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It has been called “America’s Chernobyl.” In short, following the failure to maintain rail side detectors, a freight train containing several tanks of vinyl chloride – a precursor of PVC – experienced an over-heated axle causing a train fire and a derailment close to the town of East Palestine, Ohio. While some of the vinyl chloride appears to have ignited as a result of the train fire, there are reports that the remainder was deliberately ignited in an attempt to prevent the toxic chemical from entering the local ground water. The all too visible consequence was a giant plume of black smoke rising up to and mingling with the cloud cover.
It is the content of that plume which has resulted in the Chernobyl label. As Matt Simon at Wired explains:
“Five rail cars of vinyl chloride burned—some of it done intentionally to reduce building pressure—likely producing toxic compounds called dioxins. Because hot air from a fire rises, the flames from the train sent a black plume high into the air, potentially spreading toxicants far beyond the site of the derailment. ‘The thing about dioxins is they’re potent at really low levels, and are persistent and bioaccumulative,’ says [science director of the Science and Environmental Health Network, Ted] Schettler. This means they persist in the body instead of breaking down. ‘You don’t want dioxins deposited in the soil around East Palestine that are not going to go away, and are going to bioaccumulate in people who are exposed to it.’”
Vinyl chloride is bad enough – exposure resulting in lymphoma, leukemia, and cancers of the brain and lungs. But this is a mild risk compared to the potential consequence of dioxin fallout from that spreading smoke cloud. According to the World Health Organisation:
“Dioxins are environmental pollutants. They belong to the so-called ‘dirty dozen’ – a group of dangerous chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs). Dioxins are of concern because of their highly toxic potential… and can cause reproductive and developmental problems, damage the immune system, interfere with hormones and also cause cancer…
“Once dioxins enter the body, they last a long time because of their chemical stability and their ability to be absorbed by fat tissue, where they are then stored in the body. Their half-life in the body is estimated to be 7 to 11 years…”
While not as immediately devastating as Union Carbide’s 1984 Bhopal chemical spill – which resulted in 3,787 confirmed deaths (the actual toll probably running to tens of thousands) – In the coming months and years, premature deaths from cancer in and downwind of East Palestine are likely to run into thousands too. Particularly since, other than moving far away from the affected area, there is little people can do to protect themselves against a chemical so toxic that inhaling or swallowing even the tiniest droplet is sufficient to trigger life-threatening cancers.
In this respect, East Palestine, Ohio may well prove to be far worse than Chernobyl where, despite a long-conditioned fear of radiation, just 31 people died in the immediate meltdown, and only 50 people – almost all emergency responders – have died directly from radiation. Modelling suggests that some 4,000 excess deaths will result from the fallout from Chernobyl. But thus far, the bigger death toll has come from suicide among those forced to leave their communities and to make a new life in unfamiliar towns and cities across the Soviet Union.
Once the immediate shock of the Ohio incident has passed, no doubt much of the focus will be on the inevitable litigation – particularly when the cost of treating all of those additional cancers becomes clear. But my reason for raising it here is because it is an example of the way cost-cutting and maintenance failures within a complex system can turn minor failings into major disasters. After all, toxic chemicals are routinely moved across rail routes all over the world, and the reason hot axle detectors have been used for more than half a century is precisely because the fault is commonplace.
In an article for the Guardian, Michael Sainato points to the safety aspects of the Ohio chemical spill:
“US railroad workers say the train derailment in Ohio, which forced thousands of residents to evacuate and is now spreading a noxious plume of carcinogenic chemicals across the area, should be an ‘eye-opening’ revelation for Congress and ‘an illustration of how the railroads operate, and how they’re getting away with a lot of things’…
“Greg Regan, president of the AFL-CIO’s transportation trades department, said the loss of workers in recent years, which has coincided with record profits for railroad corporations, was the driving force for deteriorating conditions on US railroads.”
This is particularly embarrassing for the Biden administration, which broke the rail workers’ strike by imposing a contract favourable to the rail companies, and which turned a blind eye to the kind of maintenance failures which led to the Ohio derailment. In reality though, the problem runs much deeper and is as much of an issue on this side of the Atlantic and, indeed, across many of the beleaguered capitalist economies of the world.
Even before the crash of 2008, infrastructure operating costs were rising. Unseen by most economists, and unknown to politicians, the energy cost of energy – which must include the energy (direct or embodied) required to maintain the system as well as to secure the energy needed to power the economy – had been rising to the point where cost cutting was becoming inevitable. The problem though, is that while it is the value provided by surplus energy which allows infrastructure companies to be profitable, by far their biggest financial overhead is their wage bill. And so, the most common response to falling profitability (which is really the rising energy cost of energy) is to cut pay and/or force workers to put in more hours.
Among the many negative consequences of this response – falling consumer demand, debt defaults, bank failures, stock market crashes, political extremism, etc. – is the creation of conditions in which disasters become more common. In the UK, for example, cost cutting through the first half of the 1980s – including Thatcher’s destructive economic rampage between 1980 and 1982, which destroyed millions of industrial jobs – laid the ground for a series of disasters between 1985 and 1987; most of which, at root, were the result of cost cutting. In two seemingly different incidents – the 1985 fire at Bradford City football stadium and the 1987 Kings Cross underground station fire – cost cutting, in the shape of cuts to cleaning, resulted in the build-up of flammable material beneath the wooden stand/wooden escalator which provided the fuel. All that was needed was a single discarded cigarette for things to quickly get out of control. Eighty-seven people died in those two incidents, a further 365 were injured.
