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Feb. 16, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
41:26
Hazardous materials incident expert explains what went wrong...
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Alright, welcome to today's featured interview.
I'm Mike Adams of Brighteon.com.
And today, in response to the incredible dioxin disaster, the train wreck in Ohio that is being hugely downplayed by the media and the government, we have a very special, highly qualified guest joining us today.
His name is Don Lauchs.
He's a certified Texas emergency manager and also a veteran.
He flew F-11s for the United States Air Force For quite a number of years and then joined the Texas State Guard.
But this man, not only is he an expert in emergency management, he...
He's certified in hazardous materials emergency preparedness, and he had specific training on rail cars and handling exactly these kinds of emergency chemical spills and cleanups and so on.
So, Mr.
Don Laux, sir, thank you so much for joining me today.
Thank you for your service to our country and for taking the time this late evening to join us and tell us about your analysis of the situation.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mike.
Hello to you.
Hello to your great audience.
And with regards to my service, you are all worth it.
Oh, well, great.
That's nice to hear.
Yes.
Well, thank you for all that you've done and you've continued to try to, you know, fight for the people and defend our country in so many ways that maybe we'll have a chance to talk about that later.
But for today, give us your big picture assessment first.
of what's happening in Ohio.
And I have a lot of questions for you, but what's your big picture assessment to start with?
Well, the big picture that what everyone's thinking about right now is the hazardous material release of some really horrible chemicals.
And we can get into that in a minute, or a little bit later in the interview.
But you were looking at a number of things.
You're looking at total incompetence on the part of the EPA, mismanagement of the local on-scene commander, and poor maintenance of the railroad.
Norfolk Southern has a terrible safety record, and I've been trying to locate some of the information.
I have not been able to, but I can tell you this.
A hotbox caused the accident.
Now, a hotbox is the lack of lubrication to an axle bearing.
If you look at train wheels, I'm a train buff too, so bear with me.
I like to paint the picture so you understand completely what happened.
In the old days, a hotbox was something that you had to stop the train because you'd have a derailment.
The train wheels and axles are all one piece.
And they sit on a truck.
So there's two wheels, two sets of axles and wheels on each truck.
One in the front, one in the back, one on each end of the car.
Now, those have to be lubricated.
And you can imagine the load, the lubricant load that's involved on something as heavy as a rail car on a set of bearings, wheel bearings.
If they're kept lubricated, they're okay.
If it loses lubrication, you have a hotbox.
And when that happens, It obviously gets hot.
It basically starts to weld itself together, the axle to the crossbar.
Now, wait one second, Mr.
Laux.
Why, from media reports, this thing was on fire for something like 20 or 30 miles.
Is there no way for the train operator, is there no alarm system or some way for them to know that this situation has developed?
I'm glad you asked that.
There are sensors along rail lines, especially freight lines, infrared heat sensors to detect hot boxes.
And one of them failed to do so, at least.
The first one, when the car went by, they knew where there was sparking and flaming.
They knew that already.
Now, the train crew in the engine...
Didn't know it.
They didn't know what was going on because they couldn't see it.
It's a 150-car train.
That's a long train.
That's probably almost a mile long.
So, they didn't know it was hot.
They weren't warned because the sensor, the trackside sensor, had failed.
But here's the other thing.
Could this sensor have been sabotaged or maliciously turned off?
Oh, it could be.
But...
Yeah, it's always a possibility that could happen.
It could have just failed.
It could have been damaged.
We don't know that.
Okay.
Now, back in the old days, freight trains had something at the back end called a caboose.
And it was manned by rail personnel.
Who would watch for hotboxes.
And they had the cupola up on top, and they had the side bays that they could sit in.
If you're going around a right-hand turn, you'd get in the right side box and look up along the terrain to see if you see any smoke.
That's how you did it.
So, and then that was called feather bedding.
We don't need that many crews on there, and the unions fought it, and so finally they did away with cabooses.
So what we ended up with, we ended up with trains that have men in the front, but not in back.
Okay.
So, as a result of this combination of things, this is what happened.
Now, the derailment happens is when the truck fails and collapses, and then it just starts derailing everything.
