Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
A “Keep Out” sign is posted near Sulphur Run Creek as it flows under homes in East Palestine, Ohio, January 30, 2024.
East Palestine moved back into the headlines last week on the grim one-year anniversary of the catastrophic freight train derailment and chemical-laced fire that convulsed this small town on the Ohio/Pennsylvania border. Some residents have moved on with their lives, but the effects of long-term exposure to deadly cocktails of toxins means that many others still suffer from rashes, headaches, respiratory complications, and more. Instead of addressing these worries with long-term health studies, what these people see is another day at the Washington fight club that passes for a national legislature.
House Republicans along with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have abandoned any action that could bring the 21st-century freight railroad robber barons to heel with a new rail safety regime. The Railway Safety Act, sponsored by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and J.D. Vance (R-OH), isn’t likely to see the light of day in a presidential-election year. Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-PA) has co-sponsored a companion bill in the House. He’s castigated his colleagues for failing to move on any bill to deal with “100 percent preventable” accidents like the Ohio derailment.
Vance has pointed his finger at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, blaming President Biden for failing to direct federal dollars to health studies. The White House wants Norfolk Southern, the freight rail operator at the center of the tragedy, to make the community whole rather than to shift the financial responsibilities to the federal government, which might enable the rail CEOs to fade into the background.
A successful template for long-term studies already exists in Flint, Michigan. In 2016, Congress acted to quell the outrage in the wake of another man-made disaster whose origin typified public officials’ callous disregard for public health. What it will take to settle on whether a public or private entity provides the millions to fund a similar framework for East Palestine is an open question.
Ten years ago, to save money, the Flint emergency manager (the first of four appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder) overseeing the fiscally distressed Michigan city switched its drinking water source from Lake Huron through the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River. The water was not treated with an anti-corrosion additive, and the harder Flint River water ate away at the old pipes. The lead leached into the drinking water. Soon, lead levels exceeded federal standards so many times over that one Virginia Tech researcher assisting residents with their own investigations said it was the worst situation he’d seen in 25 years.
Confronted with corroding car engine parts in its Flint factories, General Motors switched back to the Lake Huron sources. Residents didn’t have that out. Adults and children suffered rashes and intestinal ailments and other symptoms of lead poisoning. The crisis also contributed to an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.
In 2016, President Obama issued an emergency declaration one year after the city reconnected to its original water source. Congress also passed the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation (WIIN) Act that enabled the Centers for Disease Control to fund a four-year, $14 million grant to create a long-term vehicle for health studies: the Flint Lead Exposure Registry, a project led by the city, the Greater Flint Health Coalition, Michigan State University, and other community organizations.
Gene J. Puskar/AP Photo
People attend a National Transportation Safety Board investigative hearing at East Palestine High School to discuss the February 2023 Norfolk Southern freight train derailment and subsequent hazardous material release and fires, in East Palestine, Ohio, June 22, 2023.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine held a virtual public workshop in East Palestine last November to assess health care needs, research issues, and lessons learned in the affected Ohio and Pennsylvania areas. They recently published their findings, which include lessons from veterans of the Flint disaster.
One participant, Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Flint Registry director and now the Michigan State University associate dean for public health, who was a practicing Flint pediatrician and whistleblower during the crisis, produced crucial research on the lead in the water supply. The goal of the registry, she explained, was to monitor the long-term physical and mental health of residents, Flint-based workers, and regular visitors, as well as to assist people who suffered from lead exposure.
Today, the registry unveiled in 2018 helps clinicians and researchers to provide appropriate care, and to design approaches to anticipate future health problems. The voluntary program placed a strong emphasis on identifying young children and children whose mothers were pregnant during the period. To date, 21,000 people have registered and the officials have made 34,000 referrals.
The registry also hires local workers familiar with the stresses and harms that residents confronted as they dealt with the life-threatening ordeal and discovered that they could not trust public officials to tell them the truth. “The betrayal” of their trust in such officials, Hanna-Attisha said, “is as toxic” as the lead itself.
In 2022, the Flint Registry received another $18 million federal grant that runs through 2027.
For its part, East Palestine has seen a number of initiatives. The Environmental Protection Agency has tested air, water, and soil samples. Norfolk Southern conducted soil remediation around the derailment site and spent millions on a park as well as water treatment enhancements and a new training center for first responders. Federal health agencies boosted funds to community centers. A new health care center opened to provide long-term care supports and establish health parameters and baselines for groups like first responders.
But those efforts are insufficient to assess the longer-term impacts, such as cancers that can appear decades after first exposures to chemicals like vinyl chloride that carry little-understood risks. Moreover, a comprehensive safety regime should require rail companies to spend their own monies. Norfolk Southern has decided to participate in a yearlong pilot safety issues reporting program in just three locations among its routes, which span more than 20 states. But it also has spent millions more lobbying Congress to water down whatever safety measures have been proposed—and now, postponed—for congressional consideration. The health concerns of East Palestine residents 10 or 20 years from now are even further down its list of priorities. It’s easier to pacify people with trees and flowers than it is to dig deep into data over years to figure out if blowing up railcars full of toxins has damaged the bodies of local residents.
A federal disaster declaration by the Biden administration could speed dollars to a potential Flint-style undertaking—modeled on one that itself grew out of the World Trade Center Health Registry set up after 9/11. Compelling rail companies to also step up on longer-term health issues is also clearly necessary. East Palestine residents, like their fellow citizens in Flint, want to see Washington act rather than dither over endless permutations of partisan checkmate patterns.
President Biden expects to travel to the region this month.
