuff up and looking for trends and finding this stuff. So that's my expertise. I designed this stuff.
[:You go in and figure out where to look for this stuff and make sure it's all gone. Okay.
[:Yes. And then how to treat it and then to keep the treatment going. Let me try to share here. Okay, let me see. There we go. There. All right. Can you see it?
[:Yeah, we got it.
[:And explain it pretty well for.
[:The podcast listeners, too, if you can. Yeah. This is a generalized diagram program of how you investigate a plume of product that's in the subsurface.
[:Underground?
[:Yes, underground. So now, like Norm said, when they use all that water, they're pushing a lot of this stuff into the ground, and just the weight of this product will dive into the ground.
[:Now, you've told me before that sometimes the weight... You've said this stuff is heavier than water.
[:Yes, it is. So this will dive in, say, a sandy, cobbly substrate. And as Norm said, I haven't pulled up any well logs of the area, but I am looking at a map, and this is approximately, I don't know, it's pretty close to the Ohio River Valley. So those valleys, you have all sorts of stratified sediments in these river valleys that are conducive for stuff like this to just zip right into the subsurface, into the water supply, held down probably all the way down the Ohio River. That's why Cincinnati turned off their collector wells. And this stuff moves pretty quick and it can in the right geologic environment. What this diagram shows, and you can see in the explanation, the plume. So this is your plume, right?
[:The plume being the chemical spill that's underground.
[:Correct. So you're looking at it from a plan view or up top. So what you have to do is you know where your spill happens, so you have your monitoring well, your background wells here, and then you design your well network to assess the width and vertical dimensions of the plume.
[:Now, when you're talking wells, you mean actually digging holes in the ground and checking to see if this stuff, this chemical has reached a certain direction. So when I'm looking at these little bullseye looking things... These little.
[:Circles, yeah. So monitoring wells.
[:Holes in the ground.
[:Yeah. So soil sample points. So what I would do first off out there is I would take a real... There's very slick ways of doing this, environmentally speaking. So you can get a rig out there and you can do a bunch of soil samples and it'll tell you what's happening in the subsurface. And you have to be able to think 3D. It's not just 2D, you have to figure out where this stuff is vertically. So you're going to have nested data sets, say from 10 feet to 20 feet, 20 feet to 30, 30 to 40 to see where this stuff is. And then you track it all the way out. And once you do your soil samplings, then that's how you design your well configuration. The wells will sample the groundwater. So you get samples from your soil samples. It's twofold. You do soil sampling and you do water sample. Soil sampling is to figure out exactly what's in the soil and what your soil is comprised of. What your geology is. And then you put in your wells to get your water samples. I'm guessing these wells will be nested too. So well, you'll have casing, PVC, go figure, right?
[:And you're trying to find vinyl chloride. It's just like a water well, except you're looking in a stratified area to see where the chemicals are. You'll have a solid piece and then you'll have a screen at the bottom of it so you can collect samples and the groundwater will flow. To the right here will be the Ohio River Valley. This is exactly how it is geographically. Your spill is here, it'll migrate this way and it'll also turn. It's not homogenous under there. So you've really got to know what you're doing to find this stuff and to properly contain it. What I'm concerned about is if this gets in your groundwater and the Ohio River, man, that stuff is nasty. You saw those fish kills already, right? That was the first couple of days there was a creek nearby and just thousands of fish already dead. So this stuff, it was catastrophic what they did. They had it controlled, and then they lit it on fire. And to Norm's point also, when they're using all that water, well, that's just going to help this stuff move along. You're just basically putting a plunger at the left end of this and just pushing it that way.
[:So this is really a threefold problem. You have the initial air contamination. Well, now you have surface contamination dinoxins and how much farmland was torched. You're going to have to have some sampling program where, like Norm said, wherever the prevailing winds went, you're going to have to take samples off of roofs cars, people's front lawns, and also all that farmland that got torched. That's one part. Then the other part is making sure, and I think I read there's 115,000 gallons that were contained. We don't know how much spilled or is in the ground. That's the other thing. It's always an equation of how much and where. Then you design, and this is all rudimentary. This is your investigation to figure out where things are. Then you come in and you design a remedial strategy to capture all that you can capture. And like I said before, the primary way that this contaminates homes or the pathway to injustice is inhalation. So this shows you can have bio barriers. So you can literally, like I've dug these barriers 100 feet and you fill it with clay right here as a barrier, and then you suck out everything else.
