Dakota Beacon

By now there isn’t anyone who hasn’t heard what happened to the town of East Palestine, Ohio.  It would be a safe bet that even the Tee Shirt Dictator, Volodymir Zelenskyy of Ukraine has heard about it.  The Chinese can check it off the list.  Putin can eliminate it as a target of an EMT attack now.  Our own crony capitalist railroad company colluded with the local government to destroy the town and its people.

East Palestine was one of those little Main Street towns some people dream of living in - at least it appeared to be if you consult their city’s own website (“East Palestine: The Place You Want to Be”), a little town of hometown pride, friendly cops, parades and flags - a sort of modern-day River City, Iowa.  A couple of odd coincidences were observed, however.   One of them is that just before the derailment that kicked off this disaster the city adopted “MyID”, which causes some consternation in at least a few residents.  One would have to admit that this could be tremendously convenient under the circumstances.  This is a biometric program which tracks just about everything from your heartbeat to what you have for breakfast, where and with whom.  It would seem a very high price to pay for emergency services.  (And given that these usually end at the destination of a hospital, people might reasonably just say no.)  

Now, with this system in place, it ought to be clear to anyone that most people still in town are getting sick.  It doesn’t seem to matter much to the U.S. Department of Transportation, as witnessed by Secretary Pete Buttegieg’s foremost concern being the percentage of white men who work in construction (he has reputedly since written Norfolk Southern Railway a stern letter, which response reminds me just a bit of Paddington Bear’s “hard look”).  Well he might.  The railroad company whose train caused this disaster was negligent with regard to their equipment.  Film shows sparks from an impaired braking system many miles before the derailment.  We’ve all seen pictures of the condition of our tracks.  There are undoubtedly thousands more potential derailment disasters waiting to happen (there have already been several in various parts of the nation since this incident).

When an entire city is nuked there ought to be some things to learn from it, other than to electronically monitor its victims via My ID.  One would be that no nation should allow its infrastructure to so deteriorate, whether in terms of railroad equipment or tracks, that this kind of event is referred to off-handedly by the Secretary of Transportation as just one of thousands per year.  Another would be we can’t afford an administration which even contemplates putting someone who has never even had a position of responsibility with a city bus authority for Secretary of Transportation.  Another would be that some standards must be demanded in order for trains to run in this country.   

Yet another would be that local officials need to be knowledgeable about what is passing through their towns and if they can’t be they need to have immediate access to those who do.  These people decided that the best course of action when confronted with derailed train tanks containing deadly and volatile chemicals was to instigate the draining of them into a ditch and then setting them on fire.  One could hardly imagine a bunch of eight-year-old budding pyromaniacs coming up with a more likely scenario for disaster than to deliberately expose millions of people to the toxic and carcinogenic effects of this smoke.  VInyl chloride is well-known for this.  If someone had torn the CDC away from promoting toxic “vaccines” long enough to address this emergency they could have learned all about vinyl chloride - the CDC has plenty of information on this and its effects.  

Well, now we all know.  The wildlife in the surrounding area, the fish, livestock, chickens, pets and people, are getting sick.  Very sick.  Animals are dying.  We’ve seen the fish literally out of the toxic water apparently to escape it, we’ve seen the chemical sheen on the surface of the water.  We know it has to be in the soil.  People have been advised to burn their belongings.  Well, isn’t that a handy idea - for someone else.  This contamination will eventually affect the waterways south of Ohio.  CIncinnati has blocked the Ohio River from their water system (I wonder how), to protect their citizens.  The Ohio is, of course, a major waterway, even for cruises, and feeds into the Mississippi.  No way that will cause any problems, right?

Meanwhile, the people at Ground Zero are being basically left out to dry with $1,000 checks each.  There are about 4,000 people who have been living in East Palestine.  That’s $4 million - chicken feed for the railroad company and less than that compared to what our government has poured into the sieve that is Ukraine.  But it is perhaps more difficult to launder money in East Palestine.  In Picher, Oklahoma, abandoned lead and zinc mines led to ground contamination.  When this slow contamination was discovered the EPA Superfund was used to buy out those remaining there.  The town is now a ghost town.  Just how far does $1000 go in today’s economy toward relocating your family, perhaps abandoning your farm?  

