Ethyl Methyl Bad Stuff: "The Fish Are Swimming Upside Down"
The Toxic Mess Response in Ohio is Further Weakening the Social Fabric
A Delayed Response
I was talking to a big disaster work friend yesterday, who brought up what’s going on in Ohio after the train derailment. “You know, that place where the fish are swimming upside down,” he said. One thing about people who work in the disaster field is that they often develop a dark sense of humour.
Today two full weeks after the incident began, the Republican governor said he would put in the paperwork for federal aid. Two full weeks.
That announcement came in a press conference in which he basically lectured everyone listening that hey, the air is fine and the water is fine. He did not say “for crying out loud” or “so now you can shut the hell up” but those were clearly implied.
He was in no mood for the pushback he’d apparently been getting on not supporting the communities or the damaged environment. People are reporting all kinds of illnesses, grime everywhere inside their homes, polluted rivers, dead fish, and funky smells.
Substack author David Pepper has a good summary of recent developments — including the fact that “Senator Sherrod Brown called on the Governor to seek federal help” yesterday. No doubt thousands of others have been begging for the same.
Last week the governor said that yes, President Biden had called… but the governor hadn’t called him back. Are you kidding me?
Here’s a corporate guy in the video below who knows what should be the focus: “The railroad has said that they think they know the cause which is all important to a degree; but the fundamental focus needs to be on the human beings that are on that site and making them feel cared for… I think that’s what’s causing a little bit of the uproar….”
Yeah. The citizens of Ohio are getting increasingly ticked off at a set of governments that seem to be blowing them off.
Apparently someone clued in the governor finally that these people vote, and that maybe he should try to get this disaster to be less bad. But really? It took two weeks for him to listen? Or to figure that out?
I don’t know where all the faults lie, exactly, and who has made which disaster declarations and which phone calls. Tracking all that will be the stuff for some future government report that gets ignored, or for someone’s PhD dissertation. The bottom line is that this is a huge crisis, and both governments and the media have been blowing it off and/or ignoring it.
I know enough to know that whatever is happening in response is nowhere near reflective of the capabilities in the US to deal with a toxic crisis such as this. In the post-9/11 world with great fears about explosions at chemical plants and at rail lines, all kinds of technologies and contingency plans were put into place. First responders (many of whom are still volunteers) got new gear. Conferences were held. Contracts were awarded. Serious, somber conversations were had. And so on.
I can’t tell you how many government meetings I sat through where some contractor or vendor explained with great excitement how they had the latest greatest in plume-modeling capacity and map/systems integration and interoperability. Millions and millions were spent on this kind of thing. DHS overall, FEMA (within DHS), the intel community, DOD, and the EPA all have plume modeling capacity for air and water. Toxic measurements on land have been thought through, too.
We’ve got the capabilities.
Do we have systems that exist that can help those capabilities be put to use in such a scenario? Yeah, mostly. It’s clunky and huge and bureaucratic, but assuming the proper disaster declarations are made… an unbelievable number of federal assets can be mobilized to respond to some kind of huge crisis.
But that assumes that disaster declarations are made.
When the governor doesn’t do that, the federal government is left to put random pieces together rather than doing a wholesale response. In the press conference today, the governor said that FEMA wouldn’t typically respond to this kind of disaster because the home and other building/property damage wasn’t significant.
I’m not sure I believe that that’s what FEMA said, or that he passed forward everything that FEMA actually said.
Take a look at this bad boy here — the National Response Framework. Then you tell me if you see some capabilities that could be put to use in Ohio.
You don’t have to be a disaster management professional to see that maybe the federal government could do more and could have been doing more than what it’s done or been able to do legally so far. Agencies can only do so much on their own without being mobilized through a disaster declaration. A declaration brings authorities, it brings money, and it brings mobilization specifics to meet particular missions and needs.
A New Species of Trouble
Finally: the social fabric.
In a sociology class once, we read a book called “A New Species of Trouble,” by Kai Erikson. It had a huge influence on me.