[:So you can actually put in some oxidation or some air up here. I have read it's really difficult. It's not like petroleum. These chlorate and solvents will break down with microbes, but you have to... It's really intense to do that. And that may be the only way, but you need some barrier to protect the Ohio River Valley and figure out where it is. And then you can collect it, it'll pile up behind these barriers. So you can pump that out. You can pump it out and treat it. Also, what you would want to have, so your dissolved phase, when this stuff breaks down, there's a vapor phase component of it. That gets in the subsurface and that's what gets into basements, utility corridors. That's the stuff that you inhale over time. You can develop liver cancer, fertility issues.
[:That's like radar. It's something like radar gas.
[:Yeah, it's something like that but.
[:It's coordinated. Obviously more poisonous.
[:Yeah, exactly. This shows a capture of your dissolved stuff. You have injection wells, you inject air to stimulate the microbes and to also push the vapor to your extraction wells. These will be above the water table so you can extract the vapor in the subsurface. This is just a rudimentary one that I found that something like this may, in fact, go in to remediate this stuff. But this is going to take a while to design and get in the ground. In all that time, your product is moving and it's moving with the groundwater. In this area, it's all going to go to the Ohio River Valley. It's all going east. What's your best guesstimate on a timetable then?
[:I know this is a big guess, but...
[:On emergency actions that I've been on, I've been called out at three in the morning, and we have wells in by four to collect product and prevent it from going into sewers or what we call sensitive receptors. And sensitive receptors can be utility corridors, they can be water bodies, they can be anything. Anything sensitive to whatever that detainment is. So here, if I knew, I'd throw some wells in down here and probably right in the middle, and you can start pumping that right now.
[:I.
[:Don't know if they've done that.
[:I want to say this, I want to step out here for a second and say this, we're parenthetically. Jay, you've been involved with what makes you a unique commodity here to help us assess this is that you have done this not only in a classroom in like pie in the sky area, but you've actually had your boots on the ground. I mean, literally in boots in the mud.
[:Yeah, I've actually counted. I've been involved in 2,500 cleanups, but of those 2,500, easily half of those I've drilled myself. And I cut my teeth on actually installing remediation, installing and maintaining remediation systems, groundwater remediation systems. So I'm a pump guy, piping, and also field. So I get it done in the field. That is like my superpower.
[:Okay. This isn't just I think about this stuff. No, I collect the data in the field and then we go design it.
[:Okay, this is Norm. One of the stories, again, reliability of this story, I don't know. But one of the stories with video accompanying the story, purporting to show backhoes and shovels, restoring the rails, the rail bed, the Berm that the train tracks are laid on. And the, I don't want to call it accusation, observation, perhaps, of the locals is that Norfolk Southern's construction crews or reconstruction crews just took the existing predominant soil that had just been impregnated with dioxans and other products from the burning. That very same soil they used for reconstructing the rail beds.
[:The rail bed? Yeah, that should have been all disposed of.
[:That.
[:Should have been trucked off and disposed of.
[:That's what I thought.
[:But here's the thing with rail beds. Number one, it's almost like an act of Congress to drill inside of a right away in a rail bed because they're all contaminated. And the railroad companies don't want you messing around with their right away at all.
[:It's just a known fact. Now, rail beds do serve a different purpose in the fact that they can provide some mechanical containment because they're so hard compact. That compaction will help with shallow groundwater migration. But if this is some sandy, cobbled environment which is that close to the Ohio River, which you could be in a nice sand and gravel former Ohio River waterway, and that's always a sandy, cobbled environment where this stuff just zips. So I would first assess the plume, and you can even put... So in situations like this, you can actually achieve a mechanical barrier by installing wells down gradient, which is going left to right. You install groundwater wells down gradient and you pump so much that you actually control the direction of the groundwater flow. You can build a barrier so it will not migrate beyond. But you got to know you got to have that initial information first of your plume, what the geology is, where the groundwater is, how deep is the groundwater. And to your point, Norm, if there's a clay layer, because you don't want to pop through a clay layer that you have because that's a confining barrier in the ground.
