Locals remain desperate for answers almost a month after a train laden with harmful petrochemicals derailed in a small Ohio town, as government agencies refuse to test for some dangerous toxins, the railroad company shells out paltry restitution, and politicians steal the moment for publicity.
The derailment is stirring memories of the devastating oil train crash in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, in 2013 that left 47 people dead and 26 children orphaned, CBC reports. A decade later, a survivor of that tragedy says he’s seen no improvements in Canadian rail safety.
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“Not at all. It’s the same,” Louis-Serge Parent told CBC. “We are faced with a sense of helplessness.… We have to fight.”
A Fiery, Toxic Wreck
On February 3, 38 railcars in the 149-car “general merchandise” Norfolk Southern train 32N left the tracks in East Palestine, Ohio. Coupled with cars carrying goods like semolina, malt liquor, and hydraulic cement were 20 hazardous materials tank cars transporting a range of combustible liquids, including ethyl hexyl acrylate, a known carcinogen used in paints; and flammable gases, including vinyl chloride, another known carcinogen and building block of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).
Eleven of these hazardous material cars derailed, and some of them ignited, “fueling fires that damaged an additional 12 non-derailed railcars,” according to a preliminary report from the U.S. National Transport Safety Board (NTSB). Two hoppers filled with PVC were among the cars set ablaze in the initial derailment. Those burning cars would have released highly corrosive hydrogen chloride gas and other toxins into the surrounding air.
While firefighters were able to “mitigate” the fires less than 48 hours after the derailment, concerns quickly grew about steadily increasing temperatures inside one of the five tank cars carrying (pressurized) liquid vinyl chloride.
“If exposed to enough heat from a fire, the vinyl chloride can boil and build enough pressure to blow apart even the most powerfully reinforced container,” wrote the Washington Post, recalling a 1983 BLEVE (Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapor Explosion) in Murdock, Illinois, which tossed the tank’s remains nearly a mile away.
To avert such a catastrophic explosion, authorities decided to undertake “a controlled venting” and swift burning of the chemicals from all five cars.
As for the cause of the accident, “early signs suggest that a faulty wheel bearing on one rail car may have caused the derailment,” reports National Public Radio.
Local Creeks Devastated, Public Health Imperilled
Fish and amphibian populations in local creeks took a big hit right after the derailment, which caused one tanker to release its entire load of butyl acrylate, a clear liquid used to make paint and adhesives that is known to be “acutely toxic” to fish and invertebrates.
Some 38,000 minnows, and another 5,550 adult creatures, including fish, crayfish, and amphibians died along a five-mile network of creeks and brooks in the first hours after the derailment, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
At last report, the Ohio Emergency Management Agency had declared that successful containment of the spilled chemicals meant no further derailment-related die-offs were expected, and that “live fish were returning to Leslie Run,” the nearest small waterway.
But local residents remain concerned about the health of waterways. Many worry that toxins may have settled into sediments, posing a persistent danger to benthic organisms (plants and animals at the bottom of the waterway). Those toxins are ready to be released at the slightest disturbance—as simple as a dog chasing a stick, or a wading child.
And while no one was seriously hurt during the derailment nor its immediate aftermath, state officials opened a special health assessment clinic in East Palestine last week. The clinic includes toxicologists and mental health professionals to help the many locals who have experienced nausea, vomiting, nose bleeds, and headaches, plus mental distress from the incident.
“I don’t feel safe because I don’t know what the future holds for my town,” lifelong resident Jessica Conrad said at a CNN townhall meeting last week. “This has the potential to really decimate a small town like us.”
Echoing those fears, longtime resident Jim Stewart said the derailment had “torched his dreams of retiring soon” as the toxins released would cause his home’s value to plummet, CNN said.
Concerns remain that East Palestine’s soil may have been contaminated with toxins, especially after revelations that the company Norfolk Southern contracted to clean up the site did not follow standard protocols and immediately remove the area’s topsoil.
“Contaminated soil will continue to leech contaminants, both up into the air, and down into the surrounding ground,” warned University of Massachusetts environmental health scientist Richard Peltier. “Every time it rains, a flood of new contaminants will enter the ecosystem.”
CNN asked Norfolk Southern why it had not removed contaminated soil before reopening the site, and whether it had filled in areas of contaminated soil and chemicals to reopen the rail line. A company spokesperson responded that “some soil is moved around” during the initial response phase.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said 3,500 cubic metres of soil and 3.7 million litres of contaminated water had been removed from East Palestine. He added that the railroad tracks in the area would be taken up so the soil beneath them could be removed, as well.
But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not stepped up to match the level of thoroughness that locals and their representatives are demanding.
Senators Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and J.D. Vance (R-OH) sent a letter [pdf] to the directors of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA) and the EPA, urging that East Palestine and the surrounding area be monitored for epic carcinogens known as dioxins, which are produced by the incomplete burning of organic compounds.
But an EPA spokesperson recently said that may not be as easy as it sounds.
