Pittsburg Post-Gazette: A Year Later: Residents of the East Palestine Area Relive Derailment Experiences, Get Updates on Investigations
This article features a Government Accountability Project Environmental Investigator, Lesley Pacey, and was originally published here.
COLUMBIANA, Ohio — Courtney Miller’s children clutched her tightly as newly released footage of burning railroad cars was shown Saturday in this town’s Main Street Theater.
Five cars of a derailed Norfolk Southern freight train, thought at the time to be in danger of exploding, could be seen bursting into in a controlled burn in nearby East Palestine a year ago this Monday. It was three days after the cars derailed, and the vent and burn strategy forced about 2,000 people in the region to evacuate.
It created a towering plume that traveled for miles and was so large it could be seen from space.
On the anniversary of the disaster, the emotions hit just as hard. Some in the audience abruptly left the auditorium, sobbing.
“That was the pivotal moment, and it completely turned my entire life around,” Ms. Miller said. “It wasn’t a house fire where everything just burned and you lost everything. You can still go in and you can still look at it. But you know, if you touch it, it’s going to burn your skin. If you walk in, you’re going to breathe it in. It’s just going to hurt you in some way, shape or form. You’re going to get cancer from it.”
The night of Feb. 3, 2023, 38 cars of a Norfolk Southern left the tracks in East Palestine, near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, as a result of an overheated bearing on one of the cars.
The village was thrown into chaos and uncertainty. Dozens of lawsuits followed, along with investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board and officials in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
No one was injured in the derailment, but the resultant chemical spill and burn off forced residents from their homes, and many have not come back. They continue to face financial hardship and emotional trauma. Many say they became ill from the chemicals, with symptoms they still battle today.
To reflect on the aftermath of the disaster, environmental activists, health experts, residents and others mobilized to create a day-long anniversary event on Saturday. Some of the activities were moved to Columbiana, about 20 miles from East Palestine, because participants said they are still afraid to go near the derailment site.
If Norfolk Southern representatives attended any of the events, they did not announce their presence.
Opening the afternoon portion of the event, Anjali Mehta, an attorney for an organization called East Palestine Justice, said she hopes residents can find comfort in the fact that the organization is working toward accountability.
“We will never forget this date, Feb. 3, I’m sure, for so many of you,” Ms. Mehta said. “Your life has been divided into two: before Feb. 3, and after, . . . with so many emotions and feelings — anger, sadness, frustration, fear, to name just a few.”
Ms. Miller’s house along East Taggart Street, less than 100 yards away from the derailment site, shook each time a train passed by. But the night of Feb. 3, she heard a loud screech and the rapid “booms” from the derailing cars hitting each other.
“I looked out the window and saw the flames way, way above the trees,” she said. “No fire should be that high. That was when I knew.”
Recalling exactly what happened is still difficult because of the trauma, she said. But she knows that with the help of a friend, she and her two children, Mathias, 10, and Ellie, 6, fled the home within about 30 minutes of the derailment.
Just before she left, Ms. Miller says a police officer knocked on her door to tell her to get out.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked.
But he didn’t know how to respond.
“I don’t know what to say, I’m sorry, but I have to warn others,” she said the officer told her.
For the past year, Ms. Miller and her children couch surfed and stayed with family, primarily her mother. She made sure her children never stepped foot in East Palestine again.
Because her house was already in foreclosure, Norfolk Southern refused to help her financially with a place to stay, she said. The family received only the standard $1,000 per person in the household that Norfolk Southern gave everyone in town.
“Where was I supposed to go?” she said. “Finding a hotel, do you know expensive hotels are for a night?”
She said independent testing found dangerous levels of dioxins in the home. Some of the tanker cars carried vinyl chloride, a toxic chemical used in the manufacture of plastics.
She would come back periodically to check on her place, and her face broke out, a condition known as “chloracne,” which is linked to dioxin exposure. She said doctors told her to avoid more exposure, explaining that going back home would put her health at risk. Residents have said that the medical community seemed ill equipped to respond to the disaster and simultaneous multiple chemical exposures.