[:So a lot of times, and I've done this before, where you'll go into that clay barrier and make a sump in there, like three feet, if the clay barrier is thick enough, put a sump in there and this stuff will bounce along on that clay layer because it's heavier than the then the groundwater itself. And then you can collect it out of there. And I've actually done that in near to creek watersheds like this before because we found free product. We found free solvents down at depth. This was a, quote, solven t recycling facility. When you look at the photographs, this guy wasn't recycling anything. He was taking all this stuff from all these companies. He just put it on a pad, in the back. He had hundreds of 55 count drums. What he was doing, what he did, he built a pond. These kids are swimming in the pond. There was a 40 foot sand and gravel layer, and everybody's drinking the groundwater in this area. When we were doing the investigation, my geologist called me and said, Man, everything looked good except this last sample, I was getting high hits on my field instrument.
[:I go, Huh, that's interesting. This guy was really good. I said, Well, take one more sample. I said, Are you still in the sand and gravel? He goes, Yeah. I said, Go another five feet. He goes another five feet. He goes, Man, it just keeps getting worse and worse. I'm like, Huh, I go, Go ahead and chase it. He chases it down to a clay layer. We found four feet of free product, free solvents on the clay layer, and that sparked a million dollars clean up. What this guy had done when he built this freaking pond, and maybe it wasn't 40 feet, it was like 20 feet or something, he'd popped through that clay layer in the pond. He was dumping the solvents in the pond. And The solvents, and then we traced it. I could actually trace it with my data. We did soil bornes, and you could see exactly the depth and where he was injecting this in. It went through the clay layer, hit the bottom confining clay layer, and that was bouncing along there. It was going under the creek to other people's homes.
[:In this situation...
[:You're going to have that here. You're going to have free product underneath the ground. You got to figure out if you have any confining layers down there.
[:That'll help. Obviously, there's got to be some significant, at least we would hope, there's going to be significant testing and remediation and all sorts of work that has to be done. How does that happen? You have EPA, you have the state EPA, you have the federal government coming in, then you got department of... You've got this conglomerate of political debacle weighing in on this. And then obviously, the government doesn't have the guys with boots on the ground out there doing it. So they contract locally or they contract with the company. Break down for us, if you could, how this has to happen and maybe break down how it should happen, and then maybe we'll talk about what probably will happen.
[:Typically, it's the owner operating. It's their fault. So they're a Solvent company, no pun intended or pun intended. Norfolk Southern, what's their market cap? 55 billion? Yeah. They have their own health and safety teams. They have their own trained guys to do a lot of this. They would contract out to somebody like me. They would have preferred contractors for emergency response, for drilling and testing, testing, all that stuff. It could be under one umbrella, but it should be all on them. And there should be investigation. This should have happened after they lit this stuff on fire. You should have drill rigs out there right now trying to figure out where this is because time is of the essence. You have so much product and it is going to zoom down to... It's like water or electricity, right? Path of least resistance. And you got to figure out where that path of least resistance is and then head it off at the past. Nobody's talking about that on a national level. All I've heard is Cincinnati closed off their wells.
[:Apparently, Huntington, West Virginia did not. They made the decision. Now, that's week old news. They may have since shut it down. What triggers North for Southern.
[:To get this going? Do they have to be sued.
[:To get this going.
[:Or should they.
[:Just do it on their own?
[:No, they should. When you look at this as an environmental liability, the worst thing you want is to involve civilians. That's your cost go up exponentially. So if I have a gas station and I have a leak and there's somebody that has a groundwater well, the next property over, I've always advised my clients, Man, you got to take care of this now before they get involved, before you get the lawyers involved. Well, they've already involved the whole community. This is such a disaster of what they did. And like I say, now you have three areas that you got to figure out, the surface, the air, and now the groundwater and the soil, soil and groundwater in the spill area. There already, what is it, 6 or 12 lawsuits already out there, at least six class actions, I think.
[:So.
[:They're already in it up to their next. They have insurance, which this is going to be huge. I don't even know how any of that works. But if they're found to be negligent in their maintenance of that car that freaking seized up, how does that work? I don't know. But they're going to spend a boatload of money. Yeah.
[:This.
[:Very well, I'm hearing incredible people out there saying that this could be worse than T urn ovel.
[:The NTSB report, the preliminary that you cited earlier, the NTSB spokesperson mentioned the fact that when the overheated bearings were being detected prior to East Palestine, that then a trouble light indication would go up to the locomotive operator and they should have brought the train to a stop. They should have. He is implying that something in that system, either electrical or human, did not perform as it should have.
