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Feb. 16, 2023 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:43:38

Situation Update, 2/16/23 - Devastating DIOXIN exposure from Ohio train...

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	Welcome to the situation update for Thursday, February 16th, 2023.
	Mike Adams here.
	Thank you for joining me.
	I've got a really great interview coming up for you here.
	I just completed it before I started this recording.
	And it's great to have good contacts, let me tell you.
	So I have found a certified Texas emergency manager Who has also retired from the US Air Force many years ago, former F-111 fighter pilot, Texas State Guard guy,
	certified as a hazardous materials emergency preparedness officer with specific training on rail cars and handling spills of toxic substances in rail accidents.
	And so he's got a lot to say, as you might imagine, about the Ohio train, you know, gas bomb situation.
	And he calls it a, quote, far-reaching environmental catastrophe.
	And we're going to bring you that interview here coming up shortly.
	It's about a 35-minute interview, and I was able to pull that together for you kind of at the last minute.
	I want to thank our guests for joining us.
	You'll hear more about who he is coming up.
	But it's clear now we're seeing more and more people speaking out and even the governor of Pennsylvania now speaking out, blasting Norfolk Southern for its so-called vent and burn plan that it carried out in the aftermath of the train derailment.
	And this is covered in theohiostar.com.
	They've reprinted the governor's letter.
	This is Governor Josh Shapiro.
	And Governor Shapiro is talking about Norfolk Southern's, quote, unwillingness to explore or articulate alternative courses of action to their proposed vent and burn operation.
	And he says that the railroad response personnel improperly planned tactical response operations without adequate input from elected officials or local response organizations or state agencies resulting in a single plan of action to vent and burn all five cars Without allowing for input from Pennsylvania emergency management leaders.
	And this governor, Josh Shapiro, is a Democrat, by the way.
	He says Norfolk Southern failed to explore all potential courses of action, including some that may have kept the rail line closed longer, but could have resulted in a safer overall approach for first responders, residents, and the environment.
	And I think he's right on, actually.
	And I think that the situation that's emerging from all of this is that Norfolk Southern, a railroad company with a horrible maintenance record and a horrible safety record, did not properly lubricate the axle wheels of this train or did not properly conduct maintenance as is required to prevent this kind of thing.
	And then when the train derailed, it seems that they prioritized whatever method would reopen the tracks as quickly as possible, no matter what the cost to the community and to the environment and to the wildlife.
	And that's why they set this thing on fire.
	That's what it appears the situation is.
	With vinyl chloride unleashing phosphine gas, which is a chemical weapon used in World War I, plus the hydrochloric acid and dioxins, so many toxic chemicals coming out of this.
	And it all happened in East Palestine.
	Where about 5,000 people live.
	It's about 21 miles south of Youngstown, Ohio, and 50 miles northwest of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
	So this produced, as you know now, this massive toxic cloud.
	And it was unclear to me until I read this letter that the railroad was calling the shots on this not-local-government personnel.
	This wasn't an emergency management decision.
	This was a corporate decision.
	And so you always have to be suspect of these corporate decisions.
	Are they doing what's right for the people?
	Or are they only doing what's right for their own corporate profits?
	And it appears, although surely there will be a deeper investigation, it appears that they were doing what's right for corporate profits.
	But This ecological disaster is also, it's much larger economically than what people are realizing because if indeed the fallout of dioxins, if this is properly acknowledged, we may be looking at a situation where this entire town has to be condemned and depopulated, like literally shut down.
	And the surrounding farms may have to be permanently evacuated or at least for many years pending dioxin remediation.
	And so essentially this railroad, Norfolk Southern, may have just collapsed the value of all real estate in the town of East Palestine.
	And surely anybody trying to sell a home in this community or anywhere near it right now will not be able to sell their home, will not be able to sell a farm, and will not be able to find renters if they own a home and they're trying to find renters or if they own apartments.
	Who's going to want to live in East Palestine knowing about all this dioxin fallout, phosgene chemical weapon molecule falling out everywhere, the fish dying, the chickens dying, the wildlife dying, animal, I mean, pets, household pets now reportedly I mean, pets, household pets now reportedly dying.
	Massive smoke plume above the town with fallout.
	Who on earth is going to want to live there?
	For a long time to come.
	And it seems to me that with this decision, this railroad, Norfolk Southern, condemned an entire town to save a few bucks and try to get the rail line open more quickly.
	They set fire to something like a million gallons of toxic chemicals.
	And they essentially chemically nuked an entire town.
	And then, of course, the governor of Ohio jumped in and the National Guard and the state troopers and they began essentially working for Norfolk Southern and arresting journalists and intimidating journalists and covering this up and shutting down any questions to the governor of Ohio jumped in and the National Guard and the state troopers and they began essentially working for Norfolk Southern and arresting journalists and intimidating journalists and covering this up and So there's this massive, massive.
	massive cover-up of the reality of the situation there, and there's almost no truth coming out about this.
	In fact, there are even widespread accusations that this toxicology company that has been on the scene running tests and assuring everybody that everything's okay, that this company is accused of being a front group for highly polluting corporations.
	And this company is called the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, CTEH. It's a private contractor.
	They do water, soil, and air quality tests, and they were hired by Norfolk Southern to do these tests in East Palestine, Ohio, and that according to many reports, and I'm reading from Kanakoa News, which is kanakoa.substack.com, quote, this company has a, quote, history of minimizing the effects of environmental disasters to satisfy its corporate employers, according to critics.
	This company is known for monitoring oil and gas industry spills and disasters.
	For example, they worked on an oil spill in a Louisiana town in 2005 after a flood of toxic coal ash smothered central Tennessee in 2008 and also They worked on a defective Chinese drywall company when that began plaguing Florida homeowners.
