WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
When seconds count…. sometimes the police are right there. [Updated with new video]
byVanderleunonJanuary 12, 2022
We covered this a couple of days back in“Everybody remember where we parked!” Now The Officer Tatum comes back with another more impressive and gut-wrenching angle and better insight.
There is a video taken by a bystander on the same side of the tracks but much further over to the left side. He is very nearly hit with debris from the plane after the train hits it.
There’s something very wrong here in that this second video clearly shows yellow police tape strung up on the side roads, and closing off the side street to keep the bystanders away from the actual train crossing.
Question: If the police had ample time to neatly cordon off the area with tape, why did they not alert the train dispatcher via their emergency procedures that there was an aircraft on the tracks?
Question: Given this much time, why did they wait until (almost literally) the last second to extricate the pilot from the wreckage?
Take a look at that second video with close regard to the crime scene tape, and ask yourself how long it would have taken to neatly string and secure all that tape, and then review the two questions above. Something is a little weird about this.
VanderleunJanuary 12, 2022, 10:32 AM
Too much perfection is a mistake.
oldvet50January 13, 2022, 4:21 AM
What part of the video was anti-liberal? It was removed for some reason.
VanderleunJanuary 13, 2022, 8:21 AM
Fixed that with a new video. Even more detail.
Annie RoseJanuary 13, 2022, 6:43 AM
Each officer on an emergency scene for a traffic accident is assigned a task, one of them being to secure the scene by blocking off traffic with their car or orange cones and blocking off pathways if needed with yellow tape. This is done to keep others safe and to keep gawkers and busybodies with their smartphones from getting in the way and delaying help for the injured.
Officers are also trained to wait for paramedics and not to drag people from the wreckage, because they could end up killing them if their neck is broken or a bone punctures a major artery and they bleed to death. The injured person ideally should be assessed and stabilized before moving them.
In this situation, the police had no choice and had to quickly drag this man out of the wreckage and to safety. They clearly risked their lives to do so.
In busy areas such as this one, there are often multiple lines of trains using those tracks. I’m sure the dispatchers were rushing to contact the railroad companies that use those lines. My husband’s fire department preplans for these types of emergencies and they have emergency contact information for railroads, airports, utilities, underground pipelines, the FBI, etc. But it takes time to contact those emergency numbers and for those companies to radio the train to stop. There probably wasn’t enough time.
Even then, when a train engineer sees an accident up ahead, they have only a split second to decide whether to make a forced stop or not. Many of these trains are carrying highly hazardous, flammable, and deadly chemicals, and stopping the train must be done slowly so as not to derail. By the time an engineer sees something on the track, it’s often too late to stop on time.
In my area, we have freight trains and commuter trains on double tracks. Some of these are express trains, meaning they are traveling at a much higher rate of speed and do not stop at all stations. You never want to be in bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for a light to change and straddling those tracks because you won’t get out of the way in time to keep from being hit by an oncoming train. These officers are to be commended for their quick thinking and for saving this man’s life.
VanderleunJanuary 13, 2022, 8:03 AM
Exactly so, Rose. Exactly so. Thanks for laying this out.
Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
— WH Auden
TWAIN IN TESLA’S LABORATORY
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
The painter stood Before her work She looked around every where She saw the pictures and she painted them She picked the colors from the air Green to green Red to red Yellow to yellow In the light Black to black When the evening comes Blue to blue In the night
To the Stonecutters
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Search American Digest’s Back Pages
Contemplation of the Sword
Reason will not decide at last; the sword will decide.
The sword: an obsolete instrument of bronze or steel,
formerly used to kill men, but here
In the sense of a symbol. The sword: that is: the storms
and counter-storms of general destruction; killing
of men,
Destruction of all goods and materials; massacre, more or
less intentional, of children and women;
Destruction poured down from wings, the air made accomplice,
the innocent air
Perverted into assassin and poisoner.
The sword: that is: treachery and cowardice, incredible
baseness, incredible courage, loyalties, insanities.
The sword: weeping and despair, mass-enslavement,
mass-torture, frustration of all hopes
That starred man’s forehead. Tyranny for freedom, horror for
happiness, famine for bread, carrion for children.