[:Yeah, I heard the same thing. What do they call it? The box detectors or something specifically to detect elevated temperatures. Well, that's what the Caboose used to be for. When those guys would, they would look for fires. That's why you had a Caboose. That's why I had people back there. Now you don't. Now you have these detectors. I don't know the technicalities of all that, but I have heard that same thing that this was detected and then there was some failure or whatever. All I know is I saw a ring camera of that thing going through.
[:The town.
[:That didn't look like it was going under 50 miles an hour. That thing looked like it was motoring fast. I don't know because apparently with hazardous chemicals, you have a speed limit. It didn't look like it was going the.
[:Speed limit. I'll tell you this. I've been in Salem, Ohio a lot where the detectors picked up the 300 Fahrenheit degree pairings. There are apartment buildings and condominiums and old neighborhoods that are just their show pieces. I mean, it's a beautiful community, Salem, Ohio. The railroad is directly adjacent to these buildings. Had the derailment occurred in Salem, holy cow, the scale of what we'd be looking at would just completely swallow up East P alestine. They are so lucky this didn't happen because the physical crash alone, when you look at the dispersement of the cars there in East P alestine, that would have infiltrated actual neighborhoods in Salem, Ohio.
[:So it's funny you bring that up because there's apparently.
[:A.
[:Movie that came out two, three years ago called White noise, filmed in Salem, Ohio, a train car derailment that dispersed noxious gasses. Wow. How odd.
[:Is that? That is odd.
[:That's why I call it Columns of Truth, Norm. Because Hollywood will give you Columns of Truth.
[:That reminds me. Remember when Three Mile Island happened just a month before the China syndrome movie debuted. Then 30 days later, Three Mile Island had their incident. Go for it here. It freaked people out to this day, we haven't licensed a new nuclear power plant, maybe one plant in the last 50 years. Right.
[:And the technology is so far ahead.
[:And this is where I think it's worthy of... We can wrap it up with this final topic here, and that is, what happens next? Because everybody's going to say now rail safe or rail transfer or rail transportation is no good. It's we shouldn't be doing it. There's always a political backlash to this stuff that is designed to look good but doesn't really help the problem. I tell this old Thomas Soul story where there was a two year old that died on a plane or something like that. Now the FAA creates a regulation that all two year olds have to have seats and then deaths of kids goes up during travel because parents could no longer afford to take them on planes, which was otherwise the safest way to travel. And then they all had to get in their cars and drive on highways where there were more crashes because people couldn't afford planes. In other words, there's always a bigger picture than just the current what looks good solution. And, J, I know this isn't your expertise, but you're a smart guy and you've got common sense, which is what we like here at Common sense Ohio.
[:It's like, what needs to be done, maybe, to make sure that this stuff doesn't repeat without torpedoing our infrastructure and our ability to do what we need to do to operate as a society? Because it's easy to say no more training, no more chemicals, but obviously we need training and chemicals. So where does this go from here?
[:Well, there has to be a complete review of the train process itself. I've heard anecdotally that Norfolk Southern personnel hate these giant trains. They think that there should be no more than 80 cars. This was 149 cars. Now, out where I'm at out here in the Southwest, you can see these giant trains, but there's nothing around here. Absolutely nothing. That's safe. But when you're in populated areas like this, I think you have to look at that. You have to look at all the maintenance records. Then you have to look at this spill response. I just fail to see the common sense in what they did.
[:The NTSB lady also, the spokesperson lady for the NTSB, she also slipped this in, J, which I think we may... Therefore, since she slipped it in, I think we're going to hear something about this. She said something about we are examining the placarding on the rail cars. That tells me that they think maybe the identification of what was in these rail cars might be at issue.
[:That has been an issue for rail transport. I also heard that too, Norm, anecdotally, that there's been some consternation in the automotive industry about placarding. I don't know what that would affect.
[:Yes, right. Does that mean you can only have 80 cars?
[:Or does it mean you give prior notice, perhaps, to emergency responders that these types of chemicals will be passing through your town during this number of hours, stand by, whatever?
[:Well, that's funny you should say that because they did hand out medical bracelets. The fire department did, three days before this happened, to monitor medical conditions in case of a, what did they say, a catastrophic event.
[:Wow.
[:How odd.
[:And.
[:The EPA 11 days before this happened, increased the maximum exposure to vinyl chloride from, I think it was 100 parts per billion to 100,000. They increased it by 1,000 with with zero studies.