	Sorry, I'm trying to piece together a couple sentences here.
	This company, CTEH, was on the scene saying everything was fine.
	In each of these cases, the toxicology firm was alleged to be supplying the data that its employers wanted while falsely assuring the public that they were safe from harm.
	And this has been written up by a number of organizations, including the New York Times.
	And by the way, this is one area where Democrats actually shine, which is sounding the alarm.
	I mean, not establishment Democrats, but sort of grassroots Democrats.
	They shine on sounding the alarm on these big corporations engaging in mass pollution, you know, chemical spills, oil spills, cover-ups, all of this, because it seems like The GOP is usually in bed with these corporations, and more grassroots Democrats are the ones sounding the alarm on this.
	But in this case, I'm joining those grassroots Democrats and also sounding the alarm because I have a pretty good idea that this is a massive cover-up going on here.
	Now, you may ask, why doesn't my lab conduct these tests?
	There are several reasons.
	Number one, we are a food science lab.
	Food science is our specialty.
	Now we do test water.
	We are, in fact, validated and accredited to test water samples, but only for certain types of substances.
	So we test water and food and soil samples for things like heavy metals and pesticides and herbicides.
	Well, this is not a heavy metal issue.
	No one's concerned that there's lead in the cloud, right?
	They're talking about dioxins.
	They're talking about phosphine.
	So our laboratory is not accredited To test for phosgene chemical weapons or even dioxins.
	So you see labs specialize in certain types of chemicals or certain types of elements such as arsenic.
	You know, I can test rice for arsenic.
	No problem.
	We're really, really good at that.
	I can't test rice for dioxin contamination.
	I mean, we could develop that method.
	We could validate the method over a period of a few months, and then we could do proficiency testing, as it's called in the industry.
	We could apply for proficiency testing.
	We could conduct that.
	We could pass the testing, and then we could apply for adding that method to our accreditation of our ISO 17025 accreditation and so on.
	And yeah, in a year...
	We could be certified to test for dioxins.
	But that's a year, folks.
	That's not tomorrow.
	So we can't do this right now.
	And so we have to even rely on other labs who specialize in chemical weapons testing.
	And believe me, I don't want to be a lab that specializes in chemical weapons testing anyway, because I don't want chemical weapons around.
	In the standards or the molecules or samples, I don't want people sending me like, here, how much chemical weapon concentration is in this thing?
	No, thank you.
	Not interested.
	So we don't test for that, in case you were wondering.
	Now, but as someone who owns a laboratory that is ISO accredited, I can tell you, I've seen some very fishy stuff over the years from other labs, and I am very much aware that labs that wish to deceive the public are able to do so.
	If that's their motivation and that's their lack of ethics, they can do so.
	And if you're wondering how they do that, it's very simple.
	Number one is they buy really old instruments that lack the sensitivity.
	So, for example, my instruments, like we just bought a new ICP-MS, I don't know, six months ago, and then we have a new single quad instrument that came in like two months ago.
	We're always buying new equipment.
	We're running six mass spec instruments right now in our lab.
	One of them is a triple quad mass spec, two ICP-MSs, and the others are LC-MS single quad instruments.
	But we're running six mass specs, and we have encountered other labs that would run methods using What is it?
	Like atomic spectroscopy tests with really old instruments.
	What's it called?
	ICP-OES, atomic, I'm sorry, optical emissions spectroscopy, I believe is what that stands for, OES. And their sensitivities are like two orders of magnitude less sensitive than what we have in our lab.
	Using ICP-MS, ICP inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.
	And there's a difference between spectrometry versus spectroscopy.
	So spectrometry is looking at masses of atomic elements and spectroscopy is looking at frequencies of emitted light wavelengths.
	Spectrometry is far more sensitive in comparable instruments.
	So I've seen cases where labs would intentionally buy old instruments, and then they would claim that their limit of detection, as it's called, the LOD, is some crazy high number, like LOD, 10 parts per million.
	And then they would run a sample through that old instrument, and they would claim not detected.
	I've seen this phrase, not detected, on many, many reports, public reports, even news reports and so on, sometimes for food or personal care products that I knew were heavily contaminated.
	They would say not detected.
	So if any reports come out of this, watch for that phrase, not detected.
	But not detected on a And in case you're wondering, by the way, in the world of lab science, there are two things here.
	Well, I guess three.
	There's limit of detection, which is the lowest amount that can be detected with a proper signal.
	And in order to get to that, you have to know the signal-to-noise ratio.
	You have to have a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio.
	And for an LOD, a limit of detection, that minimum signal-to-noise ratio usually has to be three to one.
	Or something in that range, or better.
	And then there's another number called limit of quantitation, which means that's the lowest level at which you have sufficient confidence to know the concentration of the contaminant that you're looking for.
	And a limit of quantitation requires much higher signal-to-noise ratio, typically on the order of 10 to 1.
	So you have to have a lot more signal, in other words, a stronger peak coming out of the background noise of your sample run.
	Technically, this company that's telling everybody, you know, it's all good.
	Everything's fine.
	We're not finding anything.
	You need to know what's the limit of detection?
	What's the limit of quantitation?
	What instruments are they using?
	What's their calibration curve look like, by the way?
	And what external calibration standards are they using?
	And even what instruments are they using?
	Because some people can buy just kind of useless, pointless instruments that hardly pick up anything.
	And they can say, oh, we didn't see anything.
	It's all good, you know?
	Now, another thing that can happen in environmental samples, and I'm not accusing, by the way, this testing company.
	What's their name again?
	CTEH. I'm not accusing them of this.
	I don't know if they're doing this or not, but I'm just saying in a general sense, environmental labs can easily, they can easily twist their results based on their sampling technique.
