10 Months Out from East Palestine: What Have We Learned?
In February, Norfolk Southern, or NS, may have been running behind. A train carrying incredibly hazardous chemicals was caught on several surveillance cameras potentially speeding its way through a brake malfunction that caused its wheels and axles to light up in a fiery blaze. Rather than bring the train to a halt, conductors barreled through hoping to reach their next checkpoint just beyond the Ohio/ Pennsylvania border. By the time the train had decided it couldn’t make it to its destination and attempted to brake, the damage was too severe, causing the entire train to run off the rails and crash into the village of East Palestine.
The Heartland Beat was one of the first outlets covering this event that led to catastrophic results across the area back in February. You can read our previous coverage here and here. 10 months out from one of Ohio’s most devastating disasters, what have we learned?
In June, after the event garnered mainstream attention, The National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB, along with the Ohio Senate, finally decided to hold hearings to get to the bottom of the decision to “vent and burn” the extremely volatile contents of several train cars NS argued posed a significant safety concern to the village. At the time, it was argued that the contents in the two of the tankers were likely to explode, which would send hazardous waste across many miles of currently undisturbed areas. As such, Norfolk Southern met with local officials, which “may have” included representatives from the federal EPA, and the local emergency management team of East Palestine, a volunteer fire chief by the name of Keith Drabick.
We say “may have” because early questioning to the EPA, as found in our previous coverage, revealed the EPA was incredibly dodgy when asked who the onsite coordinator was on location and though the president claimed they had a presence on site “from the beginning”, no one could really say who was organizing and directing the operation. During the hearings, however, these questions were answered.
During the NTSB hearings, Paul Thomas, executive representing OxyVinyls, the company that owned the vinyl chloride in the Norfolk Southern tankers, testified that immediately after the derailment, they had communicated to Norfolk Southern that the vinyl chloride was at no risk of combustion.
“We made it clear, based on our expertise of the chemical properties of our product, that stabilized VCM would be unlikely to spontaneously polymerize under the conditions described to us by Norfolk Southern and its contractor,” Thomas said.
Per Thomas’ testimony, the vinyl chloride in transport had been ‘stabilized’ and treated for transport, which is an industry standard that called into question the rationale for Norfolk Southern arguing the necessity to burn it off. Despite this detail, representatives from Norfolk Southern met with the emergency response team, which included chief Drabick, and argued they had mere minutes to make a decision, conveniently leaving out that the compounds had been treated to prevent combustion. The Heartland Beat had made several attempts to reach Drabick for comment with no success. Given how every involved party has attempted to evade responsibility for the East Palestine decision, it may be evident why.
"I was met by the CEO and several other members and one of the members said I had 13 minutes to make a decision of whether or not we were going to vent or burn because they were running out of daylight. I was very overwhelmed by that approach to explaining that to me,” Drabick said.
Further, it was revealed in May that Norfolk Southern did not consult the Federal EPA on the decision to burn the tanker contents. In fact, the EPA claimed to have very little knowledge of the decision making process, according to former EPA administrator Judith Enck. This seems in direct contradiction to President Biden claiming the EPA was in control of the situation from the beginning. It is also in direct contradiction to how these operations are supposed to occur.
During the hearings, NTSB representative Robert Wood, attempted to insulate Norfolk Southern’s decision to leave out this detail to Drabick in their meeting by saying they had collected evidence of polymerization, a precursor to combustion. However, according to Thomas, the only way that could have happened would have been to take physical temperature and oxygen readings, something that wouldn’t have been possible under the conditions. The result of this revelation was a resounding silence from regulatory agencies that had a responsibility to intervene to prevent such catastrophes from occurring in the first place. Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw was called before Ohio lawmakers where he vowed NS would rectify the situation by cleaning up the area safely and thoroughly.
10 months out from the uncontrolled burn and residents are still experiencing skin lesions, nose bleeds, nausea and headaches along with a myriad of other symptoms related to the contaminated water and air. Regulatory agencies and NS are still refusing to test homes for potential contamination, leading to lawsuits over FOIA requested documents. Meanwhile, NS is deciding to end the relocation allowance which helped keep residents closest to the blast zone out of further harm in hotels and apartments.
"This program was always a temporary one for those residents who chose to relocate during the site remediation process," spokesman Tom Crosson of Norfolk Southern said.