The idea was that disasters weren’t always “natural” or “human-caused” necessarily, but often caused by huge entities such as corporations or the government… and that getting those huge entities to acknowledge a crisis or disaster in the first place is often spectacularly difficult. Getting a proper response for nuanced emergencies can be worse. For hazardous materials situations in which health effects are not always known, exposures can’t be measured, indirect effects are huge, chemicals can be altered, and biology isn’t 100% certain or consistent — it’s even harder to get a sufficient let alone an optimal response.
The fact that the toxic exposure even happened in the first place is fundamentally and deeply troubling for the communities affected. People may feel betrayed by their government, by regulations or lack thereof, by oversight failures, or by the very companies where themselves or others in the community make their living. And that’s just for the exposure.
Messed up, delayed, partial, or failed responses are even worse. People can’t be made whole again in many or most cases. Damage happens. Death and illness and property loss happen. Trust of all entities goes down. Trust within communities goes down. Trust of neighbors goes down. You never know people’s affiliations, or their role in the whole thing… so who can you trust? Communities often fall apart physically, too, breaking people up who may have known each other for years.
Now that the media have figured out that maybe they should report on this disaster more and now that public pressure has been increasing… we’re starting to see this distrust unfold and spread in real time.
People are ticked off, hurt, scared, sad, and in many cases sick. They’re overwhelmed. As in many American communities — people are not often wealthy and may be living right on the edge of making it. Extra expenses (even if they might be reimbursed at some distant date) can really affect day-to-day life and sustainability of circumstances that keep people fed and housed.
And who can they trust? The EPA has designated supposedly safe levels of various things, but yet people are reporting illness anyway despite supposedly safe levels through testing. Random testing doesn’t tell the whole story, either. It doesn’t recognize potential accumulation in physical areas or in human biology. It doesn’t account for uneven distribution of the ethyl methyl bad stuff; whatever it was and whatever it’s become.
Assurances that the detected plume moved down the Ohio river and we watched it go — as the governor announced today — don’t make anyone outside of the area feel great, either. Super! Toxic crap in the Mississippi watershed! And headed to the Gulf! He assured everyone that the riparian area (creek) with the highest toxicity was dammed up and would be fine. Oh, okay. Also… what about the groundwater? They are offering to test individual groundwater wells… but what about over the long term? Is there a plan for when underground plumes might spread? Especially from the toxic material buried under the railroad?
I could go on, but you get the point.
The effect of this crisis tears apart the social fabric in a part of the country (like many) where the social fabric has already been stressed, torn, and made threadbare.
Arguably, our messed up social fabric is a huge part of why we have an authoritarian movement.
I haven’t written about this disaster for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that I like to offer something helpful at the end of posts. Today, I got nothing. This is tragedy, and sometimes that’s what you’ve got. Hopefully the public and the media (now finally tracking this) keep the pressure up enough to get more resources in place and committed for the long term.
Well, I can offer this. This emergency shows (among many things) why we need government, why we need good government, why we need to fund government, why we need regulations, why we need oversight, and why we need to emphasize and center taking care of humans. It’s way overdue.
I talked to another friend today who asked for details on this incident. Her response after I explained it was, “What, is it the 1970s????” Yeah. I agree. I too have questions.
This country is becoming what it looks like when we refuse to invest in humans, in communities, and in opportunities for thriving and flourishing for all. We’ve lost our way… but it’s not so far gone that we can’t turn the ship. That’s what this organization is here for, anyway. More to come on that, as we’re just ramping up. Stick around.
Keep the faith. We can do better.
We can go after making sure that shift happens, too.
I appreciate your take, you having worked in the Federal govt before. Yesterday or the day before Heather Cox Richardson post talks about the governor refusing federal help. ( And she also made the connection between Rs wanting less regulation and how the industry pushed back on additional safety regs certainly could have had an impact here, but I digress.) The social fabric is frayed already and things like this and the response on multiple layers only add to it.
One more example of the disconnect between government and the people government is supposed to serve. The primary culprit appears to be the (Republican) governor of Ohio. But if we weren't so polarized, do you think it would matter which party the governor came from and which the president came from? Doesn't the governor know that he's supposed to represent all the people of his state, regardless of their party affiliation? I have no doubt that Biden would order as much federal support as possible--if he were asked to do so. How, why do Republican governors get away with their efforts to discredit the Democrats at the expense of their states' constituents? When a disaster happens, can't we please set aside our partisan rigidity for the sake of the people?