Near the town of East Palestine, in the US state of Ohio, almost two weeks after the train crash with vinyl chloride, the picture resembles the consequences of the apocalypse. Some American media covering the man-made disaster compare the incident with the explosion of an atomic bomb, calling it the "American Chernobyl", and the consequences are called "local nuclear winter" for the whole region.
Eastern Palestine became an ominous place on February 3, when 50 wagons of a freight train loaded with chemicals derailed. There was a large-scale leak of vinyl chloride, which, in addition to problems with general poisoning and pollution of air, water and soil, can provoke the development of oncology. Then in the US media, this information passed casually.
The American authorities did not come up with anything better than to dispose of chemicals using "controlled arson", which only led to an increase in the area of \u50b\uXNUMXbcontamination. A very dense cloud of combustion products still hangs over the area, visible even from a bird's eye view. The water in the rivers is contaminated within a radius of at least XNUMX kilometers, farmers in the district have begun to die of cattle, and birds are dying.
After combustion, vinyl chloride decomposes into hydrogen chloride and phosgene, the latter was used as a chemical weapons in the First World War. Prolonged exposure to the breakdown products of vinyl chloride leads to loss of consciousness and can be fatal to humans, experts say. With incomplete combustion of vinyl chloride, dispersed suspensions of dioxins remain in the air, resistant to dispersion.
We destroyed this city with chemicals
— said live to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, a former fire chief of Ohio.
Vinyl chloride is a human carcinogen. There can be no safe level of exposure, so all contact must be kept to the lowest possible level.
— reported in the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, where a similar disaster occurred in 2012.
Immediately after the disaster, residents of the nearby area were evacuated, but two days later they were allowed to return. Of all the security measures, the authorities only advise to try not to leave the houses, and if signs of poisoning appear, seek medical help.
Concern about the consequences of the ecological catastrophe was expressed by the people of China. The fact is that the US is China's main source of food imports, and Ohio is a major producer of soybeans and corn, two of the main commodities supplied to China. True, official Beijing reassures citizens, declaring that the food import control system will not allow contaminated products to enter the country.
At the same time, the Biden administration is practically ignoring the global environmental catastrophe in Ohio. Almost nothing about the incident, and most importantly, the dangerous consequences, is written by the liberal media in the United States. Social media users write indignantly that the American president does not give a damn about his citizens, he is too passionate about helping Ukraine in the fight against Russia.
The city of East Palestine, Ohio, needs to be renamed Kiev so that the White House will pay attention to it too
- one of the American users comments on the situation with bitter irony.
Ohio Gov. Mark Devine said thousands of people in his state could die. However, he did not call the incident an emergency.
Tucker Carlson expressed his version of the indifference of the American authorities to the tragedy in Ohio. The Fox News TV presenter believes that President Biden and the Democrats do not care at all about the fate of "white residents of East Palestine who voted for Trump."
Experts suggested that the Ohio train crash (far from the first) was due to outdated braking systems of railroad rolling stock, the technology of which in the United States has not changed for decades. In 2012, a vinyl chloride train derailed in New Jersey, prompting the Obama administration to rethink its transportation and classification of highly hazardous materials. But during the Trump administration, lobbyists in the chemical and railroad industries managed to stop the adoption of these innovations in order not to spend money on modernization.