[:Wow. I'm just like, Man, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I'm just like, That's three things that are really odd.
[:That is odd.
[:Steve brought up... In chlorinated solvents, you guys don't understand this stuff is highly regulated. It's highly toxic. It's manmade. It does not occur in nature. I've never seen just lax. This is just crazy. This is some of the worst stuff you can clean up in the environment.
[:Wow. If you're just willy nilly, just increasing your standards by a thousandfold, that's unbelievable to me.
[:It's like, over the last three years, all science, physics as we knew it just doesn't exist anymore. They're just doing it willy nilly.
[:When Steve says, Where does this go? The ultimate bad place where this could go is a love canal situation where you abandon the town because you can't clean it up.
[:That's what people are saying. This town probably will need to be bulldozed.
[:Yeah. and here's the thing. Love Canal is like a turnip. You go to Love Canal and it's like a ghost town and they have underground fires going on. And it's crazy.
[:And by igniting this, they literally set off a bomb. Wow. If they didn't ignite it, I just... And I don't know. And I will give them at least a little credit on that end. I'm pretty sure you could have pumped this stuff out and done it correctly. It may have taken a week to ensure that everything is correct. But now look at what you got.
[:Well, you have to wonder then, why not explore that option? And then this is where the conspiracy theories generate because there's already people out there saying, Well, they burned it to hide evidence of something else. Jay, you always hear me say this all the time that you just never default to some nefarious intent or bad motive when you can just simply explain it by stupidity and incompetence and negligence. But with all this stuff stacking up, it's hard to ignore some of the stuff that's happened in the last two or three years culminating, not culminating, but represented maybe by this. And if it was a complete abandonment of normal protocol and clean up geology, then why in the hell does that possibly happen in this scenario? Is it just to cover up the fact that you didn't have the right placards or to cover up the fact that you were violating other rules or cover up the fact that you weren't doing something else correctly?
[:Or seemingly just to get the railroad back up and running.
[:That's what I was.
[:Thinking.
[:Too. Do, exactly. That's what I've heard. But I cannot.
[:Believe it. They could have done that anyway. They would have done that anyway.
[:2023, exactly. They could have. In 2023, after everything that I've seen in my career where I've cleaned up residence is where you could light the liquid coming out of the person's faucet. They're like, We just brush our teeth with it and shower. We don't drink it anymore. And that was rural. It's like caveman. Now, this just boggles my mind. And I'm just saying, I think this is more of incompetence and people freaking panicking.
[:Sounds like it. Man, I.
[:Just find it hard. Like passing the.
[:Buck down to.
[:The fire marshal.
[:To.
[:Go light it. You got to light it or go for it.
[:That.
[:Goes to.
[:That theory. I want to talk a little bit about this notion of getting the trains back running on time, because I know we've had some arguments about this off the air where I don't necessarily disagree with that. I think we had an accident, so shutting down all rail transportation, I think, is not the right step. It might look good. It might be great for a government entity to come and say no moss, you can't come back and run. But on the other hand, that's impacting other parts of our society. This is a very dynamic problem. So I'm wondering then if there's a way to get the training running on time without igniting a plume of chemicals that are dangerous, that'll kill us. Could they have just used a different rail line for a little bit?
[:Well, that's what I was wondering, Steven. There's no way that they did not know the effects. This is 2023, man. We know this stuff. Everybody knows this stuff. Even the local fire commander, I bet, knew it. We have drilled this stuff. We have prepared for it. And what they did is the exact opposite of what I would think you should do.
[:Well, it wasn't the first or last time that that stuff ran through East Palestine.
[:Well, the Bolster...
[:I ran through there the week before. So the Bolster, J ae's point, I looked up vinyl chloride just as a regular citizen, and it was invented in 1910. This is not like something that just got hatched out of Elon Musk's factory. This is an old, over 100 years old experience that we've had in this country with this chemical.
[:That's a great point, Norm. And we also, around that time, we learned that if you ignite this stuff at a low temperature, it creates dioxide. Wow.
[:Yeah, incredible.
[:We've known that for almost 100 years. Wow. I mean, fosgene gas is outlawed because of World War I. One of the byproducts of a low temperature burning is fosgene gas. Why do you think all those pets died?
[:It's a war crime to use fosgene gas. It's a war crime. It's a war crime. It's been banned by the Geneva Convention.
