[While the abused residents of East Palestine, Ohio sorted through
the contradictory messaging from officials, freight trains with vast
quantities of toxic chemicals rumbled through equally vulnerable and
unprepared corridor communities across America ]
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“WE BASICALLY NUKED A TOWN WITH CHEMICALS”: EAST PALESTINE
VOLUNTEERS RISK MASS TOXIC EXPOSURE  
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Bob Hennelly
February 16, 2023
Work-Bites
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_ While the abused residents of East Palestine, Ohio sorted through
the contradictory messaging from officials, freight trains with vast
quantities of toxic chemicals rumbled through equally vulnerable and
unprepared corridor communities across America _

“This is what happens in a political economy where close to fifty
Class I railroads are permitted to shrink to seven behemoths who,
through their campaign cash, dictate what the rules of the road — or
the rails — will be.” , Photo courtesy of EPA

 

Invariably, these are communities that have some history of betrayal
and abandonment by predatory capitalism and rely on selfless community
volunteers to staff their fire apparatus and ambulances. They were the
frontline infantry for COVID. They are the arms and legs of mutual aid
24-7 responding to any and all natural and man-made disasters in
America’s heartland.

Of the total 29,452 fire departments in the country, 18,873 are all
volunteer; 5,335 are mostly volunteer; 2,459 are mostly career; and
2,785 are all career-professionals, according to the National
Volunteer Fire Council [[link removed]]. More than
half of Ohio’s departments are staffed by volunteers.

In the case of the Norfolk Southern derailment, the impact was felt
not just in Ohio.  Communities in neighboring Pennsylvania
[[link removed]]
were also caught up in the need to quickly evacuate, while first
responders tried to cool the massive rail pileup — all to buy the
railroad time to figure out how to handle five cars of vinyl chloride
that were vulnerable to catastrophic explosion.

THE RISK THAT LINGERS A LIFETIME 

What’s generally ignored — unless you are a veteran of the 9/11
World Trade Center EPA-enabled mass toxic exposure — is anytime
there’s a catastrophic toxic chemical release like there was in
Ohio, a lifelong shadow is cast over the health of every railroad
worker, first responder (paid or volunteer), and contractor that
responds.

In the case of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, the EPA offered
reassuring statements that the air was “safe” to breathe — even
though it did not have sufficient data “to make such a blanket
statement” when their “air monitoring data was lacking for several
pollutants of concern, including particulate matter and
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs),” according to the EPA’s
Inspector General.
[[link removed]] 

“Furthermore, The White House Council on Environmental Quality
influenced, through the collaboration process, the information that
EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when
it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary
ones,” the EPA Inspector General wrote, adding that “over
25-percent of the bulk dust samples that EPA had collected…showed
the presence of asbestos above the 1-percent threshold used by EPA to
indicate significant risk.”

On 9/11, 343 members of the FDNY died responding to the WTC attack and
collapse of the towers. By last year, the department had surpassed 300
firefighters who have died as a consequence of their occupational
exposure. In the case of the NYPD
[[link removed]],
23 officers died during the attack. In the years since, well over ten
times that number have died from their occupational exposure to WTC
contamination.  

Today, well over 80,000 first responders are enrolled in the WTC
Health Program [[link removed]]
with several thousand suffering with some form of cancer or other life
altering chronic condition.

This kind of lifelong cloud, and perhaps even premature death from an
occupational exposure, is just not factored into the cost-benefit
analysis into how we regulate and transport the myriad of toxic
chemicals our mass market consumer economy requires.

This is what happens in a political economy where close to fifty Class
I railroads are permitted to shrink to seven behemoths who, through
their campaign cash, dictate what the rules of the road — or the
rails — will be. Their profits are maximized, while the risks of
workplace exposure and community environmental degradation the
corporations take, are ours too often shoulder alone, unless we can
afford a lawyer.

THE VIEW FROM OHIO

John Harvey [[link removed]] is president of
Ohio’s Association of Professional Firefighters. He is also a
captain in the Middletown Fire Department and leads that city’s
HazMat response team. In a phone interview with Work-Bites, Harvey
said that whether the responders to the East Palestine fire were
professional or volunteer — he is concerned about their occupational
health exposures that can often take decades to manifest in the form
of coronary or respiratory diseases.

“We have to make sure they are taken care of immediately and that
they are getting check-ups so that we have a baseline of where they
are at and then looking further out, as the years go by-that the care
is followed up on to make sure that if there are illnesses that are
linked to this, that they are taken care of,” he told Work-Bites.

Vinnie Variale is the president of DC 37 Local 3621, which represents
the FDNY’s EMS officers. He says that across the country there’s a
patchwork of EMS organizations that include everything from voluntary
ambulance corps to civil service agencies with a wide range in
equipment, training, and protective gear.

“With something like this, I am concerned about the protection that
these first responders are getting from their region,” Variale said.
“If they don’t have the right protections, they could see the same
kind of problems we had with our members dying years later from
diseases they contracted after their World Trade Center response.”
 

