As we speak, the area is still in the process of being decontaminated.

Trucks hose down the streets in scenes reminiscent of nuclear meltdown cleanup.

And even if officially the environment is no longer dangerous, Sill, an independent expert and former firefighter specializing in chemical hazards, has serious doubts.

As you can see, they’re watering everything down to try to keep.

.

.

The dust down, but the dust is what’s got the contaminant.

That’s why you’re going to wear an N95 mask.

Yet the workers employed by the railway company are working without protection.

But they’re not in the mood for a discussion.

They probably have no idea what’s going on.

They just have jobs to do, told what to do, and that’s what they’re doing.

Given what you see and what’s going on in all the dirt, they’re also not wearing proper PPE.

So they should at least have this on.

According to Sill, the cleaning of the site poses a threat to everyone in the area, including the residents who have moved back in.

See those, right over there, see where those big mounds of plastic are? Yeah, they’re digging up contaminated dirt.

They’re storing it under plastic so it doesn’t go anywhere.

They’re trucking it out, then they’re trucking in new dirt to cover it over.

All these houses are.

.

.

affected.

They’re continually being exposed from stuff that’s being trucked out of there.

But this comes as no surprise to Sil.

He’s worked on numerous train accidents, some of which involve Norfolk Southern.

The company’s reputation has taken a nosedive in recent years, with seven derailments since the end of 2022.

Sil says the negligence seen in East Palestine.

is typical of how the company operates, driven by cost-cutting above all else.

It’s a theory supported by the initial investigations, especially analysis of this video filmed by a surveillance camera 30 kilometers before the accident.

It shows flames on the wheels of a wagon.

What happened with this car is it had an overheated bearing.

That bearing gave way, it caused one car to derail.

And then they just stack up behind each other in an accordion fashion.

Norfolk Southern and a few of the other railroad companies have gotten into cost-cutting measures to hurry up for what in the United States we call on-time delivery.

So they’re cutting down the amount of time that they’re utilizing to inspect these cars at the rail yards.

Just six days after the derailment, trains started running again.

This reminds Sill of the pressure put on him by Norfolk Southern when he was working on derailed trains as a firefighter.

They are very adamant about getting the rail lines opened.

They keep using the quote, we’re losing a million dollars a day if we don’t get these cars through.

And that’s exactly, in my opinion, what they did.

They hurried up and burned this stuff, covered it over and got the rail line running.

They miraculously lifted the evacuation zones.

We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a rail line through.

The company has rushed to rebuild its infrastructure in exactly the same place.

In the middle of town, while residents have been exposed to contaminants a second time via the cleanup operation.

Leslie and Eric, who were told by authorities they could safely return home, no longer believe this was accurate.

You guys hear the train blowing? That stuff, it didn’t come to us because we didn’t pay attention to it.

Now every time that train whistle blows, it’s a smack right into our face.

Since the couple are back, they’ve been afflicted with multiple health problems, including back-to-back bouts of bronchitis for Eric, but for Leslie it’s more serious.

Some pictures of my face.

My face was the size of a basketball.

Then my skin would turn to leather, and then it would peel, and I would scar.

This is my foot.

My skin never looked like this before.

I was destroyed.

The train wrecked.

It totally devastated my life.

Like Leslie and Eric, many of the other residents of the village have developed strange symptoms.

So they’ve banded together and called in help from a contamination specialist.

Scott, how are you? Good.

Scott is an independent tester who’s agreed to work pro bono to give them a second opinion.

He starts by collecting samples in Leslie and Eric’s garden.

I’m taking a soil sample by the downspout here, because we’ll get an idea of everything that has flowed off this roof and concentrated in here.

And try to, as you know, they’re experiencing pretty severe symptoms here, and we’re trying to figure out.

.

.

all the chemicals they’ve been exposed to, so this will help us do that.

Scott will also need to conduct analyses of the air inside the house, but Eric’s insurance company has already done tests of its own.

But, okay, here’s the, like, the full report.

After reading the reports, Scott doesn’t beat around the bush.

