Title, 10 miles, 100 miles, 200 miles, 500 miles? from East Palestine? Especially downwind
Farmer in Pennsylvania reported his foxes dying
nobody fucking knows, most atmospheric scientists haven't even heard of the Cloud yet
we're on our own
You'd need a lot of data to really say for certain.
A manifest of what was being transported, at least hour-by-hour accounting of what was reacting/burning, and wind data.
I think it was something like 5 of the cars carrying hazardous material, so like 500K liters potentially? 1km^3 =1000000000000L so if it spread perfectly through 1km^3 that's 0.5ppm which isn't all that bad. I'd be more concerned about the groundwater in the immediate area personally.
vinyl chloride illnesses include Acroosteolysis which is checks notes when your body starts to reabsorb the bones in your fingers...
TFW you wanted the raccacoonie timeline but got Hot dog fingers instead
Yeah, a massive region will be and is being affected by this, and will continue to be affected for a really long time.
Oh shit, if it goes that far I'm in danger [chuckles]
The otherside of a blatant mishandling and burying of this sort of thing is that people are just going to prescribe any number of random things to it as well.
The lack of information will have related maladies and unrelated ones flowing in to fill the gap where the truth should be.
What I am saying is that there's no way to know what's going on at this point.
If chemical warfare was that easy WWI would have been even worse.
I doubt there will be much immediate effect. Cancer rates might spike locally and downwind a bit.
The goal of WWI chemical warfare was to kill or incapacitate people in a relatively small area ASAP, there are plenty of other bad outcomes here (like the cancer you mentioned) and as far as I'm aware none of the WWI weapons were distributed atmospherically
The Japanese tried all sorts of stuff in China as well to spread chemical/biological weapons and none of it worked.
American's largest VX missile delivery system didn't even cover a square kilometer, and not for lack of trying.
Fair enough, although again those had specific goals (i.e. to inflict immediate incapacitation and death upon people in the vicinity) instead of disabling them or giving them cancer
Pittsburg is really close when I looked it up, but it could spread a lot more than that.
Those memes about no one being safe from Ohio were really onto something
Extremely worried because one of my closest friends lives 60ish miles from it. Luckily the wind has been blowing away from her so far but.... I've been like anxiously checking wind conditions
Don't worry too much! Obviously chemical fires are serious, and inexcusable, and it's unfortunately really easy to downplay their risks when doing back of the napkin math like I did in this thread, but your friend would have to be really unlucky in this scenario. Bear in mind the Chernobyl exclusion zone (the final one) was much larger than warranted at 30km (18.7miles) (to the point that it's probable many more years of life were lost by relocating people, in particular to relatively more polluted urban areas, who didn't need to be).
Fluid dynamics are weird though so it's entirely possible for pockets of these chemicals to get carried far away by the wind, but I think most of it should be heavier than air and stay mostly local. Long term the groundwater contamination is going to cause more lost years of life due to incidences of cancers.
That's very good to know, I sincerely appreciate your reassurance. I know very little about the risks here, and she's been very worried so it's been easy to start also being anxious about it.
I’m 55 miles away and not particularly worried for myself. Not of airborne things at least. I don’t know if/how water flows from them to me, which I personally suspect will be more harmful with longer-term consequences and a potentially larger reach
I would guess a 5-10 mile radius is going to be very severely effected for generations. It’s absolutely a tragedy and the perpetrators deserve a big time death sentence. But based purely on gut feelings, I’d guess life outside of a 20ish mile radius will be more emotionally/mentally affected by tragedy than direct physical harm
