Going 'Round the Bend on Preparedness?

I've long thought that purchasing gas masks would be a good thing to do. 

Now wait, wait, I know that you may be thinking "That's it, ol' Tom has finally gone 'round the bend." 

But I'm going to argue that no, it makes sense.

The immediate inspiration for the purchase was news of a train derailment this week in East Palestine, Ohio. Some "dramatic footage" as it is known in the parlance of our times can be seen here. 

Thousands of people were evacuated. The train has been burning for days, releasing a plume of phosgene and hydrogen chloride. Phosgene was used as a weapon in the first world war. 

The Guardian calls the derailment "a wake-up call" and adds the sub headline, "The next derailment 'could be cataclysmic' if action isn't taken after the incident near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, says expert." The Guardian story goes into quite a bit of detail, but the underlying problem seems to be the usual one: greed. Railway companies have eliminated 20,000 jobs since 2018-2019. Inspections and safety procedures are suffering. There are multiple other scenarios - most notably rail shipments of liquid natural gas LNG, which, due to the repeal of certain regulations can now be shipped in trains of 100 or more cars. Just 22 train cars full of LNG carry the same amount of energy as the Hiroshima bomb. In a brilliant move, these train cars run through some of the country's largest cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are singled out.  

Disturbingly, animals are dying, while the Environmental Protection Agency claims that air pollution levels are now "safe." As Arthur Dent said in  A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "This must be some new definition of the word 'safe' with which I was previously unfamiliar."

“All of the readings we’ve been recording in the community have been at normal concentrations, normal backgrounds, which you find in almost any community,” James Justice, a representative of the US Environmental Protection Agency, said.

The point here, so far as prepping goes, is that we live in a sort of bowl of hills that lead down to the Mississippi River about two miles away. We can hear the freight trains going by at night, often bringing to mind Joe Bonamassa's epic guitar solo on his tune "Distant Lonesome Train." 

It is not unrealistic to think that one of these trains might derail. It is not terribly far-fetched that it might be carrying something toxic. It is entirely reasonable to think that we might get a knock on our door one night telling us that we need to evacuate immediately, that a train full of deadly chemicals has caught fire down by the river. At that point, we will have the gas masks to protect us. Hopefully we will be able to hustle the cats into their carriers that we keep (with a couple of cans of cat food) in the front closet, snag the go-bag and go.

And we'll come back in our own good time, not when some government official with their palms greased tells us it's "safe." As Erin Brokovich said of the incident, "Come on, it’s vinyl chloride, it’s in the air, the fish are dying, really? Does that give you comfort that ‘Maybe I should be in this area?’ Probably not.”

Of course there are other scenarios where the gas masks might come in handy, like a small nuclear or biological attack on Minneapolis. It's always better to be safe than sorry. 

I was thinking back earlier this week to that moment when COVID-19 hit, and we were under a shelter-in-place order. Nobody knew what was really going on. Nobody knew how virulent it would be. Nobody knew for sure whether the infrastructure of society would hold up. Shelves were empty. We had what we had for preparation, and we didn't know if we'd be able to get more, ever.

So now we wait. Masks arrive on Wednesday. I don't like the period between ordering prepping supplies and receiving them. It would just stink to be like "I ordered some masks, and now I need them, and it's Monday. Dang it!"