US Unexplained Fires and Derailments: No Official Explanation

Fires and derailments: the streak the US does not explain

The United States is not suffering a wave of proven sabotage. It is suffering something more uncomfortable: an accumulation of industrial fires, explosions, and derailments that, lined up, look like a script. The trigger was the derailment with toxic spill in East Palestine (Ohio). Since then, every freight train is viewed as a threat. Then came a burning warehouse in Osceola County (Florida), a train derailed in Van Buren (Arkansas), the explosion at the Ineos Phenol chemical plant in Pasadena (Texas), the deflagration at a chocolate factory in Reading (Pennsylvania), another in Richmond (Indiana), and the sinking of a barge carrying 1,400 tons of methanol in the Ohio River.

None bear a signature. And the trouble begins there.

The statistics that cool the sabotage hypothesis

It is necessary to lower the volume before shouting conspiracy. According to the statistics cited in the debate, between 1990 and 2021 there were 54,539 derailments in the country, an average of 1,704 per year. What is anomalous is not that a train leaves the track, but that several do so in a few days and in different states. This concentration is the only solid argument for those suspecting something coordinated, and also its weak point: statistical series do not distinguish between sabotage and a rotten tie.

There is a less epic and more boring explanation. The US rail network has decades of deferred maintenance. A country that spends on the urgent and delays the important ends up with old tracks, old cars, and companies that compare the cost of a repair with that of an indemnity. The result is images like that of White Plains (Alabama), with another Norfolk Southern train off the track weeks after the Ohio incident.

Foreign sabotage, false flag, or simple accident?

Here the analysis opens into three currents. The first maintains that there is revenge underway for Nord Stream and support for Ukraine, and that rival powers' services have activated sleeper agents to strike civilian infrastructure. There will never be a claim, they argue, just as there is none when a domestic agency acts. The second points inward: a false flag operation designed to justify exceptional measures. The third, the least segarro, sees accumulated shoddy work and coincidence.

The evidence cited weighs differently depending on who tells it. A collision of two HH60 Blackhawk helicopters from the 101st Airborne Division in Trigg County (Kentucky) is not organized by an amateur. The explosion at South Fork Dairy Farm, near Dimmitt (Texas), with 18,000 head of cattle dead and one critically injured person, is not either. But mixing a labor accident with a deliberate attack is an old trick: the longer the list, the easier it is to confuse cause with chance.

The most cited incidents of the streak

• Sunken barge in the Ohio River with 1,400 tons of methanol, the same waterway as the East Palestine spill.
• Massive explosion and fire at the Ineos Phenol plant in Pasadena (Texas).
• Industrial fire in Richmond (Indiana) whose smoke, according to cited reports, drifted toward Ohio.
• Derailment in Rockwood (Somerset County, Maine) with warning of possible hazardous materials.
• Fire at a chemical plant in Brunswick (Georgia) and shelter-in-place order within a half-mile radius.

Added to these are the hotspots circulating in unofficial timelines: Norway, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, Hawaii, Illinois, and Montreal, as well as a fire at a Chicago industrial facility and the crash of a Brightline train with a car transport trailer in Broward County (Florida), during the Fort Lauderdale floods. This enumeration, which no authority has verified, does more work than any official statement.

The Kursk, Nord Stream, and the memory of sabotage

The most repeated historical comparison is that of the Kursk submarine. The argument is simple: if you can sink a submarine or blow up a gas pipeline without consequences, then everything is permitted. The discussion is also supported by a 1981 press clipping about the support of Cuba, Algeria, and the Soviet Union for ETA, retrieved as proof that sabotage manuals have old and known godfathers. It is archaeology, not proof of anything, but it explains why the conversation shifts so quickly toward geopolitics.

And an inevitable digression: global warming appears as a catch-all explanation for fires, with the same ease as blaming Chinese lanterns. When a phenomenon has three incompatible causes circulating at once, the most probable is almost never the most fun.

What to expect

With these handles, the predictable is more of the same: incidents piling up, no official statement connecting them, and a public opinion that no longer distinguishes between a track in bad condition and international revenge. If a detainee with a foreign name and residence near a substation appears in the coming weeks, the orchestrated attack thesis will consolidate in hours. If none appears, the list will keep growing and the statistic of 1,704 annual derailments will remain there, boring, reminding us that disaster is also manufactured through maintenance cuts.