This simulation depicts the steady release of a million pounds of persistent chemical from East Palestine, Ohio. The model was initialized to start around 02Z on February 4th (9PM EST 2/3/23), since the crash site was reportedly on fire after the derailment. According, to AP News, the controlled burn of vinyl chloride started on Monday, February 6th. Consequently, this would have been when the largest plume was likely emitted towards Western Pennsylvania.

HYSPLIT was the same model used by the National Weather Service to assist in evacuations of East Palestine, Ohio [Source]. Please do not harass me to remove this post for not being a perfect chemical model. If you don't like this post, downvote it and run your own model simulation. I'm only posting this since there are reports of folks getting sick tens of miles away from East Palestine, Ohio.

Please don't focus on the exact concentrations of chemical, especially since the EPA has reportedly found additional toxic substances burning at the site (ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, ethylhexyl acrylate, and isobutylene). The main focus should be on the potential threat that trace amounts of carcinogens may have been dispersed far away from East Palestine, Ohio.

HYSPLIT User Agreement

Aren't there many different chemicals with different toxic threshold limit values? Those should be plotted separately.

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Bye bye New York’s water shed

Plumes of WHAT? The main outputs of burning vinyl chloride are CO2 (of which there are plumes all over the place coming from any coal powerplant for example, all the time), and hydrochloric acid, which will fall out of a plume as acid rain as soon as it hits clouds of water (is that being accounted for here? Maybe yes since some of the plumes just suddenly disappear)

Or if something else, what?

And if you're referring to the non-burning portions of chemicals, then surely those have a completely different dispersal than the tall plume of hot combustion products going way up in the sky, and would have very different graphing?

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The plumes were apparently made up mix of impartially burnt Vinyl chloride, Ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, Butyl acrylate, Ethylhexyl acrylate, and Isobutylene [source]. The interaction between the byproducts of combustion and the atmosphere are a huge mystery without additional information. Unfortunately, Northfolk Southern, the EPA, and local authorities haven't exactly been transparent about cleanup operations. The fact that local authorities were performing open burns in trenches only complicated the matter.

Also, Due to poor air quality weather conditions (subsidence inversion), the plume of toxic chemicals were not able to "go far up into the sky". Look at any done photos or ground footage and you'll say that the pollution was trapped in the low levels of the atmosphere (close to the ground). That deck of stratus clouds already indicated a stable layer of the atmosphere preventing pollution escape into the upper troposphere.

Lastly, your argument regarding power plants emitting SO2 is irrelevant, especially since the EPA mandates scubbers within their smokestacks. Would you want these chemicals from East Palestine dispersed anywhere close to your home?

I agree. I live in South Central Pennsylvania and even I am concerned. The fact that some people are downplaying this disaster is absolutely ridiculous.

> impartially burnt Vinyl chloride, Ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, Butyl acrylate, Ethylhexyl acrylate, and Isobutylene

• "Impartially burnt vinyl chloride" your source mentions nothing about any such thing. Can you point me to the specific row and column you think you are seeing that?

• Ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, Butyl acrylate, and Ethylhexyl acrylate: 1) all of these are liquids at STP, so they should not just casually form large amounts of any plume all that quickly, 2) Your source says nothing about any of them being in any plume regardless, again why did you cite a source for these claims that doesn't talk about what you claimed?

• Isobutylene: This one straight up says "no signs of a breach" at all.

> Also, Due to poor air quality weather conditions (subsidence inversion), the plume of toxic chemicals were not able to "go far up into the sky".

Higher than cold gas in the same location, was the only relevant point there. Thus requiring a different plume model for the non burning stuff.

> a huge mystery

If something is a "huge mystery" then how is someone graphing it...? Can't be that big of a mystery, or if it is then OP is just lying/made up this data? I'm responding to the graph here, you know the thing the thread is about.

> Lastly, your argument regarding power plants emitting SO2 is irrelevant

I didn't specify sulfuric acid rain. CO2 produces plenty of acid rain too (way way more than this will).

> Would you want these chemicals from East Palestine dispersed anywhere close to your home?

The point of plotting a plume of "chemicals" floating around is presumably that you are trying to argue it's a big deal even if it is FAR away from one's home. So not the relevant question.

Would I mind being 200 miles away from this with my home? Not particularly at the moment, no.

What does the euro model say

I get your point, the graph doesn’t indicate what it’s tracking, which makes the data mostly irrelevant.

However you can’t argue that just because they don’t know exactly what’s been released, doesn’t mean it’s not concern. You say you would be worried at 200 miles. But how about 50? Or 30?

There’s a collective 1,400,000 people within a 40 mile radius of the town.

> just because they don’t know exactly what’s been released, doesn’t mean it’s not concern.

