During the past week to ten days, Buffalo’s Channel 4 has been running a breathless expose of railroad hazmat operations in the area. It includes frightening graphics showing the results of a terrorist attack which blows up a chlorine tank car. At one point the reporter, Luke Moretti, trespasses on CSX property and walks up to a tank car just to demonstrate its vulnerability. A CSX spokesman looks pretty weak as he asserts that everything is being done to assure safety. Niagara Falls, an important chemical production center, is also cited as a ripe target. Note that they raise all kinds of scary questions, without a single word of solutions.
My question is, have you seen this kind of coverage in your local area? I think I smell a coordinated nationwide effort to raise questions, and more importantly to raise hysteria in the public. Behind such an effort could be environmentalists, safety zealots and various other NIMBYs. I don’t mind taking reasonable measures to ensure safety, but some people will never feel safe and they are the targets of this kind of inflammatory report.
On the other hand, if your local news hasn’t featured a story on railroads and hazmat recently, maybe it’s just a Buffalo thing and I am carried away with my own conspiracy theory. What do you say?
We had several of those “scare reports” after a tank car of Chlorine derailed near here in Hershey, PA - with no leak. I guess since most people do not have much knowledge about trains, it makes for good (perhaps award-winning) coverage for the Local Yokel news. This also applies to large industries: “Scary monster warehouse will drown us in trucks and use dangerous chemicals - news at 11!”
They pander to the ignorant. And with our education system, that is an alarming large number.
Know this fellow members, stupid is as stupid does! They do not know the facts and are trying to get this area in the NYSSR homeland paranoina funds. This area is so dirt poor that it has to beg for federal funds for even the most routine expenses! This c[censored] will mean that railfans will be bothered by [censored][:o)][D)][2c][censored] rouge Cops and RR employees that do not like railfans.
You hit the nail right on the head! Panderingis exactly the right word. What you have is the ancient journalism rule " Bad News Sells, Good News Just makes you feel good." Within the last month, I think, I posted an article from the Kansas City Star on the same topic, sensationalism, terrorism,a topic designed to scare the “you know what” out of the average uniformed citizen, with an assasination piece by a minimum wage journalism major, trying to make a name. It is barely enough fact wrapped in hysteria designed not to inform, but like a horror movie, sell their [movies] or paper, take your pick.
I am more than willing to concede that sensationalism is part of the problem since TV news is overly dependent on visuals. Another problem is that when most people think of hazmat, they only think of tank cars containing various petrochemicals that Ed and his co-workers on PTRA are quite familiar with. They fail to consider the 9500-gallon tank truck that delivers gasoline to their local service station or some of the stuff that they have in their basement or garage or the fireworks that they shot off on July 4.
We had the “Weyauwega Propane Derailment” not too far in the recent history and the “Hydrite Boxcar Fire” more recently than that and we don’t have sensationalist coverage around here. Plus we have the Ethanol plant in the area. Maybe that station or reporter had some kind of agenda.
If they spent the day roadside with an Emergency Response Guide (the Orange Book), they’d be in their basement covering their heads…
We’ve had a couple of derailments in the past year or two, but no hazmat - if you don’t count that stuff that burned down the disposal factory when they tried to incinerate it…
I think the local emergency responders are more aware of what rolls through on the rails than the general populace, which is as it should be.
I’ll agree with that “agenda” comment. Probably truer than not.
If anyone ever stops to consider the sheer volume of Hazmat that it takes to keep the economy of this country and the world producing the products we take for granted every day it would blow their mind… Virtually every manufactured product consumes Hazmat somewhere in it’s manufacturing process. Stope the movement of Hazmat and you will stop the economy of the world.