	So Well, and also, by the way, cherry-picking the samples that they want to keep.
	So they can run around a community and they can take 100 samples of water and 100 samples of soil, you know, 100 samples of tree leaves or whatever.
	And then they can run all of those and obviously they can simply discard the results that they don't want to see.
	And they can often come up with reasons for why they discarded that, you know, like, oh, well, that's outside the bell curve.
	I mean, They can just make up whatever.
	Oh, we forgot to, you know, tap the instrument twice.
	Whatever.
	They can find reasons to do that.
	Okay?
	Or they can just commit sample fraud, which is what the government employees did in, what was that town near Detroit, where they had lead in the water supply.
	And they just straight up committed fraud.
	They just got water from somewhere else and labeled it city water and ran it.
	It's like, it's all good!
	So yes, they can commit fraud.
	They can do all kinds of things.
	They can take water from a stream and then they can run it through a water filter.
	And they can still say, yeah, that's water from the town and it's testing all clean now.
	What do you know?
	Even though, of course, it's been run through a filter that filters out these chemicals.
	So the point is, if somebody wants to fake these lab results, if they don't have ethics, they can absolutely do it.
	There are a multitude of ways for them to do that.
	And you always have to wonder, you know, who's paying them and what are their ethics in terms of scientific integrity?
	And just as in any industry, there are labs that will operate with high integrity, like us, and that's why we reject a lot of food samples.
	And, you know, we reject entire lots of food, such as turmeric, because it contains high lead, or...
	Rice because it contains high arsenic and so on and so forth.
	We reject a lot of stuff.
	But other labs may just say it's all good.
	And they just don't have ethics and they're just collecting a paycheck.
	So you always have to be suspicious of when a company that has caused an ecological disaster, when they are paying the lab company to conduct the tests, you need to be obviously highly suspicious of those test results.
	And what should be happening here is that there should be independent labs, you know, independent tests, like truly independent, not even, frankly, not even associated with government.
	And I don't know if there are such labs that are willing to do this and bear the cost of this, but that would be the ideal situation.
	If somebody like me, for example, if my lab were accredited in these specific analytes, as they're called, then I would be the perfect person to go in and sample everything and take it to the lab and then give you the results.
	In fact, we're doing that with chicken feed from Tractor Supply, by the way.
	You know, we're the perfect lab for that because we are, you know, we're a food lab and there were a lot of allegations and complaints out there.
	People were saying that Tractor Supply, Chicken Feed, what's it called?
	I think it's called, I forgot the name, Something Pride.
	Anyway, it's in a yellow bag.
	It's kind of the in-house brand of tractor supply.
	And a lot of people were claiming that they fed that to their chickens and the chickens stopped laying eggs.
	And then, I think it's Puritans pride, actually.
	And then when they changed to other feed, then the chickens started laying eggs again.
	So there was a lot of speculation about that.
	So we have acquired six or seven brands of chicken feed.
	From tractor supply.
	In fact, I have some of the results here on my screen, but I haven't finished putting them all together.
	And we have heavy metals results, and we have glyphosate results, and we have aflatoxin results, and we have microbiology results.
	And we're going to release all those.
	I'm going to do a full video of this.
	So we're the perfect lab to do that.
	I don't have any interests.
	You know, I don't have any, like tractor supply didn't hire me to do this.
	They're probably annoyed that I'm doing it, frankly.
	But I'm just going to give you the straight-up results.
	It is what it is.
	Whether it's good or bad, I'm just going to tell you what it is.
	And it could be that we don't find anything wrong with it.
	And so be it.
	We're not going to fudge results.
	I mean, are you kidding me?
	If you're a lab and you fudge results, and I wonder if this lab in Ohio, are they ISO-accredited?
	Because if you fudge results...
	And if your accreditation agency finds out about that, they will yank your accreditation.
	And then that will have the result of yanking every science paper that you've ever published out of that lab.
	I mean, you're talking just destroying potentially years of work.
	So no lab that is ISO accredited, unless they're insane, would fudge their results Because that accreditation actually means something.
	We are ISO accredited, and it's no joke.
	You have to prove...
	You have to provide log files and all this stuff.
	Anyway, I'm not going to go into all the details because I don't want to turn this into a lab geek session, but I did want to provide you that background so that you understand...
	That just because one lab hired by the railroad is telling you that everything's good doesn't necessarily mean it's good.
	And I also want to explain why we can't conduct these tests, even though I really, really want to.
	But again, we're just not accredited with those target molecules.
	What I do want to point out is, well, a couple of things.
	Indoor pets are now starting to die in the town.
	And there was one such incident reported by InfoWars Indoor pet dies from vinyl chloride gas emanating from toxic Ohio train derailment.
	And a family pet inside a home has died following complications related to chemical exposure.
	So this is very concerning when the EPA is telling residents, you know, go back home.
	It's all good.
	Just go home and keep on breathing.
	Well, the hazardous materials response expert that I've interviewed that you're going to hear about here in a second, or in a few minutes, He pointed out in the interview that homes are not airtight.
	Homes are not level 4 biohazard laboratory, you know, air-sealed positive air pressure systems.
	Homes exchange air with the outside of the home.
	And so if there are contaminants in the outside, whether it be, you know, phosgene gas or Or hydrochloric acid fallout or dioxins or whatever, it's going to get into the home at some level.
	And so when you start to see pets dying inside homes in this town, that's an indicator that these toxins are getting inside homes, or at least some homes, right?
	So that's red flag number one.
	And then red flag number two comes from an author on Substack.
	His Substack name is Planet Waves FM. I'm not sure what that refers to.
	But the author is Eric Coppolino.
	The title is East Palestine, Ohio, Trainwreck.