It's just, you know, that's a train wreck.
Well, they stack them up pretty badly, and it's usually, in fact, in this particular race, they were accordioned to some degree in the wreck site.
Now, the hotbox condition, could this be due to a lack of proper maintenance, just a lack of lubrication, or not checking the truck chassis after the required number of hours?
Or is it just a spontaneous failure that would happen randomly anyway?
What caused this kind of failure?
Well, something always causes a failure.
You named all the major possible causes.
But lack of lubrication is what causes a hotbox.
It's just like if you try to run your car engine without oil.
It would run for a while, and finally the parts would start to weld together, and it would stop.
Okay.
But also, you know, I noticed that this rail line has cut a lot of jobs, even though in the last year and a half or so, even though they haven't necessarily cut the number of rail miles of cargo that they're moving.
So is that something that you're aware of at all happening across rail lines right now?
Well, rail lines are cutting back on services, as you know, for hauling fertilizer.
And any business is always searching for a way, well, not any business, but business that involves stockholders and CEOs.
They're always looking for ways to cut costs and increase profits.
Now, when you compromise safety in such a way, something that causes billions of dollars of damages and death kind of erases the profit out of that.
And this is what very well may happen here.
It's a foolish economy to scrimp on safety.
It just doesn't pay off.
You're far better spending the money on preventative maintenance and inspections than you are fixing up accidents.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, you think about it, wheel bearing lubrication is pennies on the dollar compared to facing class action lawsuits for, you know, fallout of dioxins, or whatever is happening.
But that brings us to the next question.
So, in your training, once this derailment happened, what should the authorities have done in this case, in your training?
Yeah, I was trained working for Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Division of Emergency Management, as a hazardous material emergency preparedness officer.
And I received specific training, two or three days worth, in Austin on rail cards.
It's a traveling road show, so to speak, that Southern California Southern Pacific puts on to train people in how to handle hazmat incidents with rail cars, tanker cars and other things, hopper cars.
And it was very informative.
But the main thing you want to take away from this is that you want to contain the product.
The product is anything that you're carrying.
It's just the name that's used.
It could be gasoline.
It could be oil.
It could be really hazardous material like this train was carrying.
But the product has got to be contained somehow.
There was an issue here, evidently, and I'm piecing this together, evidently there was a fire somewhere, and the responding crews, the emergency crews, were fearful of some of the chemicals like the vinyl chloride exploding.
Now, I don't know what kind of incident command system they have there.
There's a standard protocol for these kinds of things.
But it's my guess that with Palestine, Ohio being an out-of-the-way place, they didn't have a really quick response.
So when you don't have a quick response, and listen, rail responses are difficult, because you go out in the country, how do you get to the rail line with an emergency vehicle?
Right, there may not be a road anywhere nearby.
Yeah, it's very difficult.
But this happened, this ended up stopping, it probably started before they got into town, right into the town.
And now you've got, what, 15 or 20 cars You said 10 of the 20 that were carrying hazardous material, 150 cars on the train, 38 derailed.
So you had at least 10 cars carrying very hazardous material, I mean really hazardous material, that are derailed, and now what do you do?
So the incident commander has to make decisions, and you want to try to keep the product, keep everything calm.
Stay calm, get a little fires, put out the fires.
The philosophy they used here, evidently, from what they did, is to, well, let's just drain the vinyl chloride into a ditch and set it on fire, because we're afraid that the tank car will explode, and if that happens, there'll be shrapnel all over.
Alright, so what's worse, having a tank car explode and shrapnel going all over, or polluting the entire Ohio River Valley with horrible chemicals?
Which is worse?
Frankly, I'd rather take my chances on keeping the product contained until it can be cooled down.
You have to take your time and pump it out into other transport vehicles and get it out of the area.
So, let me back up for a second.
The incident commander in this kind of scenario, who do they work for?
Are they working for the government or the railroad?
If the railroad had a crew on site, it depends.
You know, that's a good question.
It depends who's the authority in the area.
If the city has an emergency management coordinator, it would be him.
He may delegate authority to a fire chief, for example.