No, my argument was that they shouldn't be physically able to graph it AT ALL, if they don't know what it is at all. How... did they make the graph/model then...? If they don't know what the density of any of it is, or the temperature, or whatever? Even if all you know was that it was from the combustion column, then you should know roughly what all those things produce when they burn and be able to give a pretty good likely summary.

And if they do know what it is, why did they not label it?

> You say you would be worried at 200 miles. But how about 50? Or 30?

I only commented on this cause the guy directly asked me, it wasn't my original or main point "how bad" it is. That being said, even if this contains some of all of those chemicals listed above for sake of argument, but MOSTLY combustion products, a cloud in the light blue zone at hundreds of miles away, at 1 part per billion total and maybe 0.1-0.2 part per billion of worst-stuff is not terribly concerning IMO.

Yeah. I mean to be fair you sound like you know more about chemistry than I do. But why can’t the graph it with some range of suspected densities of base chemicals/byproducts/etc. ?

The graphic may not be completely accurate but would be pretty representative of the direction, distance and density the compounds were likely to have dispersed.

>if something else, what?

the MSDS for vinyl chloride warns that burning it "produces toxic and corrosive fumes of hydrogen chloride and phosgene" the latter of which seems more concerning from a toxicity standpoint than anything else already mentioned.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0002889718506429

HCl 27,000 ppm; CO2 58,100 ppm; CO 9500 ppm; phosgene 40 ppm

2,400x less phosgene in ppm than the other stuff created (it's a a similar molar mass to CO2 too for example)... not a big deal. Even if every single train car was full of 100% phosgene, it wouldn't really be at particularly dangerous levels spread out over 100s of cubic miles of air.

Let alone a handful of cars of vinyl chloride burned down and becoming only 1 out of 2500 parts phosgene in the combustion products, and THEN spread out of 100s of cubic miles.

I would definitely understand evacuating the town temporarily but not worried about phosgene poisoning in the slightest if I'm 100 miles away. Even if the plume is pretty directional and comes right at me

>Plumes of WHAT?

oh i thought you were asking sincere questions, but i can see from reading the other responses the questions are just a setup to flex your domain specifc knowledge in this area

How did this model get generated? Is there any longer ones?

? No, it's a sincere question. Even if I was a nobel prize winning chemist, I'd still want to know what the graph was of...

Combustion of vinyl chloride = Hydrogen chloride and around 9% phosgene plus a garden variety of other toxic compounds

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0002889718506429

According to this, it's more like 0.04% phosgene, not 9%, off by multiple orders of magnitude there. And zero notable "other toxic compounds" either in any measurable quantities. Just CO is the only other one you didn't mention, which is not toxic in minute quantities in open air in the sky.

Well you asked "plumes of what" and then proceeded to tell us what would likely be there with more specificity than any other source ive seen here or elsewhere has offered, so it seems that was more just a complaint about the vagueness of the model.

HYSPLIT is primarily a model for predicting the movement of localized masses of air that start at a specific point, over a certain period of time, given local conditions/forecast. The only reason I've heard of it is because balloon pilots use it to predict flight paths. I didn't even know it could be used for tracing contaminants. You seem to be suggesting that it can't or shouldn't. But a model doesn't have to be perfect to be useful, and even a crude model is better than no model. I don't know this w/ certainty but I would assume that for gaseous contaminant dispersal, the biggest controlling factor on the dispersal pattern would simply be weather - regardless of gas composition. If that's true then HYSPLIT seems more than sufficient to at the very least say "its probably headed this way", which is all this model appears to be saying.

> Well you asked "plumes of what" and then proceeded to tell us what would likely be there with more specificity than any other source ive seen here or elsewhere has offered, so it seems that was more just a complaint about the vagueness of the model.

I said what would be in burned vinyl chloride.

That doesn't tell me whether this graphic here is supposed to represent the burned column of smoke (with those things in it) OR cold gas nearer the ground from un burned stuff evaporating off of spilled pools of chemicals.

A distinction I actually made clear in my first comment.

> You seem to be suggesting that it can't or shouldn't.

Not if you don't know whether the gas is cold or burning hot, it can't. Or have any clue as to its general density.

I suspect that the issue isn't that the modeler didn't know any of those things, they almost surely did. But then didn't LABEL them. Making it just a bad graph. Dime a dozen on this subreddit, randomly not labeling crucial information is a tale as old as /r/dataisbeautiful I still don't know which one it is though.

> "its probably headed this way", which is all this model appears to be saying.

No, it's giving specific parts per million in the graphic. And also, as I mentioned as well from the start, it's showing some plumes suddenly disappearing, which I suspected might be "hitting rain clouds and getting knocked out of the air" but was interested in confirmation on.