	It's the dioxin.
	And he says it's not just what was in the tanker cars.
	It's what happens when they burn and combine.
	He says this may be the largest dioxin plume in world history.
	I know of no more serious release ever.
	And he says anytime chlorinated compounds burn, there will be dioxins created.
	So vinyl chloride is obviously a chlorinated compound.
	And dioxin is a byproduct of any manufacturing process involving chlorine from disinfectants to the bleaching of paper and so on.
	There was plenty of dioxin in those tanker cars before they caught fire.
	And he said that this mess of 14 tanker cars, and there were like 30 that derailed, but 14 contained vinyl chloride, was then set on fire, apparently to make it easier to clear the railroad tracks.
	And he writes, this was the worst possible decision.
	It has turned many, many miles into what should be no man's land.
	But I've not heard one single test for dioxin being done.
	So this is another important point.
	If this testing company that's hired to conduct tests, they can choose tests that they know will show everything's fine.
	And they can avoid tests for things like dioxins that they might know are really horrendous.
	So, you know, you have to test for the right things.
	And that may not be happening.
	Now, if you look at a map of the Ohio River Basin, it's massive.
	It's some of the most pristine farmland in America.
	And it covers, you know, a whole lot of Indiana and even parts of eastern Illinois.
	That's how...
	Large it is, by the way.
	And it also then feeds into the Mississippi River.
	So all this water is going to affect what's called the Lower Mississippi River Basin, which includes part of southeastern Missouri.
	It's got most of Arkansas, obviously part of Mississippi, and also most of Louisiana, and then empties into the Gulf.
	And there's, of course, a lot of fishing industry in the Gulf and seafood industries and so on.
	Well, what happens if you start dumping massive amounts of hydrochloric acid and dioxins and chemical weapons, basically, phosphine, into these rivers and dropping onto the farmlands that then wash into the rivers and wash into the Gulf Coast area?
	What do you have?
	Well, we are about to find out, folks.
	We're about to find out, and it's not going to be good.
	And this is going to affect a massive area in terms of square miles of farmland in America, and it's going to damage soils and plant life and animal life and ecosystems undoubtedly for years to come.
	And so Planet Waves FM here writes, quote, this is not a local issue.
	The plume will spread far and wide, and it's being blown by the prevailing winds across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York State towards the population centers of the northeastern U.S.
	And via land and water, the toxins can spread in many directions.
	It can get into the water table, for example.
	And, of course, air movement is, you know, an everyday thing.
	The contamination is so serious, he writes, that even soil tracking will spread significant amounts.
	Now, in this story, he mentions the town of Times Beach, Missouri.
	Times Beach, Missouri was, what, how many decades ago was that?
	Maybe 20 or 30 years ago?
	This town was contaminated heavily with dioxins.
	The town was evacuated.
	It was purchased by the federal government.
	It was leveled to the ground, and they even removed its zip code.
	And that was from dioxin contamination that's reportedly at a much lower level than what we're seeing in Ohio.
	And the town of Times Beach, Missouri is now a state park.
	No one is allowed to even live there.
	So he continues, he writes that dioxins were the toxic component in the Vietnam War era defoliant known as Agent Orange.
	Now, Agent Orange, don't forget Agent Orange is, I believe, a combination of 2,4-D, which is an herbicide, and glyphosate.
	And that's, I mean, and that was Monsanto.
	Monsanto was the primary manufacturer of Agent Orange, at least if I'm remembering correctly.
	And of course, it was filled with dioxins.
	So dropping this on Vietnam caused widespread ecological damage, wildlife damage, and of course, destroyed the lives of many people.
	I mean, maimed them.
	Dioxins were at the Love Canal in Niagara Falls.
	That was another site that had to be shut down.
	They were the toxin involved in the evacuation of Times Beach, Missouri.
	We just covered that.
	And they are also the cause of toxic shock syndrome from bleached paper tampons.
	Remember that?
	Remember toxic shock syndrome?
	What was that?
	Back in the late 80s or early 90s?
	I forgot exactly when all these women were suffering toxic shock from tampon use.
	And it turns out that the paper in the tampons had these toxic dioxins in them.
	And they are acute toxins.
	And of course, if you insert them, then they can go directly into your bloodstream.
	And then they were maiming all kinds of women.
	What else you need to know is that dioxins are toxic to the hormone system.
	And hormone toxicity can happen at extremely low concentrations in the blood and in the tissues of the body.
	So you can have parts per trillion concentrations of dioxin exposure that are biologically damaging.
	And yet, and I can say this, again, as a laboratory owner running six mass spec instruments, that we don't have any instruments that That can detect low parts per trillion concentrations of anything.
	Now, I think our limit of detection on mercury is below one part per billion.
	In fact, I think it's 0.4 parts per billion, which is 400 parts per trillion.
	But if there's a chemical that's in the environment at, let's say, 50 parts per trillion, or even 100 parts per trillion, which is 0.1 parts per billion, You're not going to find an instrument that can even see that even though that is hormonally toxic.
	So that's the other thing you need to understand is that the technology just doesn't even exist to find these things at those concentrations.
	Now, you can take things.
	You can take a large water sample.
	You can take liters of water, and you can dry it down and get like a 10 to 1 concentration of the water.
	And then you can run that, and then you have one extra order of magnitude of effective sensitivity.
	But there are a lot of problems with that.
	It's a big hassle, and one order of magnitude still wouldn't give you the sensitivity you need in this case.
	You need probably two or three orders of magnitude.
	So what are you going to do, bring in like a truck of water and try to dehydrate it down to one liter?
	It starts to get pretty insane here, right?
	Or I guess you would need 1,000 liters of water and try to dry it down to one liter.