It has been observed that this is just the kind of disaster which would cause otherwise normal people to beg to be put into FEMA camps.  I have long said FEMA needs to be defunded and dissolved.  We should rather have regional responses to these kinds of events.  FEMA hasn’t even been there according to many reports.  The Salvation Army is, though, serving food to victims and distributing bottled water.  They are usually the first on the scene.

Last on the scene, however, is President* Biden.  Just as with our own southern border, he has too much to do to make it to Ohio.  After all, he has his secret trips to Ukraine to manage, now complicated by his needing the okay of Russian President Putin.  He made it to Kiev, however.  Not only made it there, but managed to be led to his “X” where he made his speech, promising more, more, more, to his little sidekick, Zelenskyy, resplendent in one of his signature olive drab tee shirts, trying to look battle-encrusted.   If the outfits were only better it would look like a Von Suppe operetta, but those were more stylish times.   In any case, as of this writing, the conditions in Ohio are either too dangerous, not conducive enough to money laundering, or he hasn’t yet got Putin’s permission to go there.  Oh, well.  I would think a visit from him would be the last thing needed in East Palestine.  

More to the point would be some kind of relief and some kind of game plan.  Instead the people are getting conflicting orders and advice - “see your doctor and establish the condition of your health” (already too late to assess that pre-disaster, with symptoms now appearing), “evacuate”, “it’s safe to go home now”, “burn all your belongings”, “etcetera, etcetera, etcetera,” to quote the King of Siam.

This was all avoidable in the first place.  Experts can tell us that one of the worst of the chemicals involved, vinyl chloride, boils at about 8 degrees F.  It would have made sense to keep hosing these cars down until they could be safely drained/siphoned off into other containers and removed from the scene, perhaps put back on the road to their intended destination and life could have resumed with little disruption and no heartache in East Palestine and surrounding communities.  

Whoever decided to drain this into a ditch and then light it on fire needs to be examined for psychiatric problems.  DId the decision makers consult with the local fire department?  If so, whom did the fire chief consult?  Hospitals have poison information lines for people who have ingested poisonous substances or been bitten by poisonous insects or snakes, etc.  With whom should a fire department consult on something with such potential for harm?  The  local fire department, ironically, is on the top of the community’s home page.  Where were they in this?  Was the mayor involved in this decision?  He famously made the brave statement that he wasn’t going anywhere or taking his kids out of school there, apparently willing to sacrifice his family.   Did he weigh in before the so-called “controlled burn”?  

There was some concern about explosion and shrapnel. Better to have risked that and tried to cool things down until there was a safe procedure available to transfer this to other containers.  How in the world was this a “controlled burn”?  The smoke cloud and the damage can be seen from weather satellites.  Some control.  

The takeaways from this horrific incident?  Well, we can’t afford to allow our infrastructure to deteriorate due to cost-cutting of railroad companies and their appeal to stockholders.  They have a responsibility.  It’s no better to sell stock in a rickety sub-standard railroad operation than 

Bernie Madoff’s scam.  Our cities should consider plans before such a disaster and perhaps deny a railroad permission to go through their community if it is substandard, and at least know what to do or whom to ask if a derailment occurs.  We also can’t afford a dufus government in Washington, D.C., with an irresponsible, incompetent set of “authorities” in charge.  Where is the EPA?  The CDC?  The whole environmentalist movement?  Where is the Department of the Interior?  The wildlife people?  I’m not even going to ask about FEMA - better they stay far away from these people - they’ve suffered enough.   There needs to be a thorough investigation of any sweetheart deals between companies and the government and we should not tolerate them - whether they happen to be Pfizer or Norfolk Southern Railway.   

We won’t see the whole of this disaster any time soon.