[:They just nuked a town with it. It's unbelievable. People have skin rashes and they're already suffering acute freaking effects of this stuff. I cannot believe that some environmental attorney at Norfolk Southern said, Yeah, good to go. Because at the end of the day, they're the ones that are liable.
[:For this. It's funny because as an attorney, I always try to put myself in the shoes. If I get the call, the ring, ring, ring call that I gave you, it's like, do I get the call at two in the morning? There's been this accident, what do we do? And the first thing I would say is the first thing I would ask myself is how do we contain this debacle as quickly as possible to make sure that we cause the least bit of damage? You would just coordinate your team of experts, a guy like you would be on it. You would just get to the protocols and deal with it. You would never say... If I'm calling the shots here, I wouldn't default to some action that is outside normal protocol for dealing with this chemical. Unless I had 10 experts saying, Look, ordinarily, we would never do this, but here it's the right thing to do because. And that because better make a lot of sense. And if it doesn't make a lot of sense, I don't think that's.
[:What happened. And so far, I haven't heard one lick of sense coming out of that decision.
[:And.
[:We like common sense. When did they ignite it? How long did it take for them to do that? So February third at 9 PM, it derailed. So when did they light it on fire? Do we know?
[:Was it a couple of days after? It was within days, I think.
[:That's what I thought.
[:And there's plenty of time in that time frame to make a decision that made sense.
[:Yes. My brain has been kicking this over for a long time. I'm like, What would I have done? What would I do? When you secure it, you evacuate. You got to get people out of there. Then you got to figure out how much of this stuff is leaking out, what the fire situation is. There are protocols, I'm reading them on the DOT. It says for a rail car full of vinyl chloride, this is what you do. All these guys know that. So then I'm like, Okay, so if we can keep the heat under control, why can't you do that for a week while you're also v ackin' out of your trench the product that you see? I just don't understand why that couldn't happen.
[:I just don't get that. And here's the thing. Now, if they did marshal a bunch of VAQ trucks there, that's against protocol anyway, because in order to run that VAQ, you got to have your engine on. So you can't have any spark or anything going on. But my experience is I've cleaned up, particularly Petroleum spills. Free product, hundreds of gallons at a time, thousands of gallons with pumps that are non sparking. They're pneumatic pumps. Why can't we throw some pneumatic pumps in a trench and freaking pump that stuff out to either a tanker or some mobile... There's all sorts of mobile options now. You could.
[:Run that to a... Some pump put the product into the cars. Something. Yeah. If it was loaded into the cars using a pump, then a pump could extract it just as well. Right.
[:And it should be less hazardous because it's been exposed to the air and water. That's why I just don't understand. And I've been trying to look for clean up methods and examples of this, and there are none. You mean examples of.
[:The of what they did as opposed to what the protocol is? Both.
[:Both, okay. Of physical vinyl chloride spills. This is obviously going to be the worst vinyl chloride spill in history. This very well could be the biggest spill.
[:Every time one of these... Go back to the Titanic. It's always the worst in history. It's like this culmination of ignoring certain problems and certain things, and it's multifaceted. Then it culminates in the worst disaster with the perfect storm of conditions that it could have been. And then maybe we can do something that fixes it. I hate to say it, but it's like a common pattern from the Titanic, Hinderburg.
[:It's a complete failure of leadership. And here's the thing. If it was it makes sense that it was the decision of the local fire chief. That's exactly what I would expect a local fire chief to do. He doesn't know that this creates dioxides, fossil gas, and hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere. But somebody should have told them Norfolk Southern knew it. The OEPA knows that.
[:The EAPA.
[:Knows that. Right. Yes.
[:All those agencies have now claimed, including DOT, Budha Judge, they're all now claiming that they had people on site from the very beginning. So to your point, Jay, there's no excuse. If the EPA had people on site immediately, there's no excuse for why they let the fire chief do that. Zero.
[:And they obviously didn't have any experienced remediation guys or anything like that, which is very odd because the railroads are very well equipped and they know their stuff.