	So it's – and who knows, during that process, are you going to lose some of the dioxins?
	Will some of it off-gas or evaporate?
	These are things that have to be considered.
	So it's not a simple thing to test for this.
	But as this author writes, the dioxins are very persistent and they build up in the food chain.
	In lipids.
	So the fats of animals.
	So if these dioxins are falling on the farms, and then if you have animals grazing on the grass on those farms, you know, sheep, goats, cattle, whatever, chickens even, they're going to be accumulating, bioaccumulating, and then concentrating those dioxins in their products, which could be chicken eggs or cow meat, goat meat.
	You get the idea.
	You're concentrating it in the tissues of those animals.
	And if those then go into the food supply to be consumed by humans, then of course, you are now concentrating the dioxins that are found in the bacon and the eggs and the meat and so on.
	Right.
	So knowing this, what is the value of a ranch full of cows near East Palestine right now?
	What's the value right now, at least in the mind of somebody who knows what's happening?
	The value is zero.
	Would you eat beef from a cow near East Palestine?
	Not on your life, right?
	You wouldn't.
	Would you eat chicken eggs from there?
	Nope.
	Would you buy a house there?
	Not a chance.
	Would you go there as a tourist?
	Nope.
	Would you even drive through the town at this point?
	Oh, heck no.
	You would drive hundreds of miles around it because you don't want dioxins building up in your body.
	And now, I'm not even sure how do you detox from dioxins.
	I don't know.
	I mean, if they bind with lipids, They're going to persist in your body, and there's not some magical substance that I know of that you can take that's going to rip dioxins out of the lipids of your cell membranes and allow you to eliminate it.
	That is not something that happens easily in chemistry.
	There's no magic wand to say, let's take only these molecules out.
	If they get embedded into your cells, the most likely route of elimination is waiting for those cells to die.
	And then to be replaced.
	But I'm not an expert on dioxin contamination.
	I probably have a lot to learn in that area.
	But I'm giving you kind of my best first impression of this.
	This is not something that's going to be easy to eliminate.
	This also means they'll be found in mother's milk and cow's milk, which means this is going to affect dairy operations in the area, right?
	So would you eat cheese that came from dairy cows in that area?
	Heck no!
	Talk about lipids.
	Talk about dioxin concentration.
	You know, a lab that can detect dioxins might be able to find them in cow's milk or dairy cheese because the animal is concentrating it, you see?
	So it makes you wonder, is the FDA going to come in and test the food?
	Probably not.
	They're just going to cover it up.
	Or they'll tell you, just keep taking jabs, you'll be fine.
	And, you know, eat the dioxin cheese.
	Keep drinking dioxin milk.
	It's good for you.
	So you can't trust the government on any of this.
	And then private labs like mine, we don't have the ability to test for dioxins in food.
	So what do you do?
	You stay away is what you do.
	You get as far away from this thing as you can.
	And you try not to eat food from this region until we know the full story of the situation.
	Now, there's even a lawsuit that happened out there.
	This author writes about this.
	The lawsuit is the most famous dioxin lawsuit.
	It's called Keminer versus Monsanto.
	And this was about a train wreck in Sturgeon, Missouri.
	I don't know what year that was, but, you know, you can look it up if you want to read about it.
	Planetwaves.net looks like the website where you can read about that.
	He says, in this lawsuit, the ugly truth about dioxin and Monsanto came out into the open.
	And then this author quotes another author named Peter Montague.
	Who's the author of a book called, I'm sorry, a publication, Rachel's Hazardous Waste News.
	Well, that must be fun reading, huh?
	We all probably ought to read that, come to think of it.
	Summarizes the toxicity of dioxin as follows.
	And it's talking about how incomprehensibly dangerous dioxins are.
	Here's the passage.
	Quote, how can we express this in terms that people can grasp?
	Let's compare it to one single aspirin tablet.
	One aspirin tablet weighs five grains, or 325 milligrams, or you can convert that to 325 trillion femtograms.
	So what is a femtogram?
	Well, 10 to the minus 15th, okay?
	So it goes milligrams, which is 10 to the minus 3, micrograms, which is minus 6, nanograms, and then picograms, and then femtograms, okay?
	So femto is a very crazy, insanely small amount of mass, okay?
	So an aspirin tablet is 325 trillion femtograms.
	So, to express one safe lifetime dose of this dioxin, okay, a lifetime dose, you would take a single aspirin tablet and you would divide it into 32 million minuscule pieces.
	One of those pieces would represent the lifetime safe dose, in other words, really the lifetime limit, Of one of these dioxins known as 2378-TCDD. Okay?
	Or another way to state this is that one aspirin tablet that is nothing but dioxin could contaminate 32 million people with their maximum lifetime dosage of dioxin exposure.
	Okay?
	Right.
	So another way to put this is that if one drop of, let's say, dioxin-contaminated rainwater falls on your skin, that one drop is highly likely to contain, I mean, it could be thousands of lifetimes of maximum exposure that's allowable without health consequences.
	In other words, just one drop of liquid with dioxins in it could be fatal.
	Just one drop.
	And yet they set fire to this like a million gallons of vinyl chloride producing who knows how much total dioxin, right?
	I don't even know.
	But it's not a small amount.
	And this stuff is insanely toxic.
	So it's interesting that there's a whole history of Monsanto being involved in lawsuits and countersuits related to alleged cover-up of dioxins.
	Now, Monsanto's not involved in this train wreck, by the way.
	That's just part of the history of dioxins.
	But the other company that's been frequently involved is BASF, B-A-S-F. That's right.
	The German company that is shutting down in Germany now and moving to China, by the way, the company that was part of IG Farben, the Nazi corporate conglomerate that was broken apart in the aftermath of World War II.
