Pets and livestock have been dying miles from this monster. It can't be good for any living creature/plant/water.

Current wind patterns in Ohio have it aimed right at us. Maybe we'll get some acid snow!

yes but hopefully the prevailing winds from the previous days already moved everything offshore

Do you know when? I will hide with my critters, if possible. Ugh.

https://www.ventusky.com/?p=41.54;-73.37;6&l=temperature-2m

​

should be going into Canada not here

Thanks! Fortunate for us anyway.

Most toxic things come from that direction. Where's a big fan when you need it? 🤦🏿

Where’s Pete Buttigieg or any of these faux environmentalists when you need them?

Depends on the height of the cloud. At 4000m, wind is heading right this way :/

Man, what an absolutely idiotic take on the situation. Do you also blame the superintendent for not saving children during a school shooting?

all so the company could save a few bucks. People should go to prison for this, but they wont.

Great had to go to Toronto for 2 weeks at the worst possible time

Where are all the stupid Republicans who did absolutely nothing for so many years and fought against any kind of legislation that would keep this kind of crap from happening?

Don't even bother asking that question because I know you don't care about the answer.

I think if the fart cloud of death was going to move, it would have done so at this point.

I think Ohio is in the "It's not safe to move back yet, but we're going to tell you to do so because this looks bad politically" phase right now.

yes but the past few days winds were going south. It shouldnt be burning at this time I would think

no the one from mass is

You blame him for not re-hiring security after the last superintendant had fired them to save money for the contractors who make money off the school.

Pete let all of their policy live on.

You nitwit, this happened because Trump rolled back regulations under the guise of saving money. That death cloud is going to cost more than all his rollbacks combined would have saved.

Sure you can tell yourself that. Absolutely Pete has unlimited power and no opposition. Pretty much what he says goes. Kind of like the Lord. I'm surprised it's just the wave his arms and make it hell happen.

It has nothing to do with all the Republicans have gotten in the way for the last oh I don't know a hundred years.

Hi, meteorologist here. The short answer is likely no

The vinyl chloride burn has occurred under a number of days with a very stout subsidence inversion in play nearby. This means the atmosphere is not well mixed at night, but features a mixed layer as high as 2 km (~6600 ft) during the day with a layer average wind direction from the WNW. The picture above shows the burn plume trapped underneath very stable mid-level air with little horizontal movement, a clear sign of a robust subsidence inversion. The reports of multiple livestock & fish perishing over a shorter radius also confirms the presence of a subsidence inversion preventing these toxins from fanning out deeper into the atmosphere.

I've run an ensemble forward trajectory analysis (https://imgur.com/gallery/0rFlz1Z) starting at the location & approximate time of the fire, which follows the movement of air parcels up 1 km above ground (~3300 ft), a mean of each day's mixed layer during this burn. For you math/science nerds, this is the Lagranagian view of the parcel/fluid through time.

Notice that the mean mixed-layer wind direction (WNW) does carry whatever gas & aerosols are being emitted from this fire into the Carolinas before loitering over the western Atlantic. Given vinyl chloride gas is heavier than the surrounding air, it's likely remained in the lowest 1 km close to the incident location, signaling this is probably not a far-reaching event.

Thank you for this analysis, very thorough and educational!

Railroad offered town $25,000. Not per person. Total. For the inconvenience.

Wow!! Thanks so much! (Love that nerdy stuff!)

Is this a comment on Massachusetts in general (🤣) or is there yet another spill? Texas derailment, Ohio derailment, and truck jack knife somewhere else (with green toxic cloud), as I recall.

Wtf

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/norfolk-southern-giving-25-000-200000640.html

User name checks out.

There are a few cloud nerds living in the Granite State

Mmm. Spicy snow

Before the Clean Air act this kind of shit was spewing out of chimneys all over the country, particularly New England which had a thriving plastics industry. It wasn’t that long ago that a plant in Merrimack, New Hampshire was spewing similar chemicals into the air on a daily basis. Most of the chemicals used in daily life and is the kind of stuff that goes up in flames every time a house burns.

It’s not good but not terrible. We will survive

There is a reason why more people from Ohio have been to the moon than any other state.

Why are you defending the people in charge when a horrible disaster happens under their watch?

I saw somewhere that the railroad offered $25k in total for compensation, which is around $5 for each effected individual/household (not sure which). I honestly hope that residents sue them over this because there will be health effects down the line.

Only in Ohio

kevin skarupa?? Is that you??

Perfectly safe, they say!

Hopping in to call out that whether or not this guy is a real weatherman, listening to advice like this on social media is what separates the dumb people from the smart people.

