the airborne toxic event
Hoppers full of polyvinyl lay in a heap, charred tank cars loaded with industrial chemicals like ethylene glycol monobutyl, vinyl chloride, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate. Carcinogenic and colorless fluids with Grecian names. Vinyl chloride, an ingredient in PVC, water bottles, and credit cards, is particularly hazardous. Touching it causes skin to numb and blister; exposure can lead to liver failure and rare cancers.
Vinyl chloride is transported under pressure to keep it in liquid form. When it became clear that these pressure systems would fail in the aftermath of the crash, officials decided to perform a controlled breach of the tanks and burn off the chemical. So after fire, smoke: a stinking column of it, piled high like a stormcloud, looming over this tiny Midwestern town. The locals pronounce it Pal-uh-steen but the disaster looked fit for the Holy Land, its angry god. Or, more accurately, for No Man’s Land. When vinyl chloride burns, it releases phosgene, a gas used in World War I to choke tens of thousands of men to death.
Within an hour of the crash, police began forcing the evacuation of some 1,500 residents, about a third of the town. Residents and reporters noted the similarity of the disaster to the one in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, in which a suburban family must flee an “airborne toxic event.” The book was adapted into a film by Noah Baumbach last year, which was filmed on location in Ohio.
Here, in East Palestine, was an actual airborne toxic event. Even stranger, at least one man who had to evacuate had already done so—as an extra in Baumbach’s film. CNN reported that Ben Ratner, a 37-year-old man, shows up in the film, “in a traffic jam scene, sitting in a line of cars trying to evacuate after a freight train collided with a tanker truck, triggering an explosion that fills the air with dangerous toxins.” Apparently, “Directors told the group they wanted them to look ‘forlorn and downtrodden’ as they escape the environmental disaster.”
EPA tests have since ruled the air safe, though the stench lingered, and scrutiny of the ten-day-old catastrophe has recently increased. Residents have posted unsettling videos online. Streams running afloat with dead fish. Chickens suddenly dead in their coops.
Much has been made of Don DeLillo’s prescience, in White Noise and his other novels. I don’t have the space here to address it properly, but one thing he understood early on was that American modernity was as defined by the country’s capability for destruction as it was by its citizenry’s inability to conceptualize it. This incongruity, DeLillo also understood, was fundamentally televisual, in its etymological sense of “seeing from afar.” In White Noise, witnessing the toxic cloud, Jack Gladney notes that “Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious.” And later: “The whole thing was amazing. They seemed to be spotlighting the cloud for us as if it were part of a sound-and-light show[.]” Faced with new anthropogenic horrors, Americans grope for old languages of religion and entertainment. Anything to avoid understanding something on its own terms. Gladney again:
This was death made in a laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event.
In East Palestine, a hazardous materials specialist put it to a local news station more bluntly: “We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad open.” Norfolk Southern, the train operators, offered the town a mere $25,000 as recompense.
For faraway spectators of the fire, like me, the problem is DeLilloesque, one of televisual incommensurability. Watching the smoldering world, fashioned out of the very stuff of its undoing. For the residents, the problem may be much worse. Poisoned earth, poisoned wells, poisoned bodies. But for those responsible, the problem is always the same: how to pay as little as possible.
DeLillo is darkeyed with disaster, but he’s deadpan, too. In White Noise, Gladney’s son explains the toxic event to bystanders in the aftermath. “I guess there’s a lesson in all this,” he says. “Get to know your chemicals.”
ben tapeworm