Don't get me wrong, ITS VERY BAD and there's no excuse for why this happened, and the response is even more unexcusable. But comparing it to Chernobyl seems a bit overblown to me.

Chernobyl was literally a nuclear meltdown. IT rendered basically a quarter of Ukraine unlivable and unusable for several months, and the effects are still there today since the immediate area is still unlivable.

This isn't that bad in the long term. Yes, the water is bad. Yes, the chemicals seeping into the ground is bad, but if my own personal research on the topic is correct, this won't lead to 60+ years of continuous poisoning for half of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The chemicals will eventually dillude themselves to a point where they're so miniscule they won't effect anything once they get so far down the Ohio River. And the ground water pollution will more or less be contained to the immediate area of the spill (let's say 350K acres around the immediate area to be overly paranoid. Which is basically the entirety of Columbiana County where East Palestine is located).

As for the doom cloud, well that's the main reason I waited so long to make this post. I wanted to give it quite a few days of monitoring wind and rain patterns after the controlled burning to see if it would actually do what people were saying.

As far as I can tell after more than a week of monitoring this, there might have been a few small clusters of doom rain over Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. I don't think there was enough to do anything, since there wasn't any report of massive downpours and what did fall was further diluted by regular rainwater before if fell.

From what I can tell, the overwhelming majority of the doom cloud turned into rain over the Atlantic Ocean and got swept up towards Canada by the Oceanic winds.

So, while this is still a tragedy and there's no excuse for it, it also seems to me that people are blowing the actual fallout from this WAY OUT OF PROPORTION.

At most a county of roughly 100K people and 350K acres of land are going to effected in the long term (years-decades). Which is still horrible, but not the Chernobyl people are making it out to be.

If you listened to everyone on twitter and truth social, you'd think that half of Ohio and Pennsylvania is now unarable and we've lost the second largest breadbasket in the United States after California.

From my own research and monitoring over the past week, that just doesn't seem to be the case. For reference, there's somewhere between 900 MILLION and 1.2 BILLION acres of farmland in the United States at any given time (it fluctuates annually due to land reclamation, land development, Conversion of forests to farmland and vice versa, etc.).

So 350K acres, not all of which is farmland, isn't going to affect the food supply in any significant way.

Basically, what I'm trying to say, is that while this IS bad and someone needs to pay for it, it doesn't seem to be the nation ending tragedy being portrayed on social media if you actually sit down and go over the details with a fine comb.

Of course, I could be wrong since I'm no expert on any of the topics at hand, so feel free to correct me on any points I may be wrong on. This is just my own research and autisticly obsessive observations after all.