Based on the response, the cleanup from the disaster must be completed if the relocation aid is ending. So what happened to all the contaminated soil and water from the runoff of the tankers? As we have reported previously, the PFAs and dioxin contamination will last for well over a century and not even nuclear waste facilities were capable or willing to handle it.
Not long after the derailment, NS constructed several ‘temporary’ holding tanks for the contaminated waste. The original plan NS and the EPA had come up with was to funnel the waste water through a cleanup company called Clean Harbors, located in Baltimore. This was after several other out-of-state facilities refused to take the waste. The idea was that Clean Harbors, which has been cited for multiple safety violations related to improper waste disposal, would treat the wastewater before shipping the “cleaned” waste back to Ohio for final disposal. Independent investigation into the facilities in Baltimore revealed that Clean Harbors had no means of treating some of the biggest concerns within the waste, namely dioxins like TCDD, a main component of agent orange, and PFAs. However, this did not deter the EPA, NS nor Clean Harbors from moving forward despite local leadership in Baltimore attempting to push back.
As for the wastewaters final resting place, NS is now pressuring East Palestine to keep it and dump it into the river again. According to East Palestine wastewater superintendent Scott Wolfe, the current plan is for NS and the village to treat the wastewater twice before dumping it into Leslie Run creek. Once at Clean Harbors and then again through the East Palestine treatment facility.
At a December council meeting, Wolfe took questions from concerned residents and was wholly unprepared to answer any of them. Questions ranged from the exact number of what the lab testing the wastewater considers “undetectable,” a full list of what chemicals the wastewater will be tested for, how much the village stands to gain monetarily from each accepted truckload of wastewater, whether an already contaminated Leslie Run can handle the burden of the additional discharge, and who becomes legally responsible if any derailment contaminants are later detected downstream in other municipalities as a result of the wastewater discharged by the village.
According to Wolfe, the monetary gain from keeping the wastewater, while unspecified, may be enough to offset some concerns regarding health and safety. By keeping the wastewater, the village stands to get paid a handsome sum from NS which can in turn, be used to lower water rates for residents that might spike, ironically, due to EPA regulations.
“Well residents who pay a water bill might care about the profits,” Wolfe said. “This prevents a lot of rate increases for future mandates that we are given through the Ohio EPA.”
Concerned residents at the meeting pointed out that should the village accept this offer, it would effectively take the blame off of Norfolk Southern, should future health issues occur. Chief among those concerns was where the wastewater would end up after being dumped into Leslie Run. The creek empties out eventually into the Ohio River, which feeds drinking water to several municipalities along the way, including Cincinnati at its final destination. Should residents along its path report health issues or detect contamination, it would be East Palestine, not Norfolk Southern or Clean Harbors, which would foot any bill for remediation. The East Palestine council decided to mull over the proposal until their next meeting.
So 10 months out from the East Palestine disaster what have we learned? We have learned that in the event of a corporate orchestrated catastrophe, information will be withheld from first responders to elicit the preferred reaction. We have learned that regulatory agencies act only to insulate those corporations from consequences and will effectively pressure citizens with financial penalties to take on the burden of those they are supposed to be watchdogging. We have learned that politicians and local officials think in short-term metrics and are truly not prepared for actual scrutiny.
But most of all we have learned that the only reason this entire incident wasn’t immediately ignored was because we refused to let it be so. Citizens pushed back against mainstream media that was silent for over a week while a plume of toxic chemicals spread across the state. We have learned that while our judiciary hearings are toothless and exist only to placate the masses from seeking alternative remediation, they persist as a constant reminder that they still need us more than we need them.
Despite a daily growing mountain of laws shackling the constituency from seeking change, we still control the flow of commerce and action with our numbers and labor. Collectively, if we say stop, they have to listen. The problem thus far has been coordination and consistency. But people are learning and they are getting scared.
Every time an establishment outsider candidate wins an election and begins pushing back it’s a hit against larger agendas taking root. Every time independent media grabs ahold of the Overton window and rips it apart by shoving information before us we never would have seen, it forces them to pivot their narrative to adjust to new perceptions they hoped wouldn’t take hold and the more we collectively demand action in unison and learn to flex our collective influence, the faster we will be able to reclaim our control.