U.S. Ohio derailment triggers uneasy feeling in petrochemical hub: Grist

Workers drain contaminated water on the site of the Feb. 3 derailment on the outskirts of the village of East Palestine, Ohio, the United States, on Feb. 14, 2023. (Photo by Phil Zhang/Xinhua)

The accelerating petrochemical development is simply the newest incarnation of industrial exploitation for a region that has been plagued by legacy pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

NEW YORK, March 3 (Xinhua) -- The train that crashed in East Palestine of the U.S. state of Ohio derailed about 20 miles northeast of its destination of Conway, Pennsylvania, one of the industrial towns and small cities that line the Ohio River as it flows west from its mouth in Pittsburgh, reported U.S. news portal Grist on Wednesday.

The Upper Ohio River Valley, which stretches, roughly speaking, from that mouth down to where West Virginia meets the tip of Kentucky, has been the site of proliferating petrochemical development over the past decade, as oil and gas companies turn their attention away from fuel and toward a much richer prospect: plastics, according to the report.

Ethane gas fracked from the Marcellus Shale, which extends across Pennsylvania into the eastern edge of Ohio and northern West Virginia, can be "cracked" into ethylene, a flammable gas critical to the production of plastics used for packaging, bottles, and electrical insulation, among other products, it noted. And all of the infrastructure that is required for every step of plastic production and transport - wells, pipelines, refineries, ports, plants - has spread like a spider's web over the region.

"The accelerating petrochemical development is simply the newest incarnation of industrial exploitation for a region that has been plagued by legacy pollution since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution," it said.

The pressing question is whether the people who have lived here for generations have hit their breaking point, and whether they feel empowered to demand more from the corporations that threaten their homes and the politicians that enable them, it added.