“Dioxins are ubiquitous in the environment,” said EPA Regional Administrator Debra Shore. “They were here before the accident, they will be here after, and we don’t have baseline information in this area to do a proper test.”
“But we are talking to our toxicologist and looking into it,” she added.
James Fabisiak, director of the Center for Healthy Environments and Communities at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health, and his colleague Peng Gao, an associate professor of environmental and occupational health, had flagged the danger of dioxins soon after the derailment, urging environmental agencies to expand their testing.
“The incomplete combustion byproducts of those chemicals—we have no idea what they are,” Gao said, echoing other experts who cited the size and intense black colour of the controlled burn smoke plume as evidence of an incomplete burn. “And they can potentially be highly toxic or carcinogenic.”
Soon after that warning, EPA Administrator Michael Regan told media he wasn’t sure if his agency was testing for dioxins and that the subject was still “under discussion.”
Cornell University soil and crop scientist Murray McBride told CBC News that dioxin poisoning is insidious, occurring when the chemical enters the food chain via soil that crops are grown in, and in the grass that dairy and beef cows eat. Animal metabolism breaks down dioxin very slowly, so the toxin bioaccumulates in tissues at much higher than ambient levels, wreaking significant harm.
And the EPA “had to know” that burning vinyl chloride would risk dioxin generation, said Stephen Lester, science director at the non-profit Center for Health, Environment, and Justice in Virginia.
And dioxins are not the only chemical that the federal and state EPAs are failing to test for, reports the Guardian. They also appear to be giving a pass to PFAS, a class of toxic chemicals likely to have been in the firefighting foam used at the derailment site. Described as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down in the environment, these lab-made toxins “could potentially stick around in drinking water sources for decades, and also could have moved downstream in a plume.”
However, nine of the dozens of chemicals the EPA has been monitoring are at higher levels than would normally be found in the area, according to scientists from Texas A&M and Carnegie Mellon University. CNN reported that if they remain at those level, they could pose problems for residents’ health in the long term.
Political Grandstanding and ‘Height of Hypocrisy’
Located in a “deeply red slice” of northeastern Ohio, East Palestine voted overwhelmingly (70%) for Donald Trump in the 2020 election, writes the Washington Post. Over the last month, along with acolytes like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Trump has been deeply involved in stirring the political pot in the small, poor, and 98% white town of 4,800 people.
Dropping by in the early days of the crisis with bottles of Trump-branded water for distribution, the aspiring presidential nominee seized on President Joe Biden’s covert wartime trip to Ukraine as proof of the Democrats’ disregard for the well-being of Americans, especially Republican ones.
From there, the East Palestine derailment morphed from another difficult day in the life of Rust Belt America to “the country’s latest cultural firefight over identity, polarization, and the role of government,” the Post says.
The Economist called this grandstanding a ‘political circus.’
That happened even though Biden’s initial response, “calling governors, dispatching federal experts to the area, and receiving briefings from top advisers,” was seen in the White House as a “by-the-book response to a non-fatal event in a lightly populated area, one that would require federal help but had not ballooned into a larger disaster.”
Belatedly waking up to a PR disaster in the making, the Biden administration rebutted claims that it had abandoned East Palestine. It was Trump who had repealed Obama-era regulations—especially around braking technology—designed to make rail transport of hazardous materials safer, while gutting the federal EPA’s powers to respond to industrial accidents, the administration said.
“It’s the height of hypocrisy for Trump to feign concern for the community of East Palestine after years of openly mocking and rolling back environmental safeguards,” Sara Chieffo, vice-president, government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, told Bloomberg. “Trump bent over backwards to cater to corporate polluters at every turn and put East Palestine and other communities directly in harm’s way.”
But so far, Trump’s rollback of regulations cannot be blamed for the train wreck, according to analysis by the Post.
And “many prominent Republicans” added their own political spin to the derailment, the Post noted in an earlier report. Campaigning in Iowa two weeks after the accident, during Biden’s trip to Ukraine, presidential candidate Nikki Haley asked: “Shouldn’t he be with those people in Ohio?”
Meanwhile, Fox News’ Carlson falsely claimed that the town’s water was “glowing.”
East Palestine’s majority white and Republican demographic “shouldn’t be relevant, but very much is,” Carlson added, pushing a narrative that would transform real suffering from a complex web of malfeasance “into a tale about ‘woke’ Democrats abandoning White communities in the virtuous, forgotten heartland,” as Post columnist Greg Sargent put it.
Recently-elected Senator J.D. Vance attracted media attention with his more nuanced front throughout the crisis. A first-time politician and staunch Trump ally, Vance has gone seriously to bat for his constituents in East Palestine, according to the New York Times. Apart from co-authoring the bipartisan letter urging the EPA to test for dioxins, Vance wrote [pdf] to Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw, asking the company to expand its financial reimbursement area to include all residents of East Palestine, not just those within the two-kilometre evacuation area imposed during the vinyl chloride burn.
“There is no guarantee that the health and safety of the town and its environs, as well as the larger region and watershed, will ever be the same,” Vance wrote. And “families with young children who may be especially vulnerable to the carcinogenic and toxic gases released as a result of the derailment” are among the displaced.