And yet the local government keeps telling residents the air and water are safe. Nah man I don’t think so.

Well to be fair that's almost what the CEO makes each day

Nope lol, though we both went to the same college

I'm sure real environmentalists have been trying to get their voices heard for decades. If we are going to blame administrations, let's blame them all. Biden for failing the railroad workers when they wanted to strike due to subpar work conditions And Trump and Chao for putting profits over safety. 🤷🏾

Hey there! Love this trajectory that you posted - super informational.

With the toxins projected to dump into the ocean persay - what’s next? Acid rain? Carbonic acid plus chloride?

I just compacted concepts of atmospheric dispersion, chemistry & thermodynamics through the application of forward parcel trajectories into a single reply. I sure hope that folks here recognize my assessment isn't idiotic 🤔. I'd literally show my degree if it didn't give away who I actually am, smh

Being able to discern whose making shit up and whose the real deal is what separates the fools from the intelligent.

Bro in my youth I used to troll online all the time pretending to be various experts, and people would buy it hook, line and sinker.

So I'm speaking from experience here, as a former little shit who used to be all rascally on the internet.

Not saying what you posted isn't true. I'm saying posts like this that sound like they're true is a perfect and effective vector for misinformation.

In other words: if you want advice on which microwave to buy, sure listen to social media. If it involves something important like your health, you are a fucking idiot for listening to social media

It's good for people to not have a habit of going to social media and listening to random yahoos for important things.

Honestly this is all great. I'm glad you shared cause I was wondering this very thing.

But now I just want to know if I'm talking to Al Kaprielian here. That'd be real cool.

Please make my day

Fair haha, though I can assure everyone I hold a degree in atmospheric sciences and am employed as a meteorologist. I didn't suffer through multiple years of calculus for nothing. People can take two seconds to inspect weather balloon launches & other factoids about vinyl chloride gas to easily verify everything I've written as accurate, I don't know how much easier to make it.

I can confirm I am not Al Kaprielian

I believe it, that’s funny as hell. Still though, a discerning eye can usually but not always be able to tell the difference.

Damn it haha

Well the search lives on then

Based on the fact sheet I dug up about this gas from the EPA, my suspicion is we're fine here given how far away we are, the half life of the gas is fairly short both in water and soil: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/05/437069.pdf

This is the type of immediate and thorough response scientists give in a movie nice work

Kshhht

Mission control we have a situation. Call in the cloud boy

Why you only going after Pete?

He has been trying to do something.

And when formerly trusted sources are found complicit in ‘misinformation’ sharing and previously untrusted sources now being heralded as legitimate information sources, you can see where information-literacy skills are important.

One of my hottest takes is that the slew of "fact checkers" we saw emerge around/after 2020 remain one of the largest, exploitative scams ever committed on the American public.

Indeed!

$5 per affected person seems fair, right? I'm pretty sure this should all be solved with a trip to the McDonald's to hit up their value menu.

No, no, no. Smart people only listen to people if they're wearing a suit and on television.

Shhhh... Don't think about politicians. Just think about the CEO of the company.

Whatever happened to /u/PhD_in_everything

LOL it's my God King. I love this person.

Oh yes, because an appointed head of a department has legislative authority over the railroads, and not, let me see… the legislature. Sweet Jesus would you get a grip? Obama ‘s administration had passed a law that required the railroads to change up the braking systems to ones that didn’t start fires when a derailment happened.. However, a lovely Republican carpetbagger named Donald Trump overturned it. Gotta make it easy for the railroads to profiteer using technology that is 60+ years old. God forbid that these companies modernize! You’re an ass.

He doesn’t like the guy because he’s told to by the ‘media’ he consumes. The fact that he’s harping on a completely incorrect aspect of what the Transportation Secretary’s abilities are, and are not is all you need to know about where he’s getting his fact-free talking points from.

It is terrible. How many cases of cancer have come about because of all the pfas illegally emitted from these factories? Saint Gobain moved to NH to avoid the regulations Vermont imposed on them. Anyone involved in the decision should be in jail.

https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2016-04-22/untangling-why-saint-gobain-chose-new-hampshire

Has anyone verified that this image is actually from the train derailment?

That weather boy from BFHS ?

should be ok if all the smoke already went south

It is all over the front page as being an airplane shot of the cloud plume, as well as similar shots. As to actual news organizations, not sure. I see Vice used a similar photo from Twitter. The photos from the ground are really quite the same. There are TONS of those from all the major networks, when their reporters weren't being arrested. https://www.vice.com/en/article/88qze4/32-nasty-rail-workers-say-they-knew-the-train-that-derailed-in-east-palestine-was-dangerous

So because something unhealthy used to happen 'all the time', it's not a big deal if it happens now? huh?

