Let's compare-

Bhopal: 2000-8000 estimated deaths within 2 weeks of disaster

2023 Ohio train derailment: 0 estimated deaths within 10 days of disaster

I definitely see why it's appealing to exaggerate something that has been under-reported, and it's popular to do, but I don't think it's a winning strategy.

I think the max number of people will listen if the severity of events is portrayed in context. People mistrust the media for sensationalism and are looking for better ways to understand the world more accurately.

>2023 Ohio train derailment: 0 estimated deaths within 10 days of disaster

And if it causes cancer for four generations? No big deal? We're 10 days out and they just poisoned a region that has a history of it, again: https://theintercept.com/2015/08/11/dupont-chemistry-decepti...

It's weird to me that so many people in this thread are downplaying it. As someone with family niblings in Ohio and WV downstream from East Palestine, I'm very interested.

How is it Bhopal-level bad, exactly? An estimated 15,000 to 20,000 deaths occurred in Bhopal. How many have died in Ohio so far?

Not saying it's not tragic, or that it's not outrageous, but reckless exaggeration doesn't help.

Bhopal was probably an order of magnitude 'worse' than this.

At least two.

actually 3-4 ORDERS of magnitude worse

Say two people were to eventually die here. Bhopal: 20,000. That's literally 4 orders of magnitude worse. And nobody has died or been seriously injured yet, so even that is premature.

Being chicken-little is not helpful. The next stage is being "boy who cried wolf". OP: Let's keep things in at least a little balance.

So I didnt know what to compare for the orders of magnitude.

Like you said, by death it's more than 4 (since as far as i know no one has died yet).

But by affected area, toxicity normalized mass of spill, amount of ground water affected, etc, I don't know how they compare. And a cursory search showed it would be hard to get clean data.

But any way you slice it, you're right. Two orders of mag is not enough. Bohpal was such a tragedy :(

To the question: "How could it be that bad?"

Here is my reasoning:

Poly Vinyl Chloride is exceptionally toxic, the plume from this event is east of New Palestine into Pennsylvania based on radar data from both news stations and the National weather service.

Health effects of exposure are dramatic at high levels (death), and delayed at low levels (cancers) (so there is both initial health impact and "long tail" impact).

Between East Palestine and Enor Valley are a bunch of farms.

That suggests to me a number of ways for the PVC to impact the people in that area. Presumably the EPA will establish some monitoring but I haven't been able to find anything from the EPA yet that discusses that.

And FWIW I hope I'm incorrect and we don't see a serious public health crisis associated with this event.

Correction: this is Vinyl Chloride (VC), a precursor to (and much, much worse than) Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) (side note: I've mostly been hearing that PVC is largely inert and relatively fine, as part of the clarifications around vinyl chloride).