Reason will not decide at last, the sword will decide.
from Preludes
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
from Canto CXV BY EZRA POUND
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
“From a student radical/hippie/leftist of the Free Speech Movement/Vietnam Day Commitee era and a full-on Democratic Liberal in the decades after, I think I’ve evolved a politics that is neither right nor left but is, in its elemental nature, draconian. In the last 20 years, I’ve taken apart my beliefs with a sledgehammer. Now I’ve got to put the surviving parts back together with tweezers and other ‘shabby equipment, always deteriorating’.”
Ferreya
ARTIST: GIBSON
Edwin Deakin, American
Hillegas
Real World Address for Donations, Mash Notes and Hate Mail
Gerard Van der Leun
1692 MANGROVE AVE
APT 379
Chico, Ca 95926
from “Chimes of Freedom”
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
An’ the hypnotic splattered mist was slowly lifting
Electric light still struck like arrows, fired but for the ones
Condemned to drift or else be kept from drifting
Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail
For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale
An’ for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
![That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]](https://americandigest.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/welcometohell-150x150.jpg "That Was the Whopper Weekend That Was [Illustrated]")
Gerard Van der Leun
Even though a cloud’s white curtain in a far-off corner flashed
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
The scientists are in terror
Man, that was pretty close. Kudos to the brave Cop for saving the pilot’s life.
Now who or what will save the world from Covid?
According to “recent studies,” (unknown if they are legit or not) MARIJUANA may be the CURE for Covid!
Seriously—- https://nypost.com/2020/05/21/scientists-believe-cannabis-could-help-prevent-treat-coronavirus/
Will the government switch from ‘everyone must wear masks’ and ‘everyone must get vaxxed’ to
‘everybody must get stoned?’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnoxKXkPqEE
Welcome to the United States Of Idiocracy.
There is a video taken by a bystander on the same side of the tracks but much further over to the left side. He is very nearly hit with debris from the plane after the train hits it.
There’s something very wrong here in that this second video clearly shows yellow police tape strung up on the side roads, and closing off the side street to keep the bystanders away from the actual train crossing.
Question: If the police had ample time to neatly cordon off the area with tape, why did they not alert the train dispatcher via their emergency procedures that there was an aircraft on the tracks?
Question: Given this much time, why did they wait until (almost literally) the last second to extricate the pilot from the wreckage?
Take a look at that second video with close regard to the crime scene tape, and ask yourself how long it would have taken to neatly string and secure all that tape, and then review the two questions above. Something is a little weird about this.
Too much perfection is a mistake.
What part of the video was anti-liberal? It was removed for some reason.
Fixed that with a new video. Even more detail.
Each officer on an emergency scene for a traffic accident is assigned a task, one of them being to secure the scene by blocking off traffic with their car or orange cones and blocking off pathways if needed with yellow tape. This is done to keep others safe and to keep gawkers and busybodies with their smartphones from getting in the way and delaying help for the injured.
Officers are also trained to wait for paramedics and not to drag people from the wreckage, because they could end up killing them if their neck is broken or a bone punctures a major artery and they bleed to death. The injured person ideally should be assessed and stabilized before moving them.
In this situation, the police had no choice and had to quickly drag this man out of the wreckage and to safety. They clearly risked their lives to do so.
In busy areas such as this one, there are often multiple lines of trains using those tracks. I’m sure the dispatchers were rushing to contact the railroad companies that use those lines. My husband’s fire department preplans for these types of emergencies and they have emergency contact information for railroads, airports, utilities, underground pipelines, the FBI, etc. But it takes time to contact those emergency numbers and for those companies to radio the train to stop. There probably wasn’t enough time.
Even then, when a train engineer sees an accident up ahead, they have only a split second to decide whether to make a forced stop or not. Many of these trains are carrying highly hazardous, flammable, and deadly chemicals, and stopping the train must be done slowly so as not to derail. By the time an engineer sees something on the track, it’s often too late to stop on time.
In my area, we have freight trains and commuter trains on double tracks. Some of these are express trains, meaning they are traveling at a much higher rate of speed and do not stop at all stations. You never want to be in bumper-to-bumper traffic waiting for a light to change and straddling those tracks because you won’t get out of the way in time to keep from being hit by an oncoming train. These officers are to be commended for their quick thinking and for saving this man’s life.
Exactly so, Rose. Exactly so. Thanks for laying this out.