This is an article about the East Palestine whistle-blower case against the EPA:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/whistleblower-questions-delays-mistakes-epa-sensor-plane-after-110219868
https://abcnews.go.com/US/whistleblower-claims-epa-wasted-critical-time-after-devastating/story?id=110313045
He was evidently one of the key people working on it, and was associated with Los Alamos:
https://www.osti.gov/biblio/987102
Some of the details are in this affidavit:
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/24662298/kroutil_signed_statement1_may12_2023.pdf
3 comments:
By the way it seems the East Palestine disaster has been politicized, with Republicans blaming all the problems on Democrats and government bureaucracy or so-called "deep state".
In actuality Republican policies have involved deregulation, and tax cuts to starve the Federal government of money, policies against labor unions and so forth.
If one wishes to believe that the cause of the East Palestine accident is based on Republican policies, then so be it.
That does not explain why the EPA, now under a Democratic leadership, would delay the gathering of scientific data and then inhibit what data was to be gathered. We hear the adage of "follow the science" from the left, perhaps in this case one should "follow the money."
2:47 -- I was not making the claim that only Republicans were responsible. It would be more correct to blame members of both political parties in Washington.
Also, in a legal sense, I think Norfolk Southern was found to be responsible for the accident by a court in Ohio and as a good corporate citizen they have done a lot to remediate the problem and compensate victims. The Federal government also has done a lot.
There have been various claims that the accident produced dioxins or other dioxin like compounds, which contain chlorine and might be persistent in the environment. This is no doubt true to some extent, in fact the combustion of vinyl chloride monomer can create a variety of organic chemicals from incomplete combustion as well as soot.
There was in fact evidently another whistleblower case I haven't followed that claimed the EPA was not forthcoming with some tests related to dioxins and this type of contamination.
Obviously some of this could occur naturally in the environment, and I have read of other cases (in Canada I think) where many years ago a civilian version of Agent Orange was sprayed by railroads to control vegetation near railroad tracks.
The toxicology of those compounds is a complicated topic, but they are known to affect animals much more than humans so some of the claims of extreme toxicity may be questionable.
There was an accident in Sevaso Italy which released a very large quantity of dioxins into the environment, for example, certain cancers were observed at higher numbers but the incidence of all cancers combined (where better statistics were available) was not elevated:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster
https://ehjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1476-069X-8-39
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