And if the state comes in, then that authority would go to whoever the state actor was in charge there.
So I don't know what they're...
It just depends.
The system is standardized, but the way it's moved around for each individual incident can be unique.
Okay.
All right.
Next question is, are you trained, or people who have received this training like you have, Are you given or do you have sort of cheat sheets on certain chemicals, such as this vinyl chloride in this case, and there were other chemicals, and things that you should do or should not do based on the specific chemicals that represent the product?
Is that well known or are people just taking guesses about that?
No, absolutely.
It's well known.
There's a manual that comes out every four years listing all has material.
You've seen trucks that have the square diamond with little symbols.
Those symbols tell you what's inside that vehicle.
Right.
And you look on the handbook, it has a material handbook, and it'll tell you what it is.
It tells you if it's self-oxygenating, if it reacts with water, if it reacts with whatever else.
So you can look at that, and it's in every fire engine, it's in every fire vehicle, every emergency apparatus that I know of.
Okay, all right.
So that makes sense.
But then it brings up the question...
Is it possible that these people did not realize that by setting this on fire, they would release combustion products, such as what's being reported, phosgene, and also that some of the combustion products would mix with water vapor in the atmosphere and form hydrochloric acid, which would precipitate out of the air and fall onto the rivers and farms and so on?
Is it possible that they had no idea that that would happen, or should they have known that?
I mean, what's your guess?
They should have known it.
There's always a possibility they didn't, or they used the wrong procedures on it.
So that is yet to be determined, but apparently the decision was made to To drain at least one of the cars and set it on fire, and then all hell broke loose.
And I'm not sure if there was an explosion that blew it up.
But from what I read about, I've read several different sources, is that it was the fire that was set by the emergency workers that created that giant black cloud of acid and smoke.
Now, is this procedure of draining the product out of the cars and setting it on fire, is this a successful procedure in other cases?
I mean, is there...
I've never heard of it.
I served as a firefighter here, a volunteer, a certified firefighter, too, for 15 years.
And I got training both, you know, what I mentioned for DPRM, DPS, but also on the firefighter side, the responder side, first responder side.
And...
We've had, I mean, we had a jet fuel tanker overturned not far from, just right on 71, not long ago, several years ago.
And we cordoned it off.
We cleared the area.
It wasn't leaking.
This one wasn't leaking.
And we had to wait until the trucking company or TCQ came, drilled the holes in it, and pumped it out.
That would be the procedure.
If the valving gear is damaged, which in all likelihood has got to be somewhat damaged, then you have to put holes.
You have to find a way.
You have to make a hole to get the product out.
And that's a complex issue.
And that's not something you tackle on a spur of the moment.
That takes a while.
You have to get the scene secure, stabilized, and then determine the best way to make it safe and remove the product.
So if they say that they're They say there was a fire, a smaller fire, before the fire that they ignited themselves.
And reportedly then their concern was that this fire could ignite an entire car.
But wouldn't that ignition require oxygen?
I mean, this chemical doesn't just burn without oxygen.
I mean, don't all fires need oxygen to burn?
So if it's enclosed...
Yeah, some chemicals are self-oxygenating upon ignition.
Okay.
Yeah, well, hydrazine and whatever else they can put together and make it go bang.
But this situation on the ground, as a firefighter, if I'm dealing with overturned commodity vehicles, liquid vehicles, tankers, And they're not leaking and they're not burning.
But I have a little fire over there, okay?
The fire should be controlled because everything else that's not burning is an exposure.
It's called an exposure.
You want to minimize damage to the exposure.
So you cool that fire down.
You spend all your water on it.
See, now there's a limiting factor right there.
You don't know how much water that city can supply to a firefighting effort.
They may have run out of water completely.
You don't know that, and you have to balance all the things.
I'm not second-guessing the incident commander.
He made his decisions until it's investigated and reported on.
We won't know exactly.
But if he ran out of water, then maybe he has to take a different course of action.
But the point is, you have to use the resources you have on hand.
Okay, so do you think there will be a detailed investigation and report on what happened here?
And then at some point, will the public see that?
Oh, then TSB will definitely do a full investigation on this.
