Making Sense of the Ohio Train Derailment : American Greatness

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. 

NTSB investigators have identified and examined the rail car that initiated the derailment. Surveillance video from a residence showed what appears to be a wheel bearing in the final stage of overheat failure moments before the derailment. The wheelset from the suspected railcar has been collected as evidence for metallurgical examination. The suspected overheated wheel bearing has been collected and will be examined by engineers from the NTSB Materials Laboratory in Washington, D.C. 

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. A typical train tank car can hold more than 31,000 gallons. Thus, if just one of the cars containing vinyl chloride were to spill into the Ohio River, it would be sufficient to render 1,240,000 billion gallons undrinkable. More than 5 million people rely on the Ohio River as a source of drinkin

via amgreatness.com