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Not to minimize this, but could have been much worse. 100's of gallons instead of 1000's. Train remained upright. Sounds like they got lucky.
We should not focus on gratitude that it wasn't worse. Everything could always be worse. The point is to make things better.
Spilled oil is objectively bad, and to be harshly criticized, every time.
To address this a bit further up, where more eyes can see it: yes, be pissed that this happened at all, but it's absolutely okay to be thankful it wasn't worse. To not be thankful it was hundreds and not thousands, tens of thousands, is psychotic. Don't let that keep you from your anger at these companies, though. The derailment still happened, fuel was still spilled, don't forget it.
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You beat me too it! I was just going to link this since I just watched it.
tl;dw train regulations have been stripped back so much that government regulators inspect just 1% of train operations and have no idea where any trains are or what they're carrying, leaving following regulations up to the corporations. The largest corporation has placed "safety" as #4 in their list of priorities and runs their trains with just 2 overworked employees who regularly state they have no time to check that the train is running properly and warn that a derailment of a train carrying fuel will flatten a major american city some day soon if regulations aren't changed.
You know who owns the rails? Fucking Warren Buffet, like that cunt needs any more fucking wealth.
It sure is a good thing we didn’t give those train engineers enough vacation time and sick days! /s
I guess they didn't see John Oliver's episode about this.
Hundreds ain't great but the average train these days has 20000 tons of cargo behind it -- could have been a lot worse.
Derailments are pretty common, actually. Like dozens to hundreds a year depending on the size of the company. I suspect a few incidents last year have made the news extra sensitive.
Most derailments are basically just the train falling off the track, very slightly. This was a full on train crash.
From the article and video, this seems to be one of those times it slightly came off the track. There doesn't seem to have been collision and the train remained upright.
I dunno, it's kind of borderline imo. It certainly suffered some damage, rather than a low speed step off that simply needs a crane to put things back into place.
If you do something with your car and it suffers damage, it's hard not to call that a crash. You might be able to drive it afterwards while holding the steering wheel at an odd angle, but you've still suffered crash-level damage.
Sure, there's damage, but the train didn't crash into anything. If I drove into the shoulder of the road and ran over a piece of debris, I could easily damage my car, but I didn't crash the car.
There's not really anything subjective here, the train didn't crash into anything. It derailed and suffered damage.
If I drove into the shoulder of the road
See that's technically a crash. You collided with the curb. It might not be a crash into another vehicle or into something like a tree or a lamppost, but you're still crashing into something.
In this case, the train collided with the ground, after falling off the rails. A low speed derailment would have no damage - akin to spinning out in an open road or something - but if you hit something and cause damage that breaches some threshold.
Roads with shoulders don't typically have curbs.
Driving over the lane lines does not involve hitting a curb. As I said, in this hypothetical scenario I drove into the shoulder and debris damaged my car. I did not crash.
There's nothing subjective about this incident. The train derailed. The train remained upright. The train did not collide with an object. The train was damaged. Honestly, you're really doing some mental gymnastics to rationalize your decision to call it a collision. If you're just going to do whatever you need to do to convince yourself that it was a collision, nothing I'm going to say will change your mind.
In the US, maybe. Last derailment we had in Czechia was in 2010. Germany had it last year, but it's still less than once a year.
I don't buy that. Unless you define "derailments" as "giant catastrophe". Trains regularly slip off tracks, fall over, and occasionally catch fire, even in Europe.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1128848/accidents-on-european-rail-networks-by-country/
I am curious about the amount of rail in those countries vs the US. I know Europe likes their passenger trains a ton more than the US, but the US loves freight trains, and that seems to be where most of the derailments happen.
If the United States has, like, 20x the freight rail/trains, it would make sense for them to have 20x more derailments, essentially adjusting for population of freight trains. Not to give a pass to the States, for sure, but knowing this number would be a bit more helpful.
Czechia has 9,567 km.
USA has 220,044 km.
Wow thanks for the information. I think this pretty well illustrates the point. The states have 22 times the rail as Czechia, so we'd expect Czechia to have 1/22 the incidents the states have. Now we need the number of incidents in each country and we can make a proper comparison.
I don't expect you to provide that, though, you've been more than enough help for a villain of such infamy miss Bonny ;p
You're welcome.
Mainly because the corporations won’t invest in safety systems
Or hire enough people for these super-long trains
Same as a school shooting, this isn't news anymore.
I assure you diesel fuel is great for the environment, it makes it go faster.
I don't think that's true; diesel fuel isn't red.
You see, the environment without fuel will not be able to go anywhere. By adding fuel to the environment it is now able to leave at highway speeds.
It's got what the environment craves!
Where’s BoBo? It is Colorado. Is she still blaming Buttigieg for the woes of American transportation?
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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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