Staffing cuts caused both the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise vehicle ferry and the Clapham Junction rail crash. In the former, the assistant boatswain – who was responsible for closing the bow doors – had been working 14-hour shifts, seven days a week. On that fateful evening – 6 March 1987 – he had taken what was intended to be a short sleep in the hour or so between unloading and loading new vehicles for the return journey. No doubt as a consequence of extreme tiredness from overworking, the sleep was deeper and longer than intended, with the result that the ship set sail with the bow doors wide open. Within minutes, floodwater was swirling around inside the vehicle bays, causing the ship to rapidly list from side to side before finally collapsing. The – sort-of – good fortune was that the ship was still within Zeebrugge harbour when it rolled over, coming to rest on its side on a sandbar instead of sinking into the deeper waters of the English Channel. Nevertheless, 193 people died as a result of that over-worked crewman’s “brief nap.”
The electrician charged with rewiring the signalling system at Clapham Junction – one of the biggest and busiest railway junctions in the UK – over the weekend 10-12 December 1988, had also been working 12+ hours per day, seven days a week for at least the previous quarter. Little wonder then, that in the early hours of Monday 12 December, during the rush to finish the work prior to the morning rush hour, mistakes were made. Signals were wrongly wired. This may not have been a serious problem but for the fact that the rail company had also cut back on its works supervisors, so that, instead of thoroughly checking the work, it was signed off with little more than a cursory glance.
Just before 8.10am, as the 07:18 from Basingstoke to London Waterloo approached the junction, its green signal – clearing it to approach London’s busy Waterloo station – switched to red. Unable to stop, the driver brought the train to a standstill at the next signal – which was green – to contact the signal box. While he was making the call, a following train – the 06:30 from Bournemouth – proceeding passed the now green faulty signal, ran into the back of the stationary train at speed. A third, fortunately empty, train on the adjacent track then ran into the derailed wreckage. Thirty-five people died, a further 484 were injured, 69 of them with “life-changing injuries.”
While devastating for those involved, that run of British disasters – which must be seen as an outcome of the neoliberal revolution – was relatively minor in its impact. Indeed, if anything, they merely reminded us of the truth behind the old saying that “if we learn anything from history it is that we learn nothing from history.” Most of those disasters had followed earlier “near misses,” which were taken as proof that the existing safety arrangements were sufficient. Several fires had occurred on London’s underground in the years prior to the Kings Cross disaster; and it was not uncommon for ferries to cross the English Channel with their bow doors open prior to the Herald of Free Enterprise sinking – which was all too tragically repeated on the night of 28 September 1994, when the MS Estonia capsized and sank in the Baltic Sea, killing 852 people. Nor did the Clapham rail crash do much to improve the safety of Britain’s railways, which suffered a string of cost cutting-related accidents in the years following rail privatisation.
Worse is to come however, because of the rising cost of building new infrastructure coupled to the low life-expectancy of what remains. Many concrete structures built in the 1960s and 1970s, for example, were only expected to last for 50 years or so. But in the cases of essential structures like bridges and power stations, replacement building isn’t happening. Bridges are a problem because decay tends to progress unseen within the structure, so that even regular inspections – which are likely to be cut as costs rise – fail to spot problems before they threaten the collapse of the entire structure.
Power stations present a bigger risk in the UK and Europe because of the “net zero” policies which have been adopted. Unlike coal, gas and nuclear power stations, wind and solar farms have a limited life expectancy of some 20-25 years – offshore wind turbines may have an even lower lifespan because of the corrosive and kinetic impact of salt. And while governments have happily overseen the closure of coal plants, long-term and large-scale replacement has not happened. The result is that, faced with a self-sanctioned energy crisis, Europe has had to fall back on a nuclear power station fleet which is close to – and in several cases already past – its life expectancy.
Compared to other forms of power generation, nuclear has proved unexpectedly safe. Far more people have died, for example, from airborne pollution from coal plants – and then there’s the much higher death rate from coal mining compared to uranium mining. But this may owe more to something known as “the spike paradox” than to the inherent properties of nuclear. The spike paradox was initially raised as an objection to the introduction of compulsory seatbelts – the argument being that seatbelts don’t save lives they simply transfer the deaths and injuries to other road users such as cyclists and pedestrians. This is because seatbelts make drivers feel safer and so allow them to drive less cautiously. Thus, if the aim is to force drivers to be more cautious, we would do better to attach a metal spike to the top of the steering column pointing directly at the driver’s forehead. In short, the greater the perceived threat, the more likely we are to behave cautiously. In the case of nuclear power – with a couple of high-profile exceptions – this means installing and operating lots of – hopefully redundant – safety features. The problem though, is that no amount of safety features and no level of caution can protect against the inevitable decay that comes with age.
Trying to guess which disaster will occur next though, is like trying to guess which numbers will come up on next week’s lottery. But that’s not the issue. By cutting back on safety and maintenance, and by having to rely increasingly on infrastructure long past its use-by date, what we are doing is shortening the odds of disasters happening. And on a finite planet where energy and resources are increasingly in short supply, prevention becomes ever more difficult.
Chance must, of course, continue to play its part. It was good fortune of sorts that the 2020 Llanelli train derailment resulted only in a contained fire rather than an explosion of the half-a-million litres of fuel it was carrying. Nevertheless, since much of the unburned fuel leaked into the local water courses, the impact on wildlife in the area will continue for years to come. In the course of those years though, the good people of East Palestine, Ohio may find themselves wishing that their train derailment had only resulted in a fuel fire… the rest of us, meanwhile, can be thankful that but for fickle fate, it might just as easily have been us.
As you made it to the end…
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