He added that any reimbursement “should not and will not release the railroad from any liability it has incurred as a result of this disaster.”
But Vance hasn’t held back from participating in race-baiting, pitching the idea that if the residents of East Palestine had been Black and voted Democrat, the federal response to the derailment would have been much better.
Norfolk Shareholders Continue to Gain
Early on in the tragic story of East Palestine, Norfolk Southern Railway was pilloried by locals for failing to attend a public meeting on the derailment, citing safety fears for its employees and the public. When CEO Alan Shaw showed up days later, an East Palestine resident told him: “Your company stinks.”
Norfolk, which reported record-setting profits of US$4.8 billion in 2022, has announced a plan to spend $6.5 million to help East Palestine rebuild.
Such aid pales when compared to the largesse the company announced for shareholders earlier this year. “The company said it is planning to spend more than a thousand times that amount—$7.5 billion—to repurchase its own shares,” reported CNN Business.
Norfolk Southern did not respond to media questions on whether it expects to change its share repurchase plans in wake of the derailment.
And despite their wealth, railroad companies like Norfolk Southern have been swift to plead for their bottom lines, pushing successfully to block efforts to modernize braking systems on trains carrying big payloads of hazardous material. They have also claimed they couldn’t afford to meet demands for “adequate staffing, paid sick leave, and improved safety,” Eddie Hall, national president of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, told CNN.
Only two fully-trained personnel, plus one trainee, were abroad Train 32N. The train, which was nearly two miles long and heavily larded with hazardous materials, was equipped only with standard air brakes.
‘Long Trend’ of Cost-Cutting
The East Palestine accident is a “culmination of a long trend of cost-cutting in the rail industry,” reported Vox. “Rail workers, government officials, and industry analysts have long warned that such disasters are an expected consequence of an industry that has aggressively cut costs, slashed its work force, and resisted regulation for years.”
Now, the incident is expected to prompt renewed pressure to change the way hazardous materials are transported by rail. Public safety officials are stressing the need to shorten train lengths, ensure more personnel on board, and expand the definition of a “high hazard flammable train,” a designation that currently applies only if a train is carrying crude oil.
A partial manifest released by the EPA shows that some of the world’s biggest oil and petrochemical companies owned the hazardous materials aboard Train 32N, and even the tanker cars themselves. An Occidental Petroleum subsidiary owns three of the five cars carrying the vinyl chloride. Another car, whose load of polyethylene came very close to catching fire when its lading was destroyed by flames, belonged to ExxonMobil. A load of toxic ethyl-hexyl acrylate, which was lost into local waters, was owned by Dow Chemical. And one cart with a load of PVC that burned right down to its original toxic chemistry was owned by Japanese petrochemical and plastics behemoth, Shin-Etsu. These companies have maintained a low profile even though the train was transporting their products.
And even that is an incomplete list. Two cars owned by Deep Rock Refining, a midstream crude oil servicing company in Oklahoma, were listed as carrying benzene, a highly flammable, carcinogenic chemical and a lucrative input for plastics, paints, and other petrochemical products. The two cars were effectively empty when they came to rest in their unplanned stop.
But as terrible as the East Palestine derailment is, it would have been far worse had cars DPRX259013 & 258671 been fully loaded, and more directly involved in the derailment. Or if the tanks containing “petro oil” or propylene glycol had been fully breached, two cars loaded with polypropylene hadn’t escaped the derailment, or if the cars filled with polyethylene whose ladings were destroyed by fire had themselves burst into flames.
These last aren’t even classified as hazardous materials, and yet any firefighter will tell you that they burn extremely dirty, filling the air with poisons. In East Palestine, an accident involving less than 1/5th of a train that, again, was not even designated a formal hazard, has left behind an unfathomable amount of fossil-based poison, what Reuters describes as “millions of pounds of carcinogenic chemicals.”
When the NTSB vowed changes to ensure that a derailment like East Palestine “never happens again,” the Post tackled the question of just what it would take to actually make good on this pledge, focusing on the chemical that caused so much distress: vinyl chloride.
In the post, Bloomberg science analyst Faye Flam wrote that vinyl chloride is ubiquitous, especially as a building block for that plastic that “nobody loves,” PVC.
Humanity uses so much of this infamously lethal plastic because it is so cheap, and it is so cheap because “it serves another purpose—using up chlorine that’s produced as a waste product in other processes,” she explained. That list includes production of sodium hydroxide, which is “used in everything from wastewater treatment, to pharmaceuticals, to making bicycles.”
Chemical companies could “pay to get rid of the chlorine, or they could find uses for it,” she added. But transporting chlorine is far more dangerous than moving vinyl chloride, so making PVC is seen as “the lesser of evils.”
In that light, “one step in the right direction would be to require the chemical business to make their products in the same place, since all forms of transport have their dangers,” Flam wrote. Another would be to make the switch to greener building materials—but then what would we do with all the chlorine generated in producing things that we need and love, like our bicycles?
