Just before 9 p.m. on February 3, 38 rail cars tumbled off main track one in East Palestine, Ohio. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB)…
Just before 9 p.m. on February 3, 38 rail cars tumbled off main track one in East Palestine, Ohio. According to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), the train car that initiated the accident had a bad wheel bearing.
Of the 20 rail cars containing hazardous materials, a whopping 11 left the tracks. The derailed cars included five rail cars with flammable vinyl chloride, a car with combustible liquid ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, combustible liquid ethylhexyl acrylate, a flammable gas called isobutylene, a flammable liquid called butyl acrylates, and two cars that normally contained benzene but were listed as empty.
The train car containing butyl acrylates “lost entire load (spill & fire).” WTRF news in Ohio reported on February 14 that the city of Steubenville (46 miles to the south) found butyl acrylate in the municipal water intake. A number of cars that were not derailed ended up damaged and/or leaking. Two tank cars containing petroleum lube oil lost their entire load. The tank car containing propylene glycol “lost most of load.”
The EPA established a drinking water safety limit of .025 parts per billion (one-fortieth of a billion) for vinyl chloride. In other words, it takes 40 billion gallons of water to dilute one gallon of vinyl chloride before its concentration is considered sufficiently low to be used for drinking water. For reference, the Ohio River, which passes just just 20 miles south of the accident, carries 180 billion gallons of water each day.
