John Flesher/AP Photo
Sherry Bable stands beside Sulphur Run, February 25, 2023, in East Palestine, Ohio, near the site of the Norfolk Southern derailment. Bable lives across the street and fears the creek is no longer safe.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 office tweeted that 24/7 air monitoring was ongoing at 23 stations in the East Palestine community. The agency’s Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer bus tests air emissions near the derailment soil removal site. The agency had announced the deployment of the TAGA bus to East Palestine on February 28—that is, 25 days after the Norfolk Southern derailment. That is “way too late,” says Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator during the Obama administration. “The TAGA bus should have been there the first week.”
Delay has been the EPA’s default reaction throughout the series of decisions that ceded the federal agency’s emergency authority and superior expertise to ill-prepared Ohio local and state officials. The EPA took 18 days to order Norfolk Southern to pay for cleanup operations and ten days to send a small team of six agency officials and 16 contractors to the site—a decision that Enck called “late” and “limited.”
Local residents and visiting researchers continue to suffer from exposure to the toxic chemical burn-off. On Monday, the Ohio Department of Health announced that it had surveyed nearly 450 residents about their symptoms since mid-February. Three-quarters suffered from headaches and half had skin irritation, pain, or burning, with many of them also experiencing anxiety, coughs, or fatigue. The department began surveying first responders in early March and they also reported a range of ear, nose, and throat symptoms. The state’s response? Reminders about a walk-in health center’s hours, stationing certified professionals at a mobile mental health clinic, and establishing a helpline and a behavioral health resources website.
In Pennsylvania, just across the state line from East Palestine, many Beaver County residents and first responders have registered similar health complaints, and state health officials have conceded that there could be longer-term health impacts. Acting Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen has indicated that since the state is not clear on what levels constitute risk or how doctors should respond, the department is working with the Centers for Disease Control to formulate a response plan. No blood testing has been conducted at local health centers.
Behind these survey results and a nearly monthlong delay in deploying a mobile air monitoring unit to the region are hundreds of angry and frustrated residents dealing with unresponsive bureaucracies. Nearly two months after the accident, persistent questions about the federal and state response to the derailment and burn-off of the train’s chemical cargo have intensified the controversies around the environmental and human testing.
The situation compounds mistrust and creates a “split screen,” says Enck. “You have local residents talking about health problems and, on the other side of the screen, you have EPA and Ohio EPA assuring people that everything is safe.” Failing to conduct urine and blood testing and sending residents off to their doctors is problematic. “A GP is not a toxicologist and that’s where the federal government should be more engaged,” says Enck.
Norfolk Southern has a dubious history of using questionable environmental testing contractors. Amanda Kiger, the executive director of River Valley Organizing, a local community organization, says that the company operates sometimes with and sometimes without EPA employees as they test in East Palestine, with debatable results. Taken together, the company’s response and the federal government’s have not inspired confidence that any government agency is testing the right substances at the right levels. Norfolk Southern and the EPA “seem to be working more in partnership together than anybody is with the community,” says Kiger.
Norfolk Southern has a dubious history of using questionable environmental testing contractors.
The lack of transparency has become a hot-button issue and has helped persuade local residents and advocacy groups to reach out to independent researchers to investigate soil, air, and water contamination. At a Monday Pennsylvania Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee hearing in Harrisburg, Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University civil, environmental, and ecological engineering professor, discussed the university’s volunteer team’s visits to the region after community members and United for East Palestine, a community group, enlisted their assistance.
“It’s unclear who is advising these agencies about what to test for,” Whelton told the committee. The Purdue team found several chemicals in creek water that state and federal government officials had not investigated but that are “definitely related to the fire.” The team urged the governmental agencies to create stronger access controls in areas where they saw serious health risks to people moving around contaminated waterways without proper safeguards. There are exposures, Whelton said, that are not being recorded and that people were not warned about. “We have urged these agencies to correct their testing approaches, and we haven’t seen that yet. Because it is pretty hard to understand what health risks are for something if you’re not testing for them,” he said.
Whelton advises agencies “to throw the kitchen sink at [the issue], initially to figure out what they need to test for and what they don’t need to test for” and to do “cross-cutting” testing for the same chemicals across air, water, and soil. While the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has tested for vinyl chloride, ethylene glycol, and ethanol, he suggests they should be testing for other chemicals as well. As for testing duration, that depends on the distance from the accident. A creek two miles away from the derailment site might need monthly testing in perpetuity until officials understand the water flows and the time lags for possible contamination.
The professor reached out to the EPA and Ohio EPA to discuss the team’s work. Neither agency responded.
Indiana also commissioned independent testing from Pace Analytical Services, a Minneapolis-based environmental testing firm. The dioxin levels in soil samples they examined were below the standards that require the EPA to launch cleanup operations, but hundreds of times higher than the cancer risk thresholds in residential areas established by the EPA in 2010. Even so, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb promptly declared a gubernatorial equivalent of an “all clear” for disposing of the soil from the derailment site in his state. Linda Birnbaum, a former head of the U.S. National Toxicology Program, told The Guardian that “The levels are not screaming high, but we have confirmed that dioxins are in East Palestine’s soil. The EPA must test the soil in the area more broadly.”
With Ohio in the middle of its rainy spring season, there are concerns that the federal and state officials fail to clearly explain that contaminated surface water may leech into underground aquifers and that the presence of contaminants and toxins may take considerably more time to appear. Area residents are “being told all their well water was fine and the local water systems are fine, but they’re also looking at a creek that looks like a rainbow,” says Kiger of River Valley Organizing. “People know that can’t be true.” (Whelton, the Purdue University professor, told the Pennsylvania Senate committee that the causes of water discoloration are unknown but there are multiple theories, including lube oil.)
To reconcile testing inconsistencies and oversights and restore public confidence, Enck suggests that an emergency meeting between the state, local, and federal agencies should be a major priority, even “as late as it is.” Such a convening would include officials from all the relevant federal and state environmental agencies, the county and state health departments, and the Centers for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
In East Palestine, the EPA effectively put in place an extreme version of federalism, allowing Ohio to lead the emergency response even though the EPA clearly had superior emergency capabilities. The agency compounded this negligence by waiting to move against Norfolk Southern in the immediate aftermath of the derailment. “There is a culture at EPA to defer to the states,” says Enck. Alan Steinberg, a former regional EPA administrator who served during the second Bush administration, described the deference to Ohio as “foolish” and the delays in directing Norfolk Southern to act as “unpardonable.” Also inhibiting an adequate response was the determination of Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and his fellow state Republicans not to cede any ground to the EPA that might advantage President Biden—thereby compromising the health of their East Palestine constituents and turning them into so many pawns on a partisan chessboard.
