Friday, March 03, 2023

Angry Ohio residents confront railroad over health fears

By JOSH FUNK and JOHN SEEWER

A cleanup worker stands on a derailed tank car of a Norfolk Southern freight train in East Palestine, Ohio, continues, Feb. 15, 2023. The fire that erupted after last month's train derailment in Ohio melted a key part of the tank cars filled with toxic chemicals, so federal officials warned railcar owners Thursday, March 2, 2023, to check their fleets for similar flaws. (AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

Residents who say they’re still suffering from illnesses nearly a month after a train carrying toxic chemicals derailed in Ohio confronted the railroad’s operator Thursday at a town forum, demanding to know whether they’d be relocated from homes they’re afraid to live in.

“It’s not safe here,” said one man, staring straight at representatives of Norfolk Southern. “I’m begging you, by the grace of God, please get our people out of here.”

While the railroad announced it was ready to begin moving more contaminated soil from underneath the tracks, buying homes and moving people out of East Palestine hasn’t been discussed, said Darrell Wilson, the railroad’s assistant vice president of government relations.

“Why?” someone shouted.

Few seemed to come away satisfied with answers they heard about air and water testing from state and federal officials — even after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said it was ordering Norfolk Southern to begin testing for dioxins, toxic chemical compounds that can stay in the environment for long periods of time.

Many people remain scared about whether the area will be safe for their children years from now, saying they fear that dioxins not yet detected will cause long-term damage. Testing so far by the EPA for “indicator chemicals” has suggested there’s a low chance that dioxins were released from the derailment, the agency said.

Some residents booed, laughed and yelled, “Don’t lie to us,” when Debra Shore, a regional administrator with the EPA, reiterated that tests have continually shown that the village’s air is safe.


A view of the scene on Feb. 24, 2023, as the cleanup continues at the site of of a Norfolk Southern freight train derailment that happened on Feb. 3 in East Palestine, Ohio. The fire that erupted after last month's train derailment in Ohio melted a key part of the tank cars filled with toxic chemicals, so federal officials warned railcar owners Thursday, March 2, 2023, to check their fleets for similar flaws. 
(AP Photo/Matt Freed, File)

Investigators looking into the fire that erupted after the derailment said it melted a key part of the tank cars filled with toxic chemicals, leading federal officials to warn railcar owners earlier Thursday to check their fleets for similar flaws.

The National Transportation Safety Board said investigators determined the aluminum covers over the pressure relief valves on three of the five tank cars carrying vinyl chloride melted and that some of the metal was found around the valves.

The NTSB said melted aluminum may have degraded the performance of the valves and kept them from releasing some of the flammable gas to relieve pressure inside the tank cars. Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw has said the failure of the valves was part of why officials decided to breach the cars and burn off the vinyl chloride. The resulting toxic fire prompted the evacuation of half of East Palestine, Ohio, and the surrounding area near the Pennsylvania border.

Shaw said the railroad agreed with all the officials responding to the Feb. 3 derailment that venting the hazardous materials cars was the best way to prevent a disastrous explosion.

“The factors on the ground at that time were that the safety valves on the rail cars had failed and the temperatures inside the railcars were heating up,” Shaw said. “So, our independent expert was extremely concerned about a catastrophic uncontrolled explosion that would shoot shrapnel and hazardous gas throughout this populated community.”

Wilson told residents that Norfolk Southern feels horrible about what happened. So far, more than 2 million gallons (7.6 million liters) of water and liquid waste have been removed along with 1400 ton (1,270 metric tonnes) of solid waste.

Many people have complained that Norfolk Southern opened the tracks less than a week after the derailment and didn’t remove the soil underneath. The railroad now plans to dig up the areas and should be able to remove all the contaminated soil by the end of April if it’s able to start right away, Wilson said.

That only brought more jeers and angry shouts.

“You should have done it right the first time,” someone yelled.

