Dan Gleiter/The Patriot-News via AP
Democratic state Sen. Maria Collett speaks during a Pennsylvania state Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee meeting to vote to subpoena Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw, on March 1, 2023.
If Ohioans in and around East Palestine are frustrated by conflicting reports about air, soil, and water contamination after last month’s freight train derailment, there’s a similar level of anger and dismay across the border among Western Pennsylvanians, who feel that their concerns are out of sight and out of mind. “The people in Beaver County are mad,” says Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA), whose district borders Ohio. “They’re worried about whether there might be any long-term impacts on their health, livelihoods, their businesses, and their farms.”
The environmental effects of the derailment and the decision to explode toxic chemicals are slowly beginning to ricochet around the Ohio River Basin. On Tuesday, the Pennsylvania Department of Health opened a health resource center to answer residents’ questions in Beaver and Lawrence Counties, the two rural areas northwest of Pittsburgh closest to the accident. The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and the federal Department of Health and Human Services also plan to conduct visits to homes in the evacuation zone, the one-mile radius from the crash site where first-response water testing has been done to uncover any health impacts from chemical exposure.
Water flows over, under, and through state borders. The accident and its explosive aftermath produced a cascade of potential health and environmental effects that residents and public officials will be forced to confront in coming months and years. Residents have complained that the response by federal and state authorities has aligned to arbitrary boundaries, with those outside them getting no offers of monetary compensation from Norfolk Southern, the freight rail company. The worries of people who are miles away from the crash site have been downplayed, but they are living with physical effects. With environmental scientists and regional advocacy groups saying one thing about the risks, and public officials and government agencies saying something else, there are real disconnects throughout southwestern Pennsylvania.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has announced that monitored data in Pennsylvania “do not indicate a potential for long-term health effects to the chemicals related to the Norfolk Southern train derailment.” Another DEP website specifies “no known concerns for air or water,” while instituting an independent, six-month testing regime. Nearby public water entities include Pennsylvania’s American Ellwood City, a community public water supply, and the Beaver Falls Municipal Authority water treatment plant, both located roughly 11 miles from the train derailment site. A smaller public water supply located along the Little Beaver River, which utilizes spring sources, is also being monitored by the DEP. Yet when a local grocery store chain pulls its Ohio-sourced bottled water from a spring 25 miles away from the derailment from the shelves, these conflicting signals raise anxieties in a place where many people rely on well water. And some state lawmakers have even complained that the environmental agency is stonewalling their requests for more detailed information.
“They are trying to reduce panic but instead they are creating a mistrust,” says Heather Hulton VanTassel, the executive director of Three Rivers Waterkeeper, an environmental group that oversees water quality in the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela Rivers in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The state DEP is using its laboratories to test for volatile organic compounds that were on some of the train cars, including vinyl chloride, ethylene glycol, butyl acrylates, ethylhexyl acrylate, benzene, and ethanol. VanTassel expresses concerns that the chemicals have leeched into smaller streams near the accident like Sulphur Run, which zigzags into other waterways and onward into the Ohio River in Pennsylvania. She fears that the direct impacts on Pennsylvanians are being ignored, and that contaminated surface water could find its way into the groundwater. How contamination might affect a well depends on its type, age, and depth as well as whether old mining veins in the affected areas speed up the water flows.
First-response testing is an insufficient response to long-term impacts. Water can become cleaner as it flows into the ground, but the threats require constant monitoring. “Because water takes time to flow through our substrate, it can still mostly definitely become contaminated in our future,” VanTassel says. “We are not talking about days, usually we are talking about weeks, months, and years need for continued testing.”
“Every chemist and expert in this field that I have talked to up to this point has said they’re not testing for the right thing, dioxin,” says Megan McDonough.
Moreover, chemical contamination could mean more possible effects all along the nearly 1,000-mile Ohio waterway, and even beyond to the Mississippi River. There are uncertainties about how the chemicals released in the derailment will react with existing chemicals in the Ohio, or how these chemicals will accumulate downstream in smaller tributaries. VanTassel has been in discussions with waterkeepers in Kentucky and West Virginia about monitoring the bodies of water in those states.
State and federal authorities, VanTassel says, “are doing a really poor job” of explaining the diverse risks involved. “If people and animals are suffering health-related effects far beyond the immediate area of the crash site and explosion, then authorities need to get out to those areas to investigate the range of the contamination,” she says. For its part, the state Senate’s Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee has subpoenaed Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw. He was a no-show at a committee hearing held in Beaver County last week.
The use of fire retardants means that possible PFAS (also known as forever chemicals) contamination in groundwater sources is a threat and can persist in the environment. Burning vinyl chloride, which is used to manufacture polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for pipes and other materials, also poses another threat. Combustion can create dioxins, which are not completely water-soluble, so these compounds can also persist in the environment. Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown (D) and J.D. Vance (R) sent a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency requesting answers about possible dioxin contamination.
“Every chemist and expert in this field that I have talked to up to this point has said they’re not testing for the right thing, dioxin,” says Megan McDonough, the Pennsylvania state director for Food & Water Watch, a national environmental advocacy group that is working with other groups to marshal resources for preliminary water testing in the area. “We have people all the way from Ellwood City that are about 15 miles away that are having issues, and have noticed changes at their property,” she says. “So, the problem is no one is doing testing on the Pennsylvania side to even see how far the effects [go].” (McDonough says that it is unclear what data was used to establish the evacuation zone boundaries.)
Deluzio notes that his office has been hearing “a range of concerns around chemicals and examinations” from constituents. The state government in Harrisburg is committed “to testing there as long as necessary,” he says. As for the federal response, he adds that “what we have been doing from the very beginning here was to make sure that wherever those concerns are that they’re getting answered and that EPA is providing the broadest possible monitoring and testing.”
Meanwhile, to get at the root causes of the East Palestine derailment, Deluzio has introduced a bill that would revise the definition of a “high-hazard flammable train” to include dangerous chemicals like vinyl chloride (which is not included under current regulations), and reduce the number of cars need to fall under the definition to a single car. Currently, such freight trains are not defined as high-hazards unless they have 20 consecutive cars, or 35 cars total. He added that some Republicans are “frankly parroting railroad industry talking points” to oppose his bill, which has bipartisan support in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
On Wednesday, Brown and Vance, along with Pennsylvania’s Democratic senators John Fetterman (D) and Bob Casey (D), released their own companion bill, which Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called “as smart as it is necessary,” vowing to pass it soon.
“What Ohio has been very good at this point that Pennsylvania has lacked is having a louder voice,” says McDonough. “Once Pennsylvanians organize and stand up and have that loud voice, I absolutely think that we start getting the things that we need.”