This is indicative of other people getting sick, the semi-volatile organic compounds, they’re all present here.

That’s what I thought.

So.

.

.

I really don’t even need to repeat this testing.

Okay.

Because this gives you what you need.

Okay.

For example, you see these benzo compounds.

Benzo, anything with B-E-N-Z is bad.

And once it gets in your body, it can cause cancer and a whole host of other issues.

This will help support a claim against the railroad from what I’m seeing.

Okay.

Hang in there, we’re gonna get the truth.

We’re gonna get the truth.

I appreciate you.

Hey, see you later, Scott, thanks.

I’m afraid for my children.

I’m afraid for my fiance of getting cancer.

While they await the results of the class action lawsuit, the residents of East Palestine have decided to protest in Columbus, the state capital of Ohio.

They want a state of emergency to be declared, which would enable them to get financial aid.

A year after the catastrophe, they are still awaiting a decision from the federal court.

There’s no denying that Washington is currently snowed under with urgent cases of essential infrastructure failure.

The Pentagon, the HQ of the U.

S.

Department of Defense, raised the alarm on the vulnerability of the country’s electrical grid in a report published back in 2019.

In it, the power grid was described as fragile and aging.

The report even highlighted an unacceptably high risk of an extended outage.

Throughout the country, thousands of kilometers of overhead power lines attached to wooden utility poles are showing signs of disrepair.

In Hawaii, the 50th American state, it was the failure of these high-voltage power lines that sparked off a giant, deadly wildfire.

The island of Maui has long been renowned as an idyllic holiday destination.

Until the 8th of August 2023, fanned by strong winds, huge fires tore through the village of Lahaina, home to 12,000 residents.

Less than a day, 80% of it was razed to the ground.

The deadliest fire in the United States in more than a century, taking a hundred lives and leaving thousands homeless.

In my mind, it kind of looks a little bit like a small, very small version of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Chuck is one of the few whose house didn’t catch fire.

He was therefore allowed to return home.

So, here we go through the checkpoint.

For security reasons, the majority of Lahaina is a restricted zone, controlled by the army.

How’s it going? This is the first time cameras have been allowed to film here since the military locked down the town.

Did you guys get the okay? Yeah, you guys got the okay.

Alright, cool.

The atmosphere in the secure zone is almost post-apocalyptic.

Hey guys.

Good morning.

Decontamination teams are still searching for toxic residue left by the ashes.

There’s a good example of how hot it was, and you can see the molten aluminum from the vehicles melting.

The fire was so hot and it moved so quickly, they couldn’t do anything to stop it.

The fire miraculously stopped a few metres away from his house.

Maybe 5% of the homes up here survive, and this is one of them, so.

.

.

Even his garden is intact.

For me, not much has changed.

I come back here, I do my barbecue.

You know, I was lucky, very lucky.

The local electrical grid had already been accused of starting a fire on a previous occasion five years ago.

According to Chuck, this earlier red flag was not taken seriously by officials.

In 2018, they lost about 20 or 21 structures.

The fire almost made it into Lahaina, but they were able to stop it and no one did anything about it.

And they had five years to figure something out.

The electricity poles still standing are in terrible condition.

We’re still in a hurricane zone and, you know, the infrastructure just isn’t up to it here.

You know, 80 mile an hour winds are about the time when lines start coming down.

And you look at a lot of these telephone poles, they’re old, they’re dried out, they’re bent, they’re cracked.

I don’t know a lot about.

.

.

electrical infrastructure, but I am a carpenter and I work a lot with wood.

And I look at that telephone pole and I think it’s a piece of crap.

And there’s no doubt that the lack of maintenance of the power grid is behind the tragedy in Lahaina.

In the upper reaches of the town, early evidence was captured by the surveillance camera at this bird sanctuary on the night of the 7th of August.

Jennifer, the sanctuary’s director, only discovered the footage the next day.

So this video is basically the start ignition of the fire.

So out in this forest, you’ll notice there’s a big flash and the power goes out.