The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration sent an urgent safety warning out to tank car owners Thursday saying they should check how many of their cars have aluminum covers over the valves like the ones that melted after the Ohio derailment. The agency said car owners should consider switching to steel covers, which is now the industry standard on new tank cars.

It’s not clear how many tank cars in use might have aluminum valve covers. The cars with them involved in the derailment were all manufactured in the 1990s.

The derailment prompted many lingering concerns for the roughly 5,000 residents of East Palestine, even though state and federal officials say their tests haven’t found any harmful levels of toxic chemicals in the air or water around the derailment.

The NTSB has said that an overheating bearing likely caused the train to derail, sending 38 cars, including 11 containing hazardous materials, off the tracks. A trackside sensor detected the overheating bearing just before the derailment, but the crew didn’t have enough time to stop the train.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has said he is focused making sure Norfolk Southern cleans up the mess while helping the town recover, and Shaw agreed to testify in Congress next week at a hearing about the derailment.

Already, members of Congress and the Biden administration have proposed many rail safety reforms, but Norfolk Southern and the other major freight railroads want to wait until after the NTSB completes its investigation a year or more from now to make any significant changes.

The major freight railroads said earlier Thursday they would take one of the steps Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg recommended and join a government program that runs a confidential hotline for employees to report safety concerns.

___

Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Seewer reported from Toledo, Ohio.


Norfolk Southern Employees Suffering From Lingering Illnesses, Scathing Union Letter Says

Workers “continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment.”


ABIGAIL WEINBERG
News Writer
MOTHER JONES

Gene J. Puskar/AP

In a scathing letter to Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Norfolk Southern worker and Teamsters union rep denounced the rail company’s cost-cutting business model, alleging that workers who were deployed to clean up February’s vinyl chloride spill have experienced adverse health effects.

“I am writing to share with you the level of disregard that Norfolk Southern has for the safety of the railroad’s Workers, its track structure, and East Palestine and other American communities where NS operates,” Jonathon Long, who said he had been employed with Norfolk Southern for 28 years, wrote. “I am also imploring you as the Governor of the State of Ohio to use your influence and power to stop NS’s reckless business practices that endanger the public and their Workers.”

Concerns about Norfolk Southern’s cost-cutting, anti-labor policies have been spreading for weeks, but Long’s letter paints the most vivid picture yet of the company’s apparent disregard for its workers’ safety. In the letter, Long identified the implementation of “precision scheduled railroading,” or PSR, a system that he says involves increasing the lengths of trains while slashing the number of employees, as one of the primary ways that the company has prioritized profit over the safety and well-being of its workers. “The new business model of PSR is implemented by freight rail carriers not to benefit America’s supply chain through the timely delivery of good,” he wrote, “but solely for the advancement of railroad executives, shareholders, and Wall Street hedge fund investors in the form of record profits, dividends, and stock buybacks.”

In addition to systemic issues, Long criticized Norfolk Southern’s immediate response to the spill of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, Ohio. Long wrote that workers assigned to clean up the spill were not provided personal protective equipment and that many “continue to experience migraines and nausea, days after the derailment, and they all suspect that they were willingly exposed to these chemicals at the direction of NS.” (Norfolk Southern insisted in a statement to CNBC that “hazardous material professionals…were on site continuously to ensure the work area was safe to enter and the required PPE was utilized.”)

Following the letter, leaders of 12 rail unions met with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Federal Railroad Administration administrator Amit Bose in Washington, DC, on Wednesday. In addition to paid sick leave, the unions are fighting for regulatory changes to ensure railroad safety.

“NS and other railroads alike must be stopped from continuing their cost-cutting business model and start focusing on how they can improve their performance to be as safe as possible,” Long wrote. “NS and other railroads alike must be held accountable in their operations, through rule-making and regulatory reform that establishes minimum safety standards in their operations.”

Chemical Reaction Spreads Out From East Palestine

Pennsylvania residents are increasingly anxious about health impacts and water contamination after the East Palestine derailment
.

BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
MARCH 2, 2023

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.”

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