	And two of the companies that came out of that were Bayer, that's right, the pharmaceutical company, and Basif, which is involved in a lot of lawsuits that allege that dioxin exposure caused cancer in humans.
	And so if you start to dig into this, you're going to run into names like Dr. P.
	Peter Montague, a PhD.
	He was sued by Monsanto for writing articles about dioxins and cancer.
	But as Planet Waves writes here, quote, a scientist with the EPA says that Monsanto falsified data in important studies that Monsanto used to support its claim that dioxin does not cause cancer in humans.
	And then a chemist at the EPA, Dr.
	Kate Jenkins, says the EPA relied on Monsanto's, quote, fraudulent data in setting health standards for dioxin.
	This starts to sound a lot like glyphosate and GMOs and how Monsanto ran this massive disinformation unit for many years.
	In fact, before Bayer acquired Monsanto, Monsanto ran a multi-million dollar unit That targeted specific journalists, including myself.
	I was one of the top targets of the Monsanto black ops team, I called it, and also the food babe was targeted by them.
	They spent millions of dollars a year trying to destroy my reputation and censor me off the internet.
	And as you can see, they've failed because you're listening to this, but they sure spent a lot of money to try to do that.
	So I know exactly what these people are talking about.
	Monsanto has a very dark history of fraudulent type of operations, malicious deception.
	They would hire ghostwriters to write papers, and then they would pay scientists to put their name on it.
	It was...
	Just total deception.
	Now, some of that changed under Bayer.
	To my knowledge, Bayer did end some of those practices.
	I don't know exactly how much, but Monsanto is very different under Bayer now than what it used to be.
	That's for sure.
	It used to be even darker than what it is now.
	But nevertheless, if you start digging into dioxins, you're going to run into Monsanto and lawsuits and cancer allegations and BASIF and all of this.
	And you're going to learn about PVC and what happens when you burn PVC, which is why firefighters get cancer, by the way.
	I mean, it's one of the reasons, because firefighters are exposed to these super toxic chemicals, some of them being dioxins in the aftermath of a household fire.
	So Any house, a modern house, contains some amount of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, which is the water pipes often.
	And when PVC burns, it's a nasty, rancid smell, and it's also horrible dioxin exposure.
	And if you're a firefighter, it turns out that the firefighter uniforms don't cover everything.
	I've interviewed other experts about this.
	They don't cover the neck region.
	It's not an airtight seal of the neck, for example.
	So a lot of firefighters, they get cancer around the neck.
	Why is that?
	Dioxin exposure because the burning house, the PVC pipes that are on fire are releasing dioxins that get into the neck area.
	Boom.
	Firefighter gets neck cancer, you see.
	At least that's the theory.
	And there are some people that are actually working on this.
	And there are people that are working on new fabric technology for firefighters.
	This is just something I'm aware of because I'm connected to a lot of people.
	But they're working on new fabrics.
	For firefighters that can repel these types of toxic chemicals that they encounter when they're fighting fires and yet at the same time still allow the moisture to escape.
	So, you know, because you can't have a totally airtight fire suit or whatever they're called because you would smother the firefighter, right?
	They have to be able to off-gas some humidity.
	They have to be able to breathe, in effect, through the cloth in some way.
	Anyway, there's a lot that we all need to learn about dioxins in the aftermath of this train crash, and I'm learning things even today as I'm going through some of this.
	For example, there's 75 chemicals that can be called dioxins, and none of them occur naturally.
	They're all the result of manufacturing processes.
	They're byproducts that no one intentionally makes.
	But once they're made through manufacturing with certain chemicals like vinyl chloride, it's very, very difficult to get rid of them.
	And the most toxic dioxin is called 2378-TCDD, which is what we spoke about earlier.
	So this chemical, TCDD, has been called the most toxic synthetic chemical known to man.
	And I'm reading from here.
	If its acute toxicity to the guinea pig and even the rat and mouse is the criterion, the statement is probably correct.
	TCDD is unquestionably a chemical of supreme toxicity to experimental animals.
	Moreover, severe chronic effects from low dosages have also been demonstrated in experimental animals.
	Therefore, the concern about its effects on human health and the environment is understandable.
	So what do dioxins cause?
	Genetic damage.
	Reproductive disorders, spontaneous abortions, and they're highly toxic to the immune system.
	Hmm.
	Isn't that interesting?
	Because those are also the effects of the mRNA jabs, right?
	If someone were to want to commit an act of chemical weapons terrorism in America, they could not pick a more dangerous molecule that Or a class of molecules than dioxins.
	So was this train derailment ignition decision, was it deliberate?
	Was the train derailment deliberate?
	So in the interview that we have coming up, which we're going to get to here in a minute, you know how the train's wheels, or one of the wheels was on fire, and that creates what's called a hotbox?
	Which means a train that has a wheel that's on fire because the bearings have failed.
	Well, there are supposed to be hotbox detectors on the sides of the rail lines that would alert the train operator to stop the train.
	Something's wrong.
	One of your wheels is on fire.
	Well, in this train derailment accident, the hotbox detectors did not function.
	Why is that?
	It's kind of like turning off the cameras to the cell of Jeffrey Epstein, you know?
	Huh, all the cameras, they just failed to work.
	And then Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
	What do you know?
	This train derails...
	Somebody ignites this, you know, a million pounds or gallons, I don't know what the exact number or unit is, but a large amount, you know, many rail cars of vinyl chloride ignites it, unleashes a massive dioxin plume with other chemicals as well, such as phosgene, and then we find out that these dioxins are toxic in Like what?
	Picograms or nanograms?
	It's unreal.
	Femtograms?
	We need to find out.
	Oh wait, here we go.