And it will be an interesting investigation.
We don't know the extent of the damage yet.
True.
True.
I mean, you talk about canaries in a coal mine, we had chickens in a coop dropping dead.
And their owners, the people having breathing problems, skin rashes already, you know, downwind of this.
This is going to be, this will be a far-reaching environmental catastrophe.
And how we can, I even, I have no clue how to neutralize the chemicals that have been released into the environment.
Oh, yeah.
Well, a lot of these chemicals, the dioxins, are very persistent.
And, you know, the hydrochloric acid is going to alter pH of soils and rivers and streams.
It's going to burn the flesh of the gills of fish and so on.
I mean, yeah.
And then the cancer risk, right?
The cancer...
Effects of exposure to some of these, such as the dioxins, that could shorten lifespans in the aggregate of potentially tens of thousands of years of human lifespan.
I mean, we just don't know.
Well, the cancers that they've listed are horrific cancers.
They're...
I'm trying to find a list here.
Oh, angiocarcinoma.
That would be what?
Heart cancer?
Heart cancers.
I never heard of that.
Exceptionally deadly liver cancer, brain and lung cancers, leukemia, lymphoma.
Of course, you have all kinds of skin irritation and eczema and Things that are caused by that, but the acid, those are the chemicals.
The acid is something, the hydrochloric acid is different.
And like you mentioned, phosgene.
What happens with phosgene or hydrochloric acid, aerosolized acid, is that you breathe it in and it burns the lungs chemically and causes them to go into edema, which is pneumonia, and you drowned in your own fluid.
Right, right.
So...
Okay, here's a different question on all of this.
And thank you for sharing the straight-up, the truth interpretation of this as best as you can.
But here's my question.
There have been accusations from people in the town that this was...
The railroad company, Norfolk Southern, pressured authorities to set fire to this because it would be the fastest way to clear the tracks and get the railroad running again, minimizing the loss to the railroad itself, but then exporting losses to the ecological area in terms of all this fallout that we're talking about.
In your experience, Do transportation companies, do they ever pressure emergency response teams to do things like that that may not be in the interest of the public but are in the interest of the corporate profits?
I don't know of any specific cases other than what I've experienced here and what I've read about.
In this case, the trucking company, which I mentioned earlier, delivered jet fuel to the Berkshire Airport.
They handled it.
They took care of it.
TCEQ came out.
Texas Environmental Quality Commission.
But there's always going to be extent.
Here's this railroad.
I think there are two tracks going through town.
What can we do to open us up sooner?
Well, you're balancing running trains on a track with horrible environmental damage and damage to human beings and animals.
So I hope that didn't happen.
But if it did happen, that is damning to that railroad.
Well, let me ask you then, had they not set this on fire, had they just put out the smaller fire and then proceeded with a containment strategy, in your analysis, how much longer would that have added to the time required to do the cleanup?
You see what I'm asking?
Does that mean it would be a two-week cleanup?
What's your take?
Yeah, it's probably, judging from the damage, although they're pretty quick with it, I'd say at least two weeks, probably a month.
Somewhere in that area to get it cleaned up.
I mean, 150 car trains.
Now, not all the cars derailed.
They decoupled the undamaged cars and got them out of there.
But it's hard to tell.
If their concern is getting a track run again, I don't think I'd be worried about that right now if I were them.
Right, but there is a time difference in terms of Handling this, igniting all the product versus putting out the fires and then trying to clean it up with a non-ignition event.
Is that accurate?
Yes, and to compound that is that the people in the town got conflicting orders about evacuation.
They're told to evacuate, then they're told they could come back when they should not have come back.
They should have evacuated the whole town immediately.
Just everybody leave.
But they were fluctuating on that.
They were going back and forth, and as a result, a lot of people were exposed to some pretty bad chemicals.
Are there guidelines about certain chemicals where there have been breached containers, guidelines of evacuation radius?
Absolutely.
In fact, one of the first things you check on a scene is the wind direction.
Yes.
And then you evacuate downwind.
There are plume charts.
That you can reference either, you know, the firefighters can reference online, or I think some of it, I think those are just online, or in a computer and on their laptops in the trucks.
