Cleveland 19: East Palestine Residents Given Green Light to Garden, EPA Releases Soil Results on Heels of Lawsuits
This article features Government Accountability’s Environmental Investigator Lesley Pacey and Client Scott Smith and was originally published here.
EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (WOIO) – The EPA gave East Palestine residents the green light to garden, telling residents on Tuesday that their soil is safe. Not everyone is buying it.
The new soil results come on the heels of a lawsuit filed against the EPA by a nonprofit watchdog organization.
It’s been exactly eight months today since a Norfolk Southern train derailed in East Palestine and the lives of everyone who lives in that small town changed forever.
“These are our children’s lives,” said Jami Wallace, President of the United Council for East Palestine and a former resident. “This is not a game. We are not entertainment. We need help and we need help now.”
Jami Wallace is one of the lucky ones. She was able to move out of East Palestine, but she is still fighting for her family and neighbors who she says are still suffering.
“Help us find out what’s making us sick in our homes,” Wallace pleaded. “There has to be a pathway to exposure. We weren’t sick before we are sick now. We have children presenting with symptoms. We have animals presenting with symptoms, this is not mass psychosis, this is not PTSD. This is a real issue, and it needs to be addressed now.”
In late September the nonprofit watchdog group the Government Accountability Project filed a lawsuit against the EPA. They’re suing the EPA for denying expediting their Freedom of Information Act request.
“We’re asking for a lot of information on dioxin testing, lab results, and a lot of different things that we feel have not been made public,” said Lesley Pacey, Environmental Investigator with the Government Accountability Project. “We’re also looking for any communications related to dioxins or independent testing that’s been done in east Palestine that are showing elevated dioxin levels.”
Pacey said it is the first time in the organization’s 46-year history that the EPA denied an expedited FOIA request from them.
“That’s really unusual and by denying the fee waiver for a lot of nonprofit agencies that’s basically like denying the request because it’s so expensive to do these FOIAs and the main thing that we’re concerned about is this expedited processing we really feel like it needs to happen,” Pacey said. “We’ve been talking to the residents Jami included and there’s so many sick people there that we feel like this is an imminent threat to public health that needs to be fully investigated.
The FOIA request and lawsuit mention independent testing expert Scott Smith by name.
19 investigator Kelly Kennedy has interviewed him several times and gone out with him while he did testing at East Palestine homes.
“We have found in approximately 30% of our testing clearly elevated dioxin levels that are above background and we’re not talking a few percentage points we’re talking 3-400%,” explained Scott Smith, Independent Testing Expert, and CEO of US BioSolutions, LLC. “For example, residents on Taggart Street, residents near the high school we have seen these elevated levels.”
Scott said there’s a reason why there’s a discrepancy between his results and the EPAs.
“You can’t find what you don’t look for. If the EPA is going to average depths of soil and I’m going to take it from the surface I’m obviously going to get higher concentrations. If I am going to take samples close to ground zero at the resident’s request where they refuse to test, I believe if they would test the same locations as me, there wouldn’t be a discrepancy.”
EPA Response Coordinator Mark Durno said they’ve asked Smith to share more data, but he hasn’t.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Smith hasn’t shared much of his data with us,” said Durno. “I did see one sample from him where there was an elevated roadside dioxin hit.”
Smith claims that’s not true.
Durno said he understands some residents are still sick and the EPA is taking action.
“That’s understandable and we’ve heard those concerns ourselves since the beginning of this response and that’s one of the reasons why we’ve reached out to our federal public health partners to help figure out this issue,” he said.
Durno said they’ve partnered with the National Institute of Health and the Natural Academy of Sciences.
He said starting in early November, they will be working to identify health-based research needs in East Palestine.
Durno said the EPA isn’t done testing.
Over the next four months, they’re collecting over 2,500 soil samples at all of the properties affected by the train derailment.
“Once those samples are collected and analyzed we’ll be able to inform the community whether there were other areas that may have been contaminated,” Durno said. “We don’t expect to see much but we look at this kind of like a double check.”
The EPA said they can’t comment on pending litigation.