Not at all. It’s a huge deal. It’s just not the disaster it looks like. Its a few trainload of pretty ordinary chemicals. It’s not Bophal (sp?).

Wow. I hate railroads. You never know what theyre hauling You could have tankers of poison flying right by your house!!

And hey, just think!

Bumblefuck blocked the rail workers from Striking! One of their big complaints was unsafe conditions caused by understaffing. If they'd been allowed to strike for even a week, there's a decent chance this wouldn't have happened.

I mean, the same can be said of trucks, the cargo being on rail doesn't make it any more secretive.

Mixing with the water is a different story though.

It’s answers like yours that make Reddit great. Thanks so much!

Will there be any health-related side effects for the people living in or near this area? The first thought that came to mind was cancer, but I don't know anything about anything.

Have you heard of Merrimack?

I understand he doesn't know any better. I just assumed he was doing it because Pete is gay.

As far as I can tell he's doing a really good job.

if you can't tell does it matter?

How many times have you experienced something like this?

Can you help explain this report from NOAA? https://www.reddit.com/gallery/112v93n

https://www.arl.noaa.gov/arl-weekly-2-3-23/

This guy’s lucky CloudMan wasn’t here. He might be 💀

So I'm in mid North Carolina.... Should I be keeping everyone inside??

Thanks!

Good question: this is the first I've seen of ARL running particle cross section analysis right at the start of the controlled fire before the mean wind shifted. So at the initial burst, they're modeling (using I suspect a different model than the one I used to calculate the forward trajectory) the most likely dispersion integrating estimated particle release per hour. That's also starting a full 12 hours earlier than mine, right as the trough is moving through, more on that below.

What this shows is particles initially contained in the lowest 3,000 ft of the atmosphere that advect NE, then N as they're mixed higher into the atmosphere (shades of blue). This likely is along the first upper-level trough to pivot through here last week, though these particles being an issue here seems almost non-existent given what we know about the lifespan of vinyl chloride gas & how high up these particles were mixed. Then as the winds became more predominately WNW (second image), the plume orients ESE, with concentrations contained in a smaller area than I think some feared would be otherwise.

One critical question I still have is how these particles may bond to both ice crystals, water droplets, and supercooled droplets deeper in the atmosphere. Are they small enough to act as cloud condensation nuclei? Did they bond to the aforementioned hydrometers and precipitate out wherever the plume density was highest and rain/snow occurred?

Dude. A train can haul 1000x what a trailer can hold!!! Thats the difference.

Thanks. My reverse image search just found a bunch of twitter and other unsubstantiated posts. Looking at the photos from that vice article I can imagine it's legit.

I see you’ve disturbed the liberal hive mind that is Reddit. Shame on your for pointing out their blatant hypocrisy.

Executives don't go to prison. Their companies pay fines.

There is no criminal accountability no matter what they do.

That's a cumulocarcinigis cloud

Thank you for your response. Good to know it's likely a non-issue for us.

Higher rates of cancer, most notably a 42% higher rate of kidney cancer in the Merrimack River valley as a direct cause of Saint Gobain polluting the drinking water with PFAS. Even after it was first discovered in 2016, the company wasn't even required to provide safe drinking water until 2018. This is a decade and a half after the situation with Dupont, so the company had known they were poisoning people for 15 years and did absolutely nothing about it. I'd classify that as pretty fucking terrible.

Over the Atlantic. Perfect. It’ll be outside the environment out there! /s

https://youtu.be/3m5qxZm_JqM

Just make sure you don’t ever smell it the dangerous threshold is only 3 ppm.

The common law ways of the Wild West seem more fair sometimes.

It’s extremely damaging even at very low concentration. Primary damage is inhilation not ingestion.

Does anything trump CloudMan?

Nope, the only clue I'll give is I hail from Connecticut!

Ha! Did you work at WFSB a few years ago?

>The short answer is likely
>
>no

This is the only part I understood, but I still feel better.

The real MVP. Thank you.

You know your CT TV stations haha! Nope, but that was the station I grew up watching!

HEW a that's a relief

I think a few of them were freezing their ass off on top of the rock pile

This is the cloud boys big moment, glad I’m here to witness

WeHa?

Glad to meet more New Hampshirites interested in meteorology!