	The EPA believes that eating 6.4 femtograms of this TCDD dioxin per kilogram of body weight per day would cause cancer in one in a million people.
	All right, well, 6.4 femtograms is, I mean, it's almost nothing.
	It's almost nothing.
	So here's another description.
	A single grain of table salt weighs approximately 0.1 milligrams, or that would be 100 micrograms, or 100 billion femtograms, yes.
	So to get an amount of table salt that weighs the same amount as one, quote, safe lifetime dose of this 2378-TCDD dioxin, you'd have to divide a single grain of table salt into nearly 10,000 pieces.
	One of those pieces would represent the, quote, safe lifetime dose of dioxin.
	Okay?
	So, I mean, it's smaller than dust.
	So, what I've been reading from here is, again, it's all Eric Coppolino, planetwavesfm.substack.com.
	I don't know Eric, but his work here seems really outstanding.
	And that's why I'm reading from it so much.
	So, I encourage you to visit his Substack website and see what else he's talking about.
	Obviously, he must have a chemistry background, and he knows a lot about dioxins and probably the history of Monsanto and so on.
	These are the kind of people that we need to check out, you know, see what he's talking about.
	Just for the record, I don't know anything else about this individual or his politics or anything.
	And frankly, the politics don't matter.
	If he's correct about the science here, he's correct about the science.
	It doesn't matter to me if he's a Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian.
	It doesn't matter.
	I want to know the truth about the science of what's happening here.
	And the truth...
	As best as I can see here, is that you should steer clear of East Palestine, Ohio, for years to come.
	And you should not eat food from the area.
	You should not drink water from any of the water supply from this area, which is going to be insanely difficult because, of course, the water that's supplied to all the towns downstream from this comes from Either the Ohio River Basin or the Mississippi River.
	I mean, that's what provides a lot of the water supply for the local towns.
	Does your local water treatment facility, does it remove dioxins at parts per trillion concentrations?
	I mean, better check, you know?
	Better check.
	Better filter your water.
	Because, again, you get one drop of this and you're probably going to die of cancer.
	One drop.
	Okay?
	Be careful of the food supply.
	Be careful of food crops from this area.
	I know.
	It's insane, right?
	This sounds totally insane.
	But this is what they did when they set fire to these toxic chemicals.
	They unleashed the worst dioxin catastrophe in the history of America, as far as I know.
	And I can also tell you this, as a published scientist myself, specializing in food science and food contamination, the best solution to all of this is to avoid exposure in the first place.
	If you can't avoid exposure, then detoxing is a very complicated thing.
	And I know there are kind of generic things that people say about sort of generic detoxing, like, you know, drink more water and urinate more.
	Okay, that's awesome.
	But what if the chemical you're dealing with is not water-soluble, but it binds to fat tissues and lipids in your body, which is what dioxins do?
	So drinking all the water in the world may not make any difference with dioxins.
	I don't know.
	We need to look more closely at this molecule, but Just kind of generic detox advice like, you know, sit in a sauna and sweat, you know.
	Will that work on dioxins?
	I have no idea.
	But even if you sweat, then it's on your skin.
	You got to get it off your skin.
	But I don't even know if sweating works in this case.
	Or people say, you know, eat chlorella.
	Okay, well...
	Chlorella's great.
	I mean, we sell chlorella.
	But does chlorella strip dioxins out of your body's cells and eliminate it?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think chlorella's got some magical power to strip dioxins out of your cells.
	Is chlorella good for lots of other things?
	Absolutely.
	It's got all kinds of benefits.
	It's an amazing superfood.
	It's a microalgae superfood.
	But I would never...
	Sit here and say that, oh, you should eat chlorella to remove dioxins because it may not work at all on that.
	You see what I'm saying?
	And other things.
	You know, people might recommend certain herbs or substances or this or that or who knows what, certain smoothies.
	And maybe somebody will find something that works.
	Maybe somebody already knows.
	We should probably be looking into this, right?
	So if you have any suggestions, you can email me, situationupdateatprotonmail.com.
	If you know something that works, how do we detox dioxins?
	I don't know.
	We better find out fast.
	Because this is going to be in the food chain starting now.
	This is a disaster.
	This is beyond disaster.
	This is like eco-terrorism.
	Again, foreign terrorists couldn't do more damage, it seems, than this.
	It's almost an act of war.
	Perhaps it is an act of war against America.
	I mean, you know, the United States blew up the Nord Stream pipelines.
	That was an act of war against Germany.
	Maybe this is an act of war against the American people in the Northeast areas.
	You know?
	Maybe it's not an accident.
	Maybe it's all on purpose.
	There are a few things I know for sure about this.
	The more you grow your own food, the cleaner your body is going to be.
	Do some hydroponic growing like I talk about all the time.
	Grow sprouts.
	Just do sprouting in jars.
	You can do that indoors.
	You're not going to get fallout from dioxins in the sky.
	Eat organic.
	Eliminate pesticides and herbicides.
	Eliminate toxic heavy metals.
	Get clean food and superfoods and supplements.
	Which is, you know, incidentally what we sell at healthrangerstore.com.
	And thank you for your support, should you do so.
	But this is why we do the testing, folks.
	This is why I have a lab with six mass spec instruments.
	Because if you don't eat clean food and have clean water and clean beverages and so on, you're just going to build up these toxins.
	And it's going to put you very close to a tipping point.
	And then you can have an exposure...
	Like a train accident that just puts you over the edge.
	And then, boom, your immune system can be severely damaged or critical organs can be damaged.
	You can have serious liver damage or you can have, you know, reproductive organ damage or hormonal disruptions that are added to the other disruptions that you get from things like phthalates in plastics.
	Phthalates are known to cause an increased risk of diabetes, type 2 diabetes, especially in white women, by the way.
