Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio derailed and burnt, releases thousands of gallons of extreme carcinogen.

The Hard Road Newsletter #5

Author

Garen Phillips
February 20th, 2023

Happy Monday, last week was certainly a week. Lets get at it.

We’re changing up the format and delivery schedule a bit. Rather than a novel every Monday morning, we’re going to breaking the newsletter up into 2-3 releases a week. This is going to give us more space to work with, and let us put more info in each edition without bloating the read-time for you!

Two Topics for today,

  • An ecological disaster in the making.

  • A Community Call on Discord!

East Palestine Ohio Train Derailment

So on February 3rd a Norfolk Southern train carrying Vinyl Chloride derailed and was subsequently burnt in a “controlled burn”. The coverage of the event has been minimal. In the days immediately after the event there was effectively no government response outside of the state government. Anyone searching for information who wasn’t local to the area needed to be on Twitter to hear it.

The below videos contains a wealth of information about the issue, which apparently people dangerously close are still completely unaware of this event as I learned in a conversation with Garen on Discord.

Contamination has been confirmed in the Ohio River, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Water from the Ohio River provides the drinking water to 5 Million people across 6 states.

Is the Ohio River contaminated? East Palestine train derailment sparks concerns over water

The fiery derailment of a train in East Palestine has prompted concern that the drinking water some five million people rely on could be impacted.

www.dispatch.com/story/news/local/2023/02/14/is-the-ohio-river-contaminated-east-palestine-train-derailment-sparks-concerns-over-water/69900528007

Naturally, their stock price has dropped 11% since the disaster.

It came out not long after the disaster reached national coverage that there was a Netflix Movie about…. this exact same situation, set in the same town, and even featured locals as extras. Thats… Weird?

After a train derailment, Ohio residents are living the plot of a movie they helped make | CNN

When Ben Ratner's family signed up in 2021 to be extras in the movie "White Noise," they thought it would be a fun distraction from their day-to-day life in blue-collar East Palestine, Ohio.

www.cnn.com/2023/02/11/health/ohio-train-derailment-white-noise/index.html

Yeah, that series of events actually happened

The EPA and Federal department of Transportation has assured residents of East Palestine that there are “No Toxins” and that the air and water are safe. Residents were asked to “trust the government.”

WATCH: EPA head visits Ohio after toxic train spill, asks residents to 'trust the government'

EPA Administrator Michael Regan sought to reassure residents who are skeptical of testing results that say the air is safe to breathe and the water is fit for drinking around East Palestine, where just under 5,000 people live near the Pennsylvania state line.

www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/epa-chief-heads-to-ohio-to-assess-train-derailment-response-and-hear-from-impacted-residents

This is a concern for a lot of people, because the government said exactly the same thing after the 9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

EPA misleads on air quality after 9/11 attacks

Days after terrorists brought down the World Trade Center towers, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that the air was safe to breathe, but that proved to be a dangerously optimistic assessment. Nearly two years later, EPA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reported that the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to […]

publicintegrity.org/politics/epa-misleads-on-air-quality-after-9-11-attacks

In conclusion, this hasn’t had much of an impact on the stock market or finance outside of Norfolk Southern directly. I was motivated to tell you about this because, as I said above, I was surprised to hear that people potentially in the affected area still hadn’t heard about this. That and a healthy mistrust of the government!

We’ve got a Community Collaboration call scheduled for Monday, 2/20 at 8PM! Topics of discussion include;
- Building a Coder task system for newbies and problems needing solved.
- Server setups for algorithmic trading outside of Composer.
- Coder Onboarding process/video/introduction.
- Hassan's 15min strategy.

Join us, maybe you’ll learn something!

That’s all for this edition, see you at the Call!

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