Sorry I'm being pedantic here, but I think it is important to be clear that the train wreck itself did not cause any explosions, fires, or leaks.
The dramatic pictures and videos of the smoke columns, black clouds, river filled with dead fish, etc, were all results of the toxic chemicals being deliberately released and set on fire after the accident in what is being called a "controlled release".
This is why in one of the videos posted earlier, there was a very angry man that accused the railroad company of deliberately poisoning everything just so that they can put the rail line back into operation slightly sooner.
absolutely inexcusable. their excuse is that combustion products of vinyl chloride is just carbon dioxide, water and HCl which while bad, disperses in the air eventually and dissolves for some mildly acidic rain.
True,
if it were a stoichiometric reaction, which it never is in an open burn. Open burns are
fuel rich because the only reaction possible occurs at the fuel-air interface. Otherwise, near but not at the interface, there is a highly heated, fuel rich region where pyrolysis but not combustion occurs. Pyrolysis of organic compounds creates highly toxic polyaromatic and cyclic organic compounds like dioxins, napthalenes, etc. And in particular chlorodioxins are created when chlorinated compounds are burned in a fuel rich manner which are extremely toxic, carcinogenic, stable, and have excretion half lives at 10+ years.
Even combustion engines, which have electronically controlled fuel spray (to maximize fuel surface area) and air injection systems, still produce some polyaromatic/cyclic hydrocarbons. That's engine soot, easily visible on engine exhausts of commercial vehicles. So if even a highly controlled combustion engine cannot avoid creation of toxic organic waste, there is
no way that an open burn can result in the stoichiometric products.