	So if you're a white woman listening to this, don't drink out of plastic and certainly don't microwave frozen foods in plastic packages because you're creating a phthalate stew.
	It's what you're doing.
	There's a reason why I drink rainwater out of stainless steel bottles or jars, glass jars.
	Because glass jars are the safest thing to drink out of.
	You're not going to get toxic plastic chemicals in glass jars or, frankly, in stainless steel.
	Even if you have acidic water and you're stripping out some of the metallic ions in stainless steel, it's so minuscule you're going to get a little bit of chromium, a tiny amount of nickel, maybe a tiny amount of zinc and some iron.
	Who cares?
	It's nothing to be concerned about.
	At those levels, we're talking, you know, single digit, maybe parts per billion or something.
	Those elements are not toxic at those levels.
	But dioxins are toxic at parts per trillion levels.
	Or actually, even lower, we're talking femtograms here.
	So beyond that, it's almost hard to even talk about this.
	We have to take a math and chemistry course just to be able to describe the level of toxicity here.
	I'm doing the best I can, but I don't want to turn this into a metric unit prefix instructional course.
	It's already too geeky the way it is.
	Look, the bottom line here, folks, is clean up your life as much as you can't clean up your diet.
	Clean up your water intake.
	Clean up your personal care products.
	Get rid of the fragrance chemicals that I'm always railing against here, which contain phthalates, by the way.
	Get rid of the toxic shampoos and deodorants and skin lotions and all that stuff.
	Get clean stuff, which is what we sell, by the way.
	HealthRangerStore.com if you want super clean stuff.
	Clean laundry detergent, clean dishwasher, automatic dishwasher soap and personal care products.
	That we manufacture, most of them ourselves, in Texas.
	And many of our products are made using Texas rainwater, by the way, like our colloidal silver first aid gel.
	Texas rainwater, colloidal silver, plus seven essential oils that have a really powerful synergistic effect.
	But whatever you do, clean up your life.
	Get the toxins out of your closet, out of your pantry, out of your bathroom.
	Out of your shower, you know, because you're going to get exposed through other means that you can't control, such as, you know, dioxins in the food supply.
	So you need to eliminate the exposure that you can control.
	Get yourself as clean as you can.
	Now, none of us can be completely toxin-free.
	That's impossible.
	The world is toxic.
	The world's full of chemicals, no matter what.
	You know, if you get into a car, you're breathing in some level of volatile organic compounds, VOCs.
	You know, if you live in a house, especially new construction, there's off-gassing carpet and furniture and everything, the paint, you name it, everything's off-gassing, the vinyl flooring or whatever.
	The cheaper the construction, it seems, the more off-gassing there is or new furniture that you bring home.
	And assemble yourself.
	It's off-gassing formaldehyde.
	So you're not going to be toxin-free.
	But reduce your toxic load and make sure that the food and water and supplements that you take in are as clean as they can possibly be.
	Because, folks, we're going to be exposed to more and more insane, crazy stuff here.
	Dioxins, you know, who knows, spike proteins.
	What else?
	Heavy metals in the food supply, mercury, arsenic, cadmium.
	We're all exposed to insane things.
	The human body is amazing at its resilience and its ability to eliminate, but there's a tipping point beyond which the body fails.
	And we don't want to ride close to that tipping point in any way whatsoever.
	We want to be far from it.
	So eat clean, drink clean, you know, be clean in your life, especially laundry detergents.
	Again, I know I mention that all the time, but it's crazy to soak your clothes in toxic chemicals and then put them on.
	That's insane.
	People do it all day long.
	And then they wonder why they get cancer.
	I mean, have you looked...
	In your laundry room, because I can smell it from here.
	You know, you're wearing cancer.
	So clean up your life, and you will have much better results, by the way.
	So let me give credit to our sponsors today, and then we'll go right into the interview here, which you will find truly fascinating.
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	Now let's jump into the full interview with our hazardous materials response expert from Texas.
	Enjoy the interview, and I'll be back with you tomorrow with more news updates.
	Take care.
	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 Lauck, 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 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.
	Lauchs.
	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 on the right side box and look up along the train 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 the 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, you know, 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, or what caused this kind of failure?
	Well, something always causes a failure, and 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 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 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 emergency vehicles?
	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 that Oh, 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 in there.
	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 it.
	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 receive 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.
	This thing 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, Fosgene, 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 I 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 A, a jet fuel tanker overturned not far from, just right on 71, not long ago, well, 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 drained 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 to 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.
	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.
	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.
	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 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?
	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 Bergstrom Airport.
	They handled it.
	They took care of it.
	TCEQ came out.
	Texas Environmental Quality Commission.
	But there's always going to be an 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.
	Because there's a lot.
	I mean, 150 cars.
	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 the tracks 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...
	They're told to evacuate, then they're told they can 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.
	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 would 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.
	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 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 out information from my bank of knowledge of having experienced 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 bird, 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.
	Helms 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.
	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.
	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 by that, 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.
	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.
	DeWine?
	And they had a couple of maps.
	Yeah, DeWine.
	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 real election campaign for sure.
	All kinds of lawsuits too, you would imagine.
	But, 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 think 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 am 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 it's been quite remarkable storms.
	You name it.
	You know, Texas has 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'd have thunk it?
	Who'd 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. Okay.
	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.
	But I'm on Facebook and my website, I have a website, it's donlaux.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.
	Like, 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, yeah.
	You know, 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, like, preppers are getting the same thing.
	You know, 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, you know, depending on...
	Depending on the scenario at hand.
	But thank you so much, Mr.
	Laux.
	It's been really informative to talk with you.
	I hope you'll join us again.
	And once again, thank you for your service to our country and for being part of the Texas response team.
	And 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.
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