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To the editor:
Placing profit before people and planet is an operative corporate formula for a disaster waiting to happen. And in East Palestine it did happen, with a vengeance.
The grave effects of the disastrous train derailment culminating in a highly toxic mushroom cloud over this beleaguered village will linger on for years. Thousands of dead fish in the polluted waterways alone, much like dead canaries in a toxic mineshaft, announce the dire threat posed by massively unleashed toxins like vinyl chloride, phosgene, butyl acerbate and other poisons.
What makes matters worse is that this catastrophe, which some even call Ohio's Chernobyl, was fully preventable. Another deadly poison, corporate greed, caused it.
The dangerously lengthy Norfolk Southern mega-train carrying these hazardous chemicals (one million pounds of vinyl chloride!) was running on an antiquated brake system first developed in 1868. A new braking system, Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brakes, one designed to drastically reduce the possibility of train derailments, was mandated by federal safety regulations in 2015.
Trump rescinded it in late 2017, along with the regulation to include trains hauling vinyl chloride as high-hazard flammable ones. Biden failed to renew these safety measures, but instead prevented a rail strike protesting unsafe working conditions. The doomed NS train was not labeled HHFT and it was not using ECP brakes. It was, however, using a reduced workforce under the odious provisions of Precision Scheduling Railroading (PSR) and running a precarious load 9,300 feet long.
By implementing such cost-cutting and revenue-enhancing policies, Norfolk Southern raked in several billion in profits, a blood money bonanza, and invested some $10 billion in stock buybacks, not safety measures, last year. How utterly shameful and morally repugnant.
Werner Lange,
Newton falls