Bro was like my time had come

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This picture is being pushed my Russian and Chinese bots. I'm not entirely sure it's even real

There is not credible source verifying this imagine. Research image search has it first showing up on Chinese and Russian sites. I think you fell for a fake and pushing their propaganda. Some media outlets did too.

Where are you getting this info? Only credible article mentions 5 chickens found dead

Nope, a town in Middlesex County!

I've waited all my life for this moment lol

Inversion just like your peenis

So impressive…you sir / madam are a good and knowledgeable person. Thank you.

Why not? Just about every other toxic chemical is buried in NH

It shows lmao

One reporter showed dead fish in a nearby river.

So crazy, all these back room deals with deregulations. Lining pockets. And who suffers? Chumps like you and me. We live near the Schiller Power plant, after a day all our snow is black. Hopefully the Ohio poison will disperse.

Frontier justice, baby. Just like the cowboys from Red Rock (aged Mel Brooks reference)

Thank you for this!

He is! For once a Transportation Secretary that's on-point.

This might sound crazy, but I was just out doing some stargazing with my telescope (~11PM to 1:30AM), and every now and again a warm gust of wind would blow by. Every time it did, I could smell something very odd in it. It was pungent enough that I cut the observing session short and came inside. I don't really know how to describe the smell other than "sweet, but unpleasant".

Apparently vinyl chloride has a mild sweet smell in high concentrations...

https://dph.illinois.gov/topics-services/environmental-health-protection/private-water/fact-sheets/vinyl-chloride-groundwater.html

Well if you're going to throw Biden under the bus for this, let's talk about how Trump removed key Obama-era braking regulations.

Real expertise can be recognized as such. The problems come when we start thinking, for example, that Diamond and Silk's opinions are just as good as those expressed by the Director of NIAID.

Social media gives everyone an equal voice, but it's up to the reader to decide who is worth listening to. As our education system falters, we become less and less capable of making the correct call.

The president is silent.

Solar panels and windmills will never produce the amount of electricity our society needs. Powerplants are needed. Helping them with technologies to burn fossil fuel more cleaner and efficiently is what people need to get on board with. Schiller has 3 boilers. 1 is a wood burner the other 2 are coal. The wood boiler ran most of the time. The others when peak energy usage occured. Winter and summer .

Well, that could be something to worry about.. Or, someone else was also star gazing at that time while partaking in some sweet sensemilla burning in the night..

Me mongo not understand other words to

1000x is incorrect, but it is several hundred trucks worth of cargo per train. You're missing that there are still way more trucks than trains and trains carry less than 30% of freight shipped in the US, and most of that train freight is on a truck to get to the train, and to get from the train to the last mile.

You know, I'd agree with you. I really would.

Except CNN has video of a wheel bearing in the final stages of failure. Could brakes have prevented a crash in that instance? Probably not. Look up what happens when a bearing fails.

A failed bearing walks back to failed or missed maintenance, which leads back to the workers who were saying they were over worked and it was causing Safety risks. Had workers been allowed to force the railroads into, uh, safe working conditions, that maintenance likely would have been completed and this could have been prevented.

Alas, Bumblefuck knew better and now a huge area is ecologically ruined because of it.

Edit:

Downvote away.

Here's a study from the UK that says a failed bearing can cause derailment.

And here, is Vox an undeniably left leaning site that's saying the likely cause of this was, you know, a bearing. New brakes would only work if your train was still attached to the track.

Lastly, here is Vice. Also an incredibly Left leaning publication. In this one, workers who claim to be familiar with the train in question say they're not shocked it crashed and also point out they now have 90 seconds to inspect each car. A train car is 55+ feet long. For perspective, before you type anything to me, go out and look at your personal car. Set a timer on your phone for 90 seconds. Try and inspect every safety feature on your car, including looking under it. See how long it takes you. Now imagine having to do both sides, of a vehicle 3 times longer in the same time period and tell me if you think the workers probably should have been allowed to strike for better conditions.

i am still dumbstruck that they burned it instead of cleaning up the spillage. i hope the residents and towns affected can sue them into oblivion. And I seriously can't buy that it's safe to drink the water. with all the fish dying I wouldn't go anywhere near water -.- This makes me so angry for the people living there.

It’s the Manhattan project all over again lol

he didn't start his response with "GOOD eeeeeeevening." I'd bet Al uses voice-to-text so all his responses probably start with that haha

I don't care that he is gay. I care that he can't do his job. I care that he was hired for the job for lining up behind Biden when the party wanted a real candidate. He is a corporatist. We hired a guy who has a long history of making money from corporations. He was hired by a president from the most corporate friendly state in the country Delaware. I am angry that you are not angry. If it was a red guy in charge I would be mad too. I didn't vote for DT or Biden because I know they are all the same.

