Read this on Altamont Press newswire and couldn’t believe it.[:0]
I-90 closed east of Missoula, Montana: Vapor from rail car alarms public
The Montana Highway Patrol closed a 10-mile stretch of Interstate 90 east of here Thursday morning because of concerns about a vapor seen coming off a train car on a track along the interstate.
The patrol closed the highway from Clinton to Bonner, MT at about 10:30, a state Department of Transportation spokeswoman said.
Montana Rail Link spokeswoman Lynda Frost said the railroad believes the vapor was harmless steam that resulted from rain hitting a heated asphalt car, rather than any hazardous material.
“We have people on site that are in the process of verifying that,” she said.
Frost said the 37-car train was parked on a siding 12 miles east of Missoula. - The Associated Press, The Billings Gazette, courtesy Larry W. Grant
This sort of [censored][censored]happens all the time, day after day here in the NYSSR! The whole thing is so [B)][:(!][][X-)][censored][censored][D)][sigh] Life in the Northeast is not very free these days and we have a problem that appears, sadly,[:(!] to be incurable!
The cure is called revolution. I believe that we have been headded that direction sience the government started cracking down on assult guns. There arguement was you don’t need a AK47 to go deer hunting. The right to bear arms is not to protect bambi, it’s to ensure the government feared the people. Well now it’s the other way around. Our forefathers must be spinning in there graves.
We had an incident here where some busy body made a big deal about a crew leaveing the engines running unatended. The media ate it up. They must of felt pretty stupid when they found out it’s normal.
Never mind the railroads - we deal with this stuff all the time in the fire service. Somebody has a bon fire in the back yard - some yo-yo with a cell phone sees it from a half mile away and reports that there ‘might’ be a house on fire. Of course, then he continues on his merry way and is miles from the scene by the time we get there. One guy reported the smoke from someone’s wood stove…
I’m wondering when we’re gonna get a call on the steam rising off piles of baled hay. Years ago we did run on a possible “structure fire,” only to find steam rising off the roof as the sun hit it and evaporated the frost…
I’m not against someone calling in a bonafide emergency, but unless their life is in danger, they should at least stick around to show us what they reported, so we can educate them…
You do have a point, Hugh (not surprisingly); up to a point, it is better to be safe than sorry. The question is – what’s the point? The US, at least, is astoundingly risk-averse as a nation, with some rather peculiar results. Of which this is a nice example. One of the problems is that many in the general public are quite willing to consider themselves experts on hazard and risk assessment, and cry bl____ murder if they perceive a risk; the authorities have little choice but to respond. However, GP is very poor at risk assessment. The result is that many quite serious risks are completely overlooked, whilst many idiotic things (like this one) get a massive response.
One very bad side result is that that same GP become accustomed to this kind of thing – and fail to respond when there is a real problem (the boy who cried ‘wolf’).
I completely agree; however, Good luck with that revolution. Big Brother has agents infiltrated everywhere.
Not much we can do about it anymore anyway. Years ago, when ever I tried to make someone aware of the government’s impending divergence from the Constitution, too many people would tell me stuff like, “Well, if you don’t have anything to hide, why worry about them searcing”. I would try to explain how they were completely missing the point.
Sadly funny, but that is EXACTLY how tyrants manage to install themselves as dictator.
The populace is duped into believing the new strongman is on their side, and intends to “clean up” the problem that so torments them.
So they believe the lies and vote the guy in like so many clapping seals waiting for their turn to balance the ball on their noses…chanting nonsense such as"if you are not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about"
Sadly it’s a no-win situation. If they did nothing and just kept going everybody and his mother would be allover them saying they could have poisoned people with all those deadly chemicals or it could have deadly toxins or whatever. They erred on the side of caution.
I don’t buy that “Cover your %&^” thing. Cover your *&% would be to call the railroad and report the problem, or better yet, How about asking someone that knows if it even is a problem. Closeing interstates because there “may” be a problem is obsurd. Could you imagine the traffic jam that something like this could cause if it happened in the middle of LA, or any other big city. You would think that a state trooper (or highway patroll) would have enough common sense to not over react.
Remember this is Montana where the policy for winter is mother nature put there when it is snow mother nature removes it. I drove across that state in winter with 6 inches of snow pack on the roads yet they worry about a steam from a freshly loaded asphalt tanker car.
][X-)][censored][censored][D)][sigh] Life in the Northeast is not very free these days and we have a problem that appears, sadly,[:(!] to be incurable!