“It was like I had some kind of crazy disease because it was just so bad, the way they treated me,” she said.
Outside the auditorium on Saturday, researchers from the University of California, San Diego took blood samples and conducted respiratory assessments for a study that aims to understand the long-term health impacts of the derailment.
Marcella Evans, a medical writer and editor, was the first person residents interacted with as they moved through the screening process.
By mid-afternoon, she said the researchers had already seen 23 people, with enough supplies for 30. They hope to recruit 5,000 participants, including anyone who lives within 20 miles away of the derailment site.
“We’ve been in communication with the different groups and community members,” she said. “We’ve heard what they’re concerned about with health outcomes, as well as, you know, feeling like they’re not being heard.”
Case Western Reserve University researchers also are looking for answers. Lead researcher Frederick Schumacher joined the anniversary event to discuss his long-term health study.
Through the Healthy Futures Research Project, researchers from the private university in Cleveland will measure DNA damage that may increase the risk of developing chronic health conditions such as cancer, metabolic and autoimmune diseases. The project hopes to better understand residents’ post-disaster quality of life, risk perceptions and their health care needs.
Mr. Schumacher said government response to public health disasters such as the derailment are still a patchwork, but he hopes his research can help fill the gaps.
“There’s been a number of environmental disasters that have occurred across time, from Love Canal to 9/11,” he said. “ And we really don’t have a great game plan on how to kind of manage this and understand the health impact.”
The team submitted a proposal at the end of March to the National Institutes of Health for review.
“We’d like to get a health registry in place to understand what individuals and residents actually experienced,” he said. “To have a sense of what the symptoms look like, how severe they were. Did they receive medical attention? Is it something that was more acute and was gone? Is it something that’s chronic?”
Mr. Schumacher said in an interview that the work started on the ground. He attended county fairs in several counties, including Columbiana County. It was a casual way to introduce the team to the community, answer whatever questions that they could and recruit study participants.
“We went down there trying to be very mindful of you’ll gain trust or lose it,” he said. “We’re being very cautious and not over-promising anything. I feel like if you over promise, and then you can’t fulfill that promise, that’s when people are going to walk away from you.”
So far, the team has 200 participants, from whom they are collecting saliva, hair and other samples for DNA isolation. The researchers are also collecting information on where people live and work to potentially get a sense of whether factors like proximity to the site could be a factor.
While he knows residents are anxious for answers, the reality is that research results won’t come for years, Mr. Schumacher said.
“It would probably be like a good decade before we really know some of the effects,” he said. “I remind people of 9/11. It really was 10 years after that when some of the large cohorts and follow-up studies were put together. Unfortunately, these kinds of disasters take a while to manifest.”
Lesley Pacey, an environmental investigator for The Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C., also is investigating the derailment. Its work began in August after independent scientists found elevated levels of dioxins in and around East Palestine.
“Our investigation is ongoing in an effort to create change not just for your community, but for how these types of disasters are handled in the future,” she said.
Ms. Pacey cited critical decisions made by officials: Lifting the evacuation after just a few days; relying on Norfolk Southern contractors for public health assurances; delaying dioxin testing; and ignoring the scope of the plume created by the venting and burning of the railroad cars that spread across five states.
“There’s a theme and we call it the playbook,” she said. “It’s a conflict of interest. No matter the disaster. The responsible party always vows to make it right. I mean, we hear this all the time, pouring money into parks, tourism, infrastructure and slick public relations campaigns, often while denying health harm.”
The Government Accountability Project’s presentation included testimony from Ms. Miller, who now is moving to Pennsylvania, near Crescent Township.
“How many people have to get sick?” she told the Post-Gazette. “How many people have to end up with cancer? How much more can they push it under the rug and not bring attention to it? It’s been a year. How many people are really safe?”