And you can input the data and it'll give you, you know, roughly what a plume will be, you know, the dangerous part and the not so dangerous and all that.
That's available.
That's easy stuff to find.
Okay, so an incident commander, if they are competent, they would have been able to have access to that kind of tool and calculate the dispersion effect of this?
Yes.
Any town that has a railroad going through it like that, or a known truck route with very hazardous material, like something next to a mine or a big industry, The first responders, the emergency operations center, and the incident commander, whoever that might end up being, must be versed in that.
They must know all about that.
They must be trained.
And they have to have recurrent training.
Because a train going through a town, this is what happens.
What do you do?
A tank car fell over, what do you do?
Well, let's just wait and see what happens.
No, you evacuate.
There should have been, in my opinion, there should have been a much broader evacuation area ordered.
Okay, next question.
It was widely reported by local media outlets that the firefighters who responded to this were told that they need to dispose of their fire gear, not to clean it and ever use it again, but literally get rid of it.
What does that tell you as a former firefighter?
Well, yeah, they're told to destroy it.
Yeah, destroy it.
It's all their PPE, personal protective equipment, helmet, turnout gear, boots, gloves, if they're wearing Nomex underwear.
The reason that is, is because these chemicals penetrate all of that.
Oh.
And they've got to get it, you just have to get rid of it.
You can't wash it out.
It's like chemically bonds inside the material.
That's the way I would describe it.
And you just can't extract it, so you have to destroy it.
It's that bad.
So then it seems, and I'm speaking on behalf of I think what our listeners will be asking, if it's so toxic that the firefighters are ordered to destroy their gear, then how can it be so safe that you can set it on fire and just let the wind take it anywhere?
Exactly.
You can't.
Yeah, it seems like this crazy contradiction.
I mean, it's...
Yeah, I'd have to see, Mike, I'd have to see a really good layout of the accident scene and know what they were fighting.
I know there was widespread fire, but I think that came after That initial collision.
I think they had the one car on fire, but the rest of them weren't.
If that's the case, what you do is put as much water on the other cars as necessary close to the fire to keep them cool.
But I don't know.
We don't have that information yet.
I'm passing on information from my bank of knowledge.
I'm having experience in some of that myself.
Okay.
Alright, yes.
And thank you for doing that.
So, next question then.
It's been widely reported that there are a lot of local animal deaths.
So, there's been at least one pet death of an indoor pet.
There's been chicken deaths and foxes dying and of course a lot of fish dying.
What does that tell you as an emergency hazardous materials responder?
What does that mean if you get those reports?
Well, it scares the living daylights out of me, because this has been moving well away from the accident scene, and it's killing animals.
Now, you know, birds in a coal mine, canaries in a coal mine were used to detect poison gas, carbon dioxide and methane, in mines.
Well, the birds, the chickens, you know, people's chickens are dropping dead.
They're the first ones.
Birds have to have a high oxygen level and they have a high metabolism.
And if they have something ingested into their lungs that prevents it, they just die.
Animals are dying.
I don't have a full report on it.
I know we're going to be getting more of it.
But having that happen is...
There should be alarm bells going off all over the place, trying to get an idea where the damage is, where the contamination is, who's contaminated, whose homes are contaminated.
It's like Chernobyl.
I mean, it's so widespread, you can't fix it.
You have to leave.
Yeah, exactly.
But speaking of Chernobyl, so one of the similarities that's been pointed out by a lot of people, including myself, is that in Chernobyl, I believe 1986, the Soviet Union told everybody, everything's fine, nothing to worry about, go home.
And that's exactly what the EPA now is doing in Ohio.
And it strikes people as crazy that, okay, these animals are dropping dead, and the fish are dying, and the EPA says it's safe to return to your homes, and we detect no problems with the air quality while people are watching this giant smoke plume fill the sky.
It seems like something ripped right out of the Soviet Union.
It sounds like it, doesn't it?
It sounds very, very aloof.
And dangerous.
I mean, okay, yeah, we got a giant smoke cloud moving through the area.
Shelter in your place.
Go in your house, close all your doors and windows, and you'll be okay.