This is the camera resetting.

It takes a couple minutes for the camera to reset and when the camera comes back online it’s in the exact same position that it was previously when we saw that initial flash.

We are now seeing that the forest is on fire.

This fire was the first of several that hit the west of Maui.

The firefighters managed to contain it, but still today they remain on the alert because the danger isn’t over.

Right there.

Right here, bro.

Inside the roots right there.

There’s a little smoke popping out of these roots right here.

For Bill, the chief of the unit, the electrical origin of the fire is as clear as day.

The power lines are not sufficiently protected.

A fire can start by branches rubbing on a bare electrical wire that’s not insulated.

It’s going to create friction, heat.

Power company has to trim all of the vegetation away from their lines.

There’s been talk for a long time that we could get away from that hazard by putting the lines underground.

Down in the town, this structural flaw had devastating consequences.

The morning of the 8th, a power line fell to the ground, setting off the giant wildfire that ravaged Lahaina.

Hey, the phone line is live, F The phone line This resident, who shared what he was seeing on Facebook, tried to extinguish the fire with a hose, but it wouldn’t go out.

And the failing electrical infrastructure continued to spread chaos as the fire raged on.

All over the town, utility poles fell over and cables dropped to the ground.

According to the electrical company themselves, more than half of the town’s poles and transformers were affected.

So much so, that two key thoroughfares were blocked, forcing residents to abandon their cars and flee on foot.

That fire is moving, so I am going to make my way down to the water.

Right now.

I’m going.

Private company Hawaiian Electric, the only operator on the island, begrudgingly acknowledged responsibility for the starting of the fire.

But according to them, the inability of the firefighters to put out the blaze was to blame for the tragedy.

They declined to provide further comment.

You can call directly, but I can definitely have someone call you back.

Two months after the crisis, however, the company seems to have taken on board the necessity of protecting the power lines.

Just curiosity, what are you doing? I’m doing this canine.

It’s supposed to help the pole not catch on fire as easy.

It’s a fire repellent.

It doesn’t allow, from when there’s first fires, it doesn’t allow it to burn as easy.

It’s a basic protective measure that should have been taken a long time ago.

We just started about a week ago.

Okay.

Yeah.

Today, Hawaiian Electric is the subject of multiple lawsuits and is facing a colossal fine.

The cost of the reconstruction of Lahaina is estimated at $5.

5 billion.

Across the country, citizens are taking legal recourse to demand responses, especially when their lives have been turned upside down.

We’re in North Carolina.

in the small city of hickory alicia visits this dead end road regularly to honor the memory of her husband philip it’s here that he lost his life at the age of 47 leaving behind their two daughters amelia and juliet the moment her life changed forever alicia was at home with her oldest daughter amelia came in the back and she’s like mommy the police are here And my heart just like sank and it’s just not real.

Like saying, are you, you know, the wife of Phil Paxson? And you know, I’m just like, where is he? and they just said he was gone.

The tragedy took place one night in September 2022.

All alone in the dark, you know, like this.

trapped under water here in the glow of his headlights philip couldn’t see that the road abruptly ended his car plummeted six meters into the river where he tragically drowned and at night it’s a totally different place it looks like a pothole i mean your headlights are going to hit those guard rails you know and it gives the illusion that the road continues You can’t see any of this.

It’s a dark spot.

The night of the incident, Philip was driving at roughly 40 km per hour.

Unfamiliar with the area, he was relying on Google Maps GPS.

He wasn’t under the influence of any alcohol or drugs, as the toxicology report confirmed.

Google Maps directed him down this small road.

In reality, what lay ahead was the collapsed bridge.

There was no signage and no barriers to stop cars driving that way.

These barricades were not here.

There was nothing here.

So my friends, almost 48 hours later, they brought them out and dropped them here.

Said, you know, we put the barricades up so nobody else would get hurt.

And I just fell down on the ground screaming because it couldn’t be so easy.

I still just can’t understand it, how this could be here.

Only the residents of the immediate area know about this hazard.

They call it the Bridge to Nowhere.