You know they're all the same because you're an ill-informed person who watches Fox News. Maybe you should try broaden your horizon. Perhaps if you could learn how to read that we better. They're not always saying the problem is they're fighting against a bunch of idiotic Republicans. You're probably Republican.

Wtf…. Why are you attacking me? I literally just said I didn’t vote for either of the guys in the corporate unity party.

Don’t own a tv.

You’re probably an idiot. Or a fat trans satanist because

Did you get your defend Pete rallying cry from msnbc or was it cnn?

This is the map I saw and I believe it over some reddit cloud guru

However windmills and solar will never be able to replace fossil fuel stations, because we aren’t building them. 😬

[deleted]

Jim cantore, is that you?

I'm doing it because you're ill-informed. You're attacking somebody without any information. And now you're getting all oh why you attacking me. Go clutch your pearls. If you voted for the right people you wouldn't be in this mess.

Nope, though he taught one of my meteorology classes at my college!

You are defending someone with no information. Look at this list of former McKinsey Consulting employees who work in government. They are all peas in the same pod. There is only a few ways you get to be a politician and its playing the game. Open your eyes. You think you are voting for the good guys but they are all on the same team behind closed doors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_employees_of_McKinsey_%26_Company

Thanks OP for asking this question, and u/TheCloudBoy for answering it.

It really ticks me off that we have to turn to each other to find answers that should have been readily and quickly given to us by those at the top. "Where is it headed/where and when did it go?" are basic questions that countless numbers of us have been wondering for days, but heaven forbid those in charge come out and thoroughly address and answer them.

I've had similar issues with the dissemination of critical information about this controlled burn from the beginning, the town hall in East Palestine last night was revealing and shows folks there are even more frustrated about this.

Let's focus on the HYSPLIT modeling I've shown and another pair of images released by NOAA ARL (Air Resources Laboratory) referenced in another post below. The moment this burn was ignited, ARL was supporting the local NWS forecast office and other government agencies by running a high-resolution HYSPLIT WRF nest over that burn. Essentially, as new info about the burn and weather analysis data came in, they were running new plume dispersion forecasts, likely at least 4 times a day but probably once an hour. None of these frequently updated data were readily visible to the public to my knowledge, which is totally unacceptable.

>which is totally unacceptable

Indeed.

(And now, years later, I'm wondering where all of the Lac-Megantic train wreck cloud blew, as HELLO! we were directly south of that one.)

I do agree but it's good to get different viewpoints. Both sources are using different modeling, similar to hurricane tracking or other weather events.

What is most interesting now is that NOAA figure has been removed from the article. I'm curious as to why. And I have not seen any other articles that don't focus on anything but the vicinity of the burn site. Really strange how little is being covered on this, but I suppose I'm not surprised.

I agree they should close down k Street. I don't care who somebody worked for as long as they do the job. You're throwing everybody in the same boat. And it's tedious what aboutism.

Because the rail and chemicals are owned by vanguard which has enormous share stakes in media outlets.

The HYSPLIT modeling ARL offers allows you to run archived parcel trajectories and dispersion, I'm half-tempted to run one to see where all that smoke ended up.

I'll keep this next statement as apolitical as possible: multiple facets leading up to and during the response to this disaster should show all of us how corrupt entire agencies and the broader U.S. government have become, regardless of which party has control.

Look at how this train wasn't classified as carrying very hazardous materials, the arresting of local journalists covering the event, the complete silence by multiple federal agencies for nearly a week (eerily similar to the Soviet Union during Chernobyl), a failure to share critical information in a timely manner, covering for a private company clearly in the wrong (eerily similar to Japan covering TEPCO during Fukushima-Daiichi), I can keep going.

burning it in an incinerator is a lot different than lighting a pit full of it and other chemicals on fire

We’re all fucked.

Not everything is partisan. This is what happens when business and government are entrenched in corruption for decades from multiple parties maintaining status quo.

[deleted]

You're making the partisan attack and saying everything is not partisan. Everybody is exactly like everybody else.

That's not true One party has tried to overthrow the government take away women's rights and pollute like crazy. One party is trying to take away social security. I contend your opinion is wrong. Sorry if you disagree with me. I do believe that there should be no money in politics.

It can't just stay there forever, can it? It would either dilute into the atmosphere or fall on the ground or something. Where's the bulk of it going? (Perhaps you answered and I didn't understand it).

Ohio is telling people at ground zero to return home, it's all good, yes? What can those residents do?

What about phosgene, or other byproducts?