One Year Later, A Town Torn Apart: Update From East Palestine, Ohio

Residents Still Feeling Impact of Train Derailment; Congress Still Hasn't Passed New Safety Legislation; & President Biden Visits One Year After The Disaster

It’s been a year since a Norfolk Southern freight train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents and endangering the community’s health and safety.

East Palestine is a village with a population of less than 5,000 people that sits about a mile from the Pennsylvania border. About 52,000 people live within 10 miles of the crash site.

Not one of those people was at fault, and yet they are the ones left with an uncertain future.  

The derailed cars carried hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, isobutylene, and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether. These chemicals are known to cause burning eyes and skin, coughing and shortness of breath, headaches, and nausea.

We posted FAQs last year with more info about these chemicals.

Days after the derailment, an uncontrolled explosion of vinyl chloride led to a massive black smoke cloud exuding over the town.

The EPA ordered Norfolk Southern to clean up this toxic mess about three weeks later. That work included digging up the soil from under the train tracks and shipping it to remediation facilities. Most of the contaminated soil and water went to Texas and Michigan. The company is still cleaning up the contaminated creeks.

Concerns about the contractors hired by the polluter have also been raised. The company employed several contractors to test and sample for contaminants in the environment and homes. One of those contractors is the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH), a consulting firm steeped in controversy, as reported by CBS News. The firm has faced lawsuits, and lawmakers have criticized corporations for hiring it in previous disasters.

Accidents Up, No New Regulations

After the Feb 3, 2023, incident, the rail industry pledged to do better on safety measures; Congress vowed to pass legislation to prevent future disasters in other communities.  

Well, accidents have gone up, and the bill has stalled. Residents still report health issues that they did not have before the accident.

The New York Times reported that derailments rose at the top five freight railroads in 2023, according to regulatory reports for the first 10 months of the year, the most recent period for which data exists for all five companies.

A bipartisan bill named the Railway Safety Act of 2023 aspired to make the industry safer. Led by Ohio Senators. J.D. Vance and Sherrod Brown, the bill presented commonsense reforms like federal standards for trackside detectors to help spot mechanical problems, additional inspections by qualified workers, and extra funding for research and development to improve railway safety.

It has yet to go to vote in the Senate.

Here we go, once again letting the fox guard the henhouse. Industry wants to regulate itself. Isn’t that what contributed to this hazardous mess in the first place?

A Public Citizen report from early 2024 shows that Norfolk Southern spent more than $2 million lobbying the government in 2023, up 30 percent from the $1,800,000 it spent the year before. This number includes money spent lobbying Congress on issues like railway safety and railroad staffing requirements.

Publicly, corporations love to criticize the complexity of regulations, but privately they are the ones working behind the scenes to complicate them.

Norfolk Southern’s federal lobbying spending total in 2023 was its highest reported federal lobbying spending total since 2015, according to the analysis.

That spending is a drop in the bucket compared to the total costs related to the East Palestine derailment. The company estimates the total cost could top $1.1 billion, not including additional lawsuits and penalties that haven’t been settled, along with further clean-up efforts.

The company ended its relocation assistance payments last week, which means it stopped paying for hotel rooms and living expenses for residents who relocated out of the village.

It has infused other money into the town, spending $25 million to revitalize a city park and allocating another $25 million to set up a regional training center for first responders. The company built a new resiliency center for counseling services and donated $750,000 to the school district, which included new football helmets with railroad tracks on them, according to reporting in CNN.

Imagine if they had spent a fraction of those funds on safety measures to prevent this kind of accident from ever happening.

Health Issues Persist As President Biden Plans Visit

President Joe Biden is set to travel to East Palestine on Friday at the invitation of Mayor Trent Conaway and other local officials.

The White House said the president would travel there to ensure state and local officials “hold Norfolk Southern accountable.”

Many have questioned why he hasn’t visited sooner. I can tell you. When I was there last year, I got sick. So have most residents there. Members of the CDC team studying the health risks also became sick with chemical exposure symptoms.

He probably didn’t want to get sick as well. Toxic exposure is particularly dangerous to vulnerable populations like young children and elderly adults.

But he could have sent FEMA down and housed people. He could have assisted in getting their kids into safe schools instead of doing nothing. He let the company that polluted dole out whatever compensation they wanted, while innocent people were confused, scared, and frustrated.

The results of the CDC’s Assessment of Chemical Exposure (ACE) for residents conducted just a few weeks after the toxic spill found a plethora of health problems related to the incident. More than 90 percent of the area residents who participated in the survey reported getting headaches and more than 70 percent reporting coughing and eye irritation. Others reported difficulty breathing, congestion or runny nose, and a burning nose or throat.

These symptoms are consistent with exposure to the chemicals involved in the derailment, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR).

There’s a reason the town didn’t hold an official commemoration to make the date. The town is still torn apart. Gaps remain in the public health response.

Why isn’t home testing taking place?

What happened to the crops growing nearby?

Why aren’t independent experts on long-term toxic exposure being called in to assess the air, soil, and water testing?

What kind of ongoing health monitoring is happening especially for cancer or other health problems that might show up later?  

Why can’t we pass regulations to ensure that other communities are safe from this nightmare?

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This community deserves more than lip service and a new park. They need ongoing assistance.

I am turning down interviews from major media networks because I am so mad and so frustrated. It feels like nothing changes. What’s the point? Anything I have to add will be negative. It is a total failure of our agencies.

The town has been bought off, and the people are left waiting to get cancer or worse, while business just keeps on rolling.

I can’t tell you all how many emails I get EVERY day from people who want my help, but these environmental problems are way bigger than one person coming in to magically save the day. We all have to get involved. We have to work together.

Please keep the conversation going in the comments below. I know most of you feel equally upset about what happened in Ohio and/or what’s happening in your town. Let’s support each other to keep moving forward.