The nickname isn’t new.

At the time of the accident, it had been ten years since the bridge collapsed.

In the neighbourhood nearby, Deborah remembers it very well.

In 2013, we had a very hard rainfall that just continued and turned into a major flood.

It was a mess.

The whole neighborhood was a mess.

The road had broken.

The bridge itself had collapsed.

The pilings were destroyed.

And the deterioration of the local infrastructure just continued from there, with no repairs whatsoever.

Meanwhile, Deborah moved heaven and earth trying to get the bridge rebuilt.

I wrote letters to Senator Allran, his secretary answered them, saying the state wasn’t responsible.

Of course, the city wasn’t responsible because we’re in the county, and the county wasn’t responsible.

And nobody would do anything.

Delving through old documents.

.

.

Would you like to see them? Okay.

.

.

.

Devra discovered who was responsible.

Her whole area was originally built by a trio of real estate developers called Keener, Shook and Tarleton.

This is my.

.

.

When I purchased the house, I kept all the records.

This is just the owner policy.

Then I found this is signed by Keener, Shook and Tarleton.

If you’d like me to read it.

All roads in this subdivision are hereby declared private and shall not be maintained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.

It’s therefore private investors who are responsible for the bridge, not public officials.

The maintenance of all streets and roads in this subdivision shall be the responsibility of Keener, Shurkin, Tarleton.

Deborah and her neighbors have tried without success to take the developers to court.

Only one of them is still alive today.

James Tarleton is an influential man in the region, known for his philanthropy and numerous developments.

He was a very well-known developer.

He developed this whole area and bought all the land.

Since the tragedy, Tarlton and associates at his offices, based in Hickory, have remained tight-lipped.

He hasn’t responded to a single media request.

I’ll take your name and number and I’ll have his secretary contact you.

Thank you for your welcome.

We were no exception.

You too, take care.

The senseless death of this family man shocked the nation.

A significant lawsuit is in the works, claiming damages that could stack up to millions of dollars.

One of the biggest law firms in Philadelphia is representing the victim’s widow.

James Tarleton is named in the lawsuit, but he’s not the only defendant.

Can we pull that up on the big screen? The road that is no longer there on the right? Google.

Also in the lawyer’s sights is another influential figure, a digital one this time, the tech giant Google and its widely used GPS service, which has a billion monthly users.

This is the area where Phil was killed.

That road was broken, and Google should have done what other people have done, what other GPS companies have done, which is to completely shut down.

that road and not mark it as a road where you can pass.

In fact, users of the service had already flagged the issue long before the accident.

And Google’s response, which appears to be automated, says that the suggestion is being reviewed, thank you for sharing your knowledge, and that we will let you know once the changes are published.

That concerned resident did not hear from Google.

People were still directed down that road.

Even after Philip’s death, it took close to a year and the lawsuit for Google to finally adjust their map.

To prevent more tragedies in a country with crumbling infrastructure and increasingly frequent natural disasters, some developers have caught onto a gap in the market.

In Babcock Ranch, a boomtown in Florida, business is skyrocketing.

Its unique selling point, properties advertised as hurricane-proof, in a development branded as the ideal city.

The hometown of tomorrow is being created today, here at Babcock Ranch.

And I invite you to see for yourself all the impressive things that are happening here.

The man who dreamed up this project is Sid Kitson, a retired American footballer turned sustainable real estate titan.

People say to me, well, how can you be an environmentalist and build a new city? And I say, well, I think it’s perfectly natural and right by preserving the natural flowways, by preserving the wetland areas, by using native plant materials, by hardening the infrastructure, by making certain that.

.

.

Not only are the water and sewer and everything’s underground, but all the electrical is underground.

During Hurricane Ian, when again we had 150 mile an hour winds, we never lost power, we never lost internet service, and we never lost our water service.

Robin and Richard, a wealthy retired couple, were among the first to move in here five years ago.

They wanted to live in Florida, but were concerned about hurricanes.

In Babcock Ranch, they found the perfect home.

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