[:I got a hunch. Some of the cause of this response is going to be a political it's going to be attributed to some political incompetence where one agency doesn't want to step on another agency's toes or this guy's in charge, but the person who's in charge isn't really qualified because it was a political appointee on one side of the aisle or the other. It's like when you put people like Budhaj or these people that don't have experience in these jobs, their figurehead jobs, until they freaking matter. And so if somebody's in charge of the Ohio EPA, do they really have any expense or any experience like you have, Jay, out there cleaning stuff up so they know? So that's not the person who needs to be calling the shots. Yet, we perceive as a society that they are experts and they're not. They're not. That's the problem. We would need somebody who is smart enough to know what they don't know. And not to say that you could run the EPA. That's a whole different skill set. What you need is somebody who's in charge of the EPA, who's got somebody like you in their Rolodex.
[:One phone call away.
[:This happens. What you needed was a Redd at there. That's who you needed. The guy that used to put out all the oil fires.
[:You need guys like... You need John Wayne. You need John Wayne and Hellfighters. You need guys like that.
[:To come in there and take charge and overrule everybody, say, No, this is what you're going to do. This is why you got to do it. And you can't do that other option that you're even talking about.
[:It's an interesting point you make because there's that old John Wayne movie in Hellfighters where he's like this cowboyish guy whose job is to go put out oil rig fires. And it's based.
[:Off Red Adair.
[:A true guy. And it's the same as... What's the other stupid... I don't know if it's a stupid movie, but where Bruce Willis has to go to the asteroid to go drill. It's this cowboy attitude where these guys come in and they're not politicians and they throw their weight around. I mean, yes and I mean, no, and that's the way it's going to be. This is how it is. But it's like that's about is anti woke and anti political as it gets, you need somebody who's just going to take charge and say, here's how this goes down. I don't give a crap about your train. I don't give a crap about your money. I don't give a crap about you get elected. I'm fixing the damn problem. The buck stops here.
[:I'm the I'm the guy, I'm the woman. The thing is, when this stuff happens, and I've been on enough emergency responses, number one, everybody's trying to figure out what the heck is going on. My whole thing, when I pull up on a site, I'm like, Okay, where is the immediate danger? Am I going to get blown up? With petroleum and utility corridors, I've seen manholes blow off. It just doesn't seem like there was that continuity or some contractor that knew really what the hell was going on. When you get a bunch of these freaking bubbling bureaucrats around and you have residents screaming at you, and I mean screaming, crying, stealing your stuff, violence, that happens all the time because people freak out. This, I'm sure, was as chaotic as it gets. But it obviously... And You can't be bullied around by production. This is not a production issue. Getting the rail line going, that's where guys like me come in and say, I don't care how much money you're losing. Look what you did here. And we're going to try to clean this up as quick and as appropriate as possible. And sometimes it just takes time.
[:But my God, what they did, I still can't wrap my brain around it. I can't wrap my brain around that thought process. And what spreadsheet are they looking at? What Venn diagram are they looking at? It says, yes, ignite it. I've never seen that ever in a remedial strategy, ever.
[:Well, with that, we probably got to wrap it up. That was great, Jay. You know what? That was about the most insightful discussion on this I've heard on any news channel. And that's not just to tout us here at Common sense Ohio, but I think that was the common sense, or that was the dose of common sense that I think a lot of people needed on this to unravel this and get an idea of what really did happen, what could happen, what should have happened, and how dangerous this chemical really is. Man, thank you very much for for breaking that down for us.
[:Yeah, it's fun, man. I always like talking with you guys. I'll stay on this and maybe we can have a follow up.
[:Yeah, we'll keep you on tap and maybe we'll touch base in a couple of weeks and see where it is.
[:Yeah, I really do want to know what the root cause of all this, especially their cleanup strategy. For the life of me, I haven't heard anybody in a week since make any sense out of it. So I.
[:Don't know. Well, we're going to do that right here. All right. Cool. Anyway, for those who want to catch the backlog of all the Common sense Ohio shows, that's easy. Just go to common senseohioshow. Com You can there lives all the prior episodes of Common sense Ohio. Not all of them are as riveting as this one, but it's the same concept. We take apart issues and try to really discuss them with a common sense attitude and one that maybe isn't driven by politics or other emotion. And that's not always easy to find in this day and age. And if you want to become a sponsor, obviously, you can reach out there. If you've got a question for us, you can reach out there. You should check out Norm's blog. They're getting released at an alarming rate. He's got lots of topics and lots of things to talk about. Yeah, you can catch those at common senseohio show. Com. Brett's got a blog, too, and I, in theory, do, but it is not populated by any blogs yet. At any rate, we're going to keep taking apart this issue and all the others on common sense Ohio coming at you right from the middle, at least until now.
