A freight train of about 150 cars, some of which were carrying dangerous chemicals, crashed on February 3. As a result, several tanks spilled vinyl chloride, a toxic substance used in the manufacture of plastic products. A few days after the crash, Norfolk Southern, which owned the train, agreed with local authorities to burn the chemicals, including those from the surviving carriages. This is due to the risk of explosion in the event of an attempt to drain the chemicals.
A huge cloud of black toxic smoke hung over the city from the fire. When vinyl chloride burns, phosgene and hydrogen chloride are released. The former is extremely toxic and was used as a chemical warfare agent during World War I. The second is capable of causing skin irritation and tissue erosion.
Hundreds of residents were evacuated from areas near the disaster site for two days while the chemicals were burned. But, according to the Washington Post, after returning home, they began complaining of a strong foreign smell, headaches, nausea and other ailments. Environmentalists say chemicals have also entered soil and surface waters.
Norfolk Southern and the state environmental agency working at the site built several dams to keep heavy doses of chemicals out of the nearby Great Ohio River, which supplies water to several million people.
But according to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, federal and local authorities are underestimating the extremely dangerous accident and reacting too slowly, preferring to promote more politically sensitive topics instead of helping the small town. Carlson points out that in eastern Palestine, the majority of the population is made up of poor white Americans with conservative views that do not appeal to the ruling Democratic Party, with its focus on national minorities, primarily blacks. Popular among conservatives, the presenter notes that US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttejage preferred to ‘announce Transportation Equality Day’ during the days of the state of emergency in eastern Palestine, and in his speech on the occasion , he did not say a word about the disaster in Ohio. But, as Carlson quotes, “he said we have too many white people working on construction sites.”
Fox News host thinks the White House is in no rush to help eastern Palestine because its white conservative residents aren’t voting for Joe Biden
And when Republican Senators Marco Rubio and Jay Vance filed a questioning with the US Department of Transportation criticizing federal rail regulations, Buttejage countered that those matters were in the hands of Congress.
Not a word about the state of emergency in Ohio since early February has been said by President Joe Biden, who has been dedicated to destroying various balloons in the skies over the United States, which, as the Pentagon now cautiously admits, probably carried no threat.
However, the propensity for public relations manifested itself in this case not only among the Democrats. As Carlson points out, the Republican governor of Ohio has been rather flippant in downplaying the threat of a chemical spill in his own state, though he likes to talk about protecting Ukraine. “He just said that thousands of people in his state could die. But he’s not panicking, it’s not an emergency. Only Kiev is in danger!” – Carlson is surprised.
Democrats agree that the emergency response mechanism is politicized, but, in their view, in a different direction. The New York Times early in the Biden administration argued that federal authorities were more willing to help white people affected by natural disasters and pay them more compensation than their black neighbors, urging the Democratic president to solve this problem.
Policy distortions of this type, including in response to natural disasters, are not uncommon in the United States. For example, when an unprecedented freeze in Texas caused a massive energy crisis a few years ago, some federal politicians accused Republican leaders in the state of being too independent, speaking in the spirit that the Texans’ desire for their own power grid prevented federal authorities from helping them. Republicans responded by blaming the green energy promoted by Democrats.
One of the major failures of George W. Bush’s presidency was his ineffective response to the mighty Hurricane Katrina, which in 2005 led to massive disaster in New Orleans. Most of the people in the region are black, so Bush has been accused of indifference and falsehood in trying to flirt with national minorities.
This is also evident in American foreign policy. A clear example was the reaction of Washington and its allies to the aftermath of the catastrophic earthquake in Turkey and Syria. If the former was immediately offered help, then no one from the United States reached out to Syria, led by Bashar al-Assad, which was reprehensible to the Americans, even though the most affected are not controlled by the government.
Finally, the race for political points also manifests itself in other political decisions of the White House. For example, critics of the current US administration have pointed to the racial overtones of its decision to trade basketball player Brittney Griner for Russian Viktor Bout late last year. The White House’s heightened focus on Greiner stems from the fact that she is African American and a representative of sexual minorities, and both of these categories are key for Democrats.