No, that's not the way it works.
Homes are not completely airtight.
A lot of them are quite tight, but not tight enough to protect you from that stuff.
Yeah, good point.
Right.
There is still air exchange.
And as you said, some of these chemicals can penetrate and they can persist.
So doesn't this potentially mean...
I mean, if there's been fallout of dioxins and so on on these homes, if this is, you know, recognized...
How do you clean up a whole town of homes that have been covered with dioxin fallout, if indeed that's what has happened?
If it can't be, well, again, referring to Chernobyl, if it cannot be decontaminated, it's uninhabitable anymore.
So they'd have to move everybody out of the town.
I guess.
And condemn the town.
The survivors.
Right.
And then real estate values would go to zero, and farm values would go to zero, at least temporarily.
What we're looking at, Mike, and I know you know this, that cloud and that damage going down the Ohio River is going to be terrible.
We don't even know what's going to happen to those chemicals.
But we've already seen fish belly up.
Let's talk about, let's say, an emergency response or an incident response commander and their interaction with the media.
Because...
I would imagine in the training that you've received and all your experience and working with the state of Texas and so on, nobody ever told you, I'm guessing, to say, okay, once there's been a big spill, get the National Guard to intimidate and arrest every journalist.
Like, that's not part of the operational plan, is it?
No, I saw that, and that is completely the wrong way to do it.
An incident commander, when he's involved in an incident, should not be interfacing with the press.
You have the information officer to do that.
You have someone appointed to do that.
And what that position does, and I was trained in that at FEMA back in 2004, is you put your story together.
You never lie.
You never put people off.
If you can't answer a question, you find the answer and get it to the press.
And you give them the information as accurately as possible.
And I saw that incident, and that reporter was beaten up by the cops.
Because he was there asking questions, and they didn't like it.
That's insane, but that's happening a lot.
That's happening, well, you know, it's happening to school boards, too.
Yeah, but what does that tell you about the incident?
Because that was a reporter for News Nation, and he was arrested and handcuffed, thrown to the floor by state troopers.
Now, I heard that they dropped the charges against him now, which, of course...
The Attorney General said, drop the charges.
Yeah, right, right, because this is insane, but...
What does that say?
I mean, isn't that an indicator that, wait a second, you know, if they're throwing journalists to the ground and handcuffing them and marching them out of the building, why would they do that if there's nothing to hide, right?
Well, it's fear.
It is insecurity on the part of the staff who did that.
And it's totally unprofessional.
Yeah.
Completely.
You just don't do that.
And I'll say something else about press conferences.
And this angered me.
Actually, it angered me more than anything else.
The governor...
I don't have his name here.
The governor of Ohio was giving a press conference.
And they had a couple of maps.
Yeah, DeWire.
He had a couple of maps up out there pointing to him.
And then he started laughing about something.
And I thought, you can't do that.
The governor of the state, looking at probably the worst hazardous material spill it's ever had, with the most far-reaching effects, yucking it up.
You compare that to how Governor DeSantis handles a press conference.
He doesn't fool around with them.
He sticks to the business.
He doesn't make jokes.
He tells the story the way it is, and that's it.
And this governor just, I couldn't believe it when I saw that.
That was, that'll be used against him in a re-election campaign for sure.
All kinds of lawsuits too, you would imagine.
But, so, you know, your experiences with Texas, how do you think Texas would have handled this train incident differently from the way it got handled in Ohio?
Well, I just returned from the Emergency Management Association of Texas symposium this last week.
I just got back today in San Marcos, and that's for emergency managers.
Texas is very well prepared, in my opinion.
The professionalism that I see among the emergency management community It's dedicated, it is knowledgeable, and its leadership is very good.
I'll just say that.
I'm very impressed with it.
I think Texas is well prepared.
The whole incident command system, say in Bastrop County, we have a spill on the train going through Bastrop.
What I would do is the county judge should call the governor's office immediately, tell them what's going on, and request assistance, and then turn it over to the incident commander.
The incident commander then makes a determination of what they need.
We need hazardous material, cleanup crews and tanks and chemicals and hazmat suits, whatever it is.