>you sound like you know

Key word here is sound. This person knows nothing about environmental modelling.

i think its only giving a concentration because to model the spatial dispersion pattern of a hypothetical volume of *some contaminant* in air, there has to be a starting concentration of *some contaminant*. it looks like they've used a dust based model, and the standard for quantifying concentrations of stuff in air when the exact composition is unknown (like dust / ash / etc.) is mass per cubic vol. for such hypotheticals the exact values are irrelevant and meaningless, but their relative differences are still useful as a vector.

and I wasn't sure of any of this either at first so i simply clicked the link OP provided to read about the model and its assumptions. There is an impressive amount of documentation available for HYSPLIT. I have learned some cool stuff already. Most of your questions / assumptions could have been addressed by reading the documentation, and doing so would probably even make clear how many of the shortcomings you've identified in the model could be improved. But it doesn't seem like you're interested in learning / contributing / helping bc all you've done so far is use hundreds of words to say nothing more than "youre dumb thats dumb you cant do that", and that seems like a waste of your knowledge

Don't let that shit up into Canada, please.

But some pretty polished nothingtoseehereism delivery

I haven't tried to use the ERA5 reanalysis dataset with HYSPLIT, but it appears that you can use this python-based converter for ingesting ERA5 grib files to ARL.

You don’t need to know exactly what it is. You need a mass emission rate. Granted there’s some guess work. You know the mass leaked. You can guess % burned. But you still have to know % combined with oxygen. Still whatever compounds produced by burning are going to be really nasty. The were some fixed site monitors upwind that measured pretty high polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). I beg there were some chlorinated ones too. The just like regular PAHs, chlorinated PAHs are going to be around for a long time but longer. And Cl-PAHs are going to more toxic and there’s not a lot of good data to derive health benchmarks. We’re going to have to see what diseases pop up for people and ecosystems.

I used the web-based interface to generate this model (using NOAA's servers). You can run it yourself here or install the software locally on your computer. https://www.ready.noaa.gov/HYSPLIT.php

You are absolutely correct. However, in order to model the potential plume transport, I specified a persistent chemical to represent the mix. Excluding deposition (both wet and dry) and complex chemical interactions, this model shows where the atmosphere may have transported the plume during the dispersion process. It's not perfect, but it does provide insight into who may have been affected downwind of the chemical disaster.

HYSPLIT does provide the ability to specify deposition if you check out the model for yourself, but I didn't feel that there was enough information to specify that variable. Thanks for your scientific inquiry; hopefully government officials release an official dispersion map at some point.

The chemical plume would likely be very diluted at that point. Hopefully my country can get our sh*t together soon, so that it doesn't happen again.

Thank you for this concise response. Your explanation is very helpful :)

You should definitely need to know the temperature "Burning hot right out of a fire" or "cold, evaporated" is going to change the elevation and which wind patterns it is in by hundreds, thousands of meters...

Just labeling that alone would be great, because then from the chart of what was in the tankers and what burned and what didn't, etc, we could estimate what it is a plume of ourselves.

> The were some fixed site monitors upwind that measured pretty high polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).

That seems way more interesting than this chart here (just in general, downwind readings make more sense for what people would care about, and skips right over the question of what the stuff is...), do you have a link for this?

I'm not trying to say "ur dumb" I'm trying to find the answers to the actual questions I asked: was this the hot burning combustion column they were modeling, or was it cold evaporated gases? And optionally: if they measured it for concentrations, did they also measure stuff in it? (maybe maybe not, but had to do SOME measuring, what did it find?)

I will check out the documentation too though, thanks

Anyway you give me a quick rundown of what you picked for options?

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Good points. I'd also like to see that breakdown and see where the heavier gasses or emissions ended up. And, someone else suggested on another sub that they might still be present. Would love to get some data on whether or not that is true.

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I live in Brockville, Ontario, and have both asthma and bronchitis, and noticed it seemed worse this past week, although it very well could have been the typical triggers and just worse for other reasons. Should I be concerned about exposure?

I live about 180 miles away from East Palestine near Lake Erie, am I fucked?

Here’s the main site https://response.epa.gov/site/site_profile.aspx?site_id=15933 and here’s the documents / data https://response.epa.gov/site/doc_list.aspx?site_id=15933link.

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Any chance of these acid rain clouds making their way into Atlantic Canada? I’ve been monitoring radars and we have had a few systems come from over OH and PA that travelled to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the past weeks. I think that any chemicals in those systems would fall far before travelling that far but I am just curious as I live in Nova Scotia, if we should be concerned

looks like the winds shifted north on the 7th, at 0:00 hours, fire still burning strong. it appears as though ontario would receive a great deal.

BPC fire in saint basile le grand, right next to montreal in 1988 was much much worse lol.

I’m from the Maritimes too I hope it doesn’t affect us