The government doesn't generally know the list of chemicals, so it's not keeping people in the dark because it has no information to divulge.
We could certainly make it a rule that chemical manifests be lodged with such-and-such organization (the FRA, I'd assume), but we don't because that's not the history of how rail happened in this country. And in general, the US government tends to operate under a rule of "Ain't no problem, ain't no problem" regarding data collection, with rare exception (Americans get very jumpy about over-collection of data by the government, after all; "Why do you need to know how many firearms I own? It's my right to own them", etc.).
... I could certainly see an argument for changing this rule, but I can also see an argument for not; much as Americans are, broadly speaking, comfortable living in homes where lines of toxic volatile chemicals are plumbed directly into those homes (50,000 hospitalizations and 430 deaths due to CO poisoning annually; in 2020, 10 natural gas explosions and 0 train chemical spills) and comfortable operating private individual vehicles on roadways (38,000+ deaths in crashes in 2020) and comfortable with non-licensed ownership of firearms (carrying requires a license, ownership does not; 24,000+ suicides by gun in 2020), most people are most of the time comfortable with train loads of God-knows-what rattling down the old main street. And they're comfortable with it because accidents like this, while not nearly as rare as they should be, are far rarer than other risks Americans tolerate every single day. Risk-tolerance for convenience is just kind of an American tradition.
... like I said else-thread, I'm likelier to suffer from the lead in my pipes living in this part of the country than the train fire.
shadowgovt|3 years ago
We could certainly make it a rule that chemical manifests be lodged with such-and-such organization (the FRA, I'd assume), but we don't because that's not the history of how rail happened in this country. And in general, the US government tends to operate under a rule of "Ain't no problem, ain't no problem" regarding data collection, with rare exception (Americans get very jumpy about over-collection of data by the government, after all; "Why do you need to know how many firearms I own? It's my right to own them", etc.).
... I could certainly see an argument for changing this rule, but I can also see an argument for not; much as Americans are, broadly speaking, comfortable living in homes where lines of toxic volatile chemicals are plumbed directly into those homes (50,000 hospitalizations and 430 deaths due to CO poisoning annually; in 2020, 10 natural gas explosions and 0 train chemical spills) and comfortable operating private individual vehicles on roadways (38,000+ deaths in crashes in 2020) and comfortable with non-licensed ownership of firearms (carrying requires a license, ownership does not; 24,000+ suicides by gun in 2020), most people are most of the time comfortable with train loads of God-knows-what rattling down the old main street. And they're comfortable with it because accidents like this, while not nearly as rare as they should be, are far rarer than other risks Americans tolerate every single day. Risk-tolerance for convenience is just kind of an American tradition.
... like I said else-thread, I'm likelier to suffer from the lead in my pipes living in this part of the country than the train fire.