And the state jumps on that, and they'll draw resources from other counties to be here, because they know what everyone has.
It works out really well.
The coordination through TDEM, DPS, the Texas Division of Emergency Management, And the emergency managers throughout the state, I think, is excellent.
Well, I'm really glad to hear that.
And even though I don't have all the contact that you do, my impression is very much the same.
My impression of Texas first responders and emergency management personnel is that they are...
They're extremely well trained.
They have a can-do attitude, right?
And they don't make excuses.
They jump in and get it done.
Even, you know, rescue operations, fires, you name it.
It's been quite remarkable.
Storms, you name it.
You know, Texas has it together in this aspect, although, of course, the power grid Failed with that freeze in, what, January, February of 2021.
But that wasn't the fault of the responders.
That was lack of weatherization of the grid energy providers.
That's a totally different issue.
It was that and a combination of over-reliance on unreliable energy sources like windmills covered with tons of ice.
Yeah, exactly.
Good point.
Yeah, they don't turn and generate power when they're covered with ice.
That's an amazing thing.
And solar panels don't work when the sun isn't shining because you're covered in snow clouds.
Who would have thunk it?
Who would have thunk it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Okay.
Well, so a couple of things then.
We're going to wrap this up.
I really appreciate your time.
First of all, how can people reach you or follow anything that you're working on?
I think you have a Facebook account.
I have Facebook, Don Lauchs, D-O-N-L-O-U-C-K-S, is my Facebook handle.
I've got some other, gosh, I'm not prepared to give you all those things.
I can't remember them.
No, no worries.
I'm on Facebook and my website, I have a website, it's donlauchs.org.
It's a little bit out of date.
Okay, but the reason I mention this is because I want to invite you to come into our studio.
Since you're in Central Texas, you're probably driving distance to our studio, and I'd really like to get you in studio to cover this more because your experience on this is so valuable, and people just want a straight analysis from someone, and you've given it tonight.
Coming up, could you join us in the studio?
Absolutely, Mike.
I'd be happy to.
Let me know what you want to discuss.
I'll prepare for it and have the charts and graphs as necessary and do whatever we can to enlighten your viewers.
Well, thank you so much.
Unfortunately, I think we're going to have a lot more emergencies coming up as our world seems to be going crazy and things falling apart and headed into World War and so on.
I think emergency management personnel are going to be very busy for the next few years.
Sad to say.
I think so.
I think we've got a lot to learn from this last incident in Ohio.
Yeah, no kidding.
Think twice about how prepared your small town is for a derailment event, right?
I mean, number one.
Maybe this was just a lack of water trucks.
Well, let's say number one is know how to get out of town when you need to.
Ah, good point.
Yeah, your bug out plan.
And I guess for anybody who was teased about owning a gas mask, well, you know, now it seems pretty smart right now to put on the mask and get out of Dodge, right?
Well, the reason those were developed was because of phosgene gas in World War I. Good point.
Good point.
Yeah, see?
Preppers vindicated yet again.
Yeah.
It seems like every week preppers are getting the same thing.
Their friends are saying, man, you were right, you know, about one thing or another.
It's fascinating.
Yeah, then they want to borrow some eggs from you.
Or ammo, depending on the scenario at hand.
Thank you so much, Mr.
Laux.
It's been really informative to talk with you.
I hope you'll join us again.
Once again, thank you for your service to our country and for being part of the Texas response team.
You helped give me a lot of confidence in Texas.
I'm proud to live in Texas and be part of this community.
Well, thank you, Mike.
It was a pleasure.
I'm very much looking forward to collaborating with you some more on the issues that come up.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much.
God bless you and stay safe.
And folks, you've been listening to an interview with Don Laux in Central Texas.
I'm Mike Adams, also in Central Texas.
The platform here, brighteon.com, you are free to copy and download and repost this interview on other platforms.
If you quote from it, just credit Don Laux.
And thank you for listening.
Mike Adams here, the founder of Brighteon and also NaturalNews.com.
Be safe, everybody.
It's a dangerous world out there.
Get prepared to bug out if you have to.
Take care.
A global reset is coming.
And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
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