By Ted Millar, Milton
Does the Marlborough town board have a plan in place to prevent a disaster similar to that experienced recently in East Palestine, Ohio?
Does Ulster County Emergency Services Director Everett Erichsen?
With the CSX freight train line traversing through the Hudson Valley, and the potential for noxious hazardous materials it carries being released into our air and water should an accident occur, we are vulnerable.
As always happens when giant corporations, such CSX, put profit over safety, it is always taxpayers who are left responsible for cleaning up the disastrous environmental fallout.
We’ve seen the pattern over and over for decades: corporations privatize profits while socializing the risks.
As Rep. Pat Ryan stated this week on The Brian Lehrer Show, “We cannot allow this to happen in New York, in the Hudson Valley, which would, by the way, affect potentially everybody in the city given how important the river is to our entire ecosystem.”
Ryan added: “Just a few years ago in Newburgh...we had a significant derailment. Thousands of tons of crude oil polluted the ground and the river. This was just a few years ago with CSX. CSX is, just like Norfolk Southern, one of these big rail companies.”
In the interest of public safety, we ought to know whether CSX is required to inform the Ulster County Emergency Services in advance of each train’s contents, what can be done if it is not required to do so, if the County Emergency Services and impacted towns have response plans to deal with major and potentially toxic derailments, and if these plans are available to the public.