In Ohio, we are still in the performative theater phase of the
government’s response with the public health officials in white
coats telling residents the air is safe to breathe but they advise
residents to drink bottled water, just to be on the safe side. Local
TV is awash with images of dead fish, belly-up in stream beds while in
the distance residents are shown trying to return to the rhythm of
their lives before it was all upended on Friday, Feb 3.

Not surprisingly, Norfolk Southern opted out of attending the East
Palestine forum with a Trumpian twist playing of the victim card,
saying in a statement they were “increasingly concerned about the
growing physical threat to our employees and members of the community
around this event stemming from the increasing likelihood of the
participation of outside parties."

They have good reason to avoid large public gatherings.

ON THE CASE

Thanks to the essential reporting of the Lever
[[link removed]]
and the Railroad Workers United News Service
[[link removed]], we know how Norfolk Southern
lobbied government officials to weaken the regulations for hauling the
kind of toxic chemicals
[[link removed]] that have now
cast a shadow over the lives of the traincrew, the army of mostly
volunteer first-responders and the wider community.

With each passing day, rail workers are getting their story out about
their trepidations about the length, weight and make-up
[[link removed]]
of the toxic train that originated in Illinois and was headed east to
Pennsylvania.  

The Norfolk Southern railroad’s failure to accurately characterize
the highly hazardous nature of the train’s cargo prompted a
bi-partisan blast from Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and
Pennsylvania’s recently-elected Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro.

On Feb. 14, DeWine told reporters that he had been told by Public
Utilities Commission of Ohio that the train had not been flagged as
“a high hazardous materials train”, meaning that the railroad was
under no obligation to notify Ohio about the hazardous materials it
was hauling through the state.

“Frankly, if this is true, and I'm told it's true, this is absurd,
and we need to look at this, and Congress needs to take a look at how
these things are handled,” DeWine said. “We should know when we
have trains carrying hazardous material that are going through the
state of Ohio."

The Feb. 3 derailment and response played out over four days. On Feb.
6, concerned about the increasingly unstable tanker cars containing
vinyl chloride, Norfolk Southern opted to release hazardous chemicals
from five cars and then execute a "controlled explosion
[[link removed]]"
which generated a loud boom and menacing cloud of black smoke.

But it wasn’t until  Governor Shapiro’s Feb. 14 letter
[[link removed]]
to Alan Shaw, the president and CEO of Norfolk Southern, that we got a
behind the scenes of what appears to have been a seriously flawed
response which played out from Feb. 3 through Feb. 8 when the
evacuation order was lifted. Shapiro was particularly critical of the
railroad’s Feb. 6 decision to intentionally vent the five tanker
cars containing the vinyl chloride.

“Norfolk Southern failed to explore all potential courses of action,
including some that may have kept the rail line closed longer but
could have resulted in a safer overall approach for first responders,
residents and the environment,” Shapiro wrote. 

The railroad, according to Pennsylvania’s governor, kept first
responders in the dark throughout the incident by failing to
“implement a unified command” because Southern Norfolk opted to
separate themselves “from the rest of the incident management
structure.”  

As a consequence, Shapiro wrote state and local agencies had “to
react to tactics that were developed unilaterally [by the railroad]
and without the combined input of key state agencies” which at the
same time, Norfolk Southern was giving out “inaccurate information
and conflicting modelling about the impact of the controlled release
that made protective action decision making more difficult in the
immediate aftermath of the derailment.”

Thanks to a Feb. 13 dispatch from State Impact Pennsylvania, an NPR
local reporting project, residents learned ten days later, that in
addition to butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride, the derailed train
contained: “ethylhexyl acrylate
[[link removed]],
which can cause burning on the skin and in the eyes, coughing and
shortness of breath; “isobutylene
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dizzy and drowsy; and ethylene glycol monobutyl ether
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can cause coughing, dizziness, drowsiness, headaches, nausea, and
weakness if inhaled.”

“We basically nuked a town with chemicals so we could get a railroad
open — I was kind of surprised when they said so quickly the people
could go back home,” Sil Caggiano, a hazardous material expert and
retired Youngstown Fire Battalion Chief, told WKBN CBS-TV
[[link removed]]
“There’s a lot of what ifs, and we’re going to be looking at
this thing five, ten, fifteen, twenty years down the line and
wondering, ‘Gee, cancer clusters could pop up, you know? Well water
could go bad.”

ON THE SAME PAGE

Charles Jennings [[link removed]]
is an associate professor of security, fire, and emergency management
at City University’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He told
Work-Bites that the kind of fractured response that Governor Shapiro
describes is “absolutely not” the way to execute an effective
response.

“With the unified command all the key decision makers and all the
key people with responsibilities are jointly setting high level goals
based on the best information from ALL sources informing those
decision makers,” Jennings said. “Major decisions like we are
going to attempt to fight it or let it burn out — all of those
should all be made in the context of a joint unified command.”

Jennings continued, “This issue came up with the debate over oil
trains and the transport of fracked oil and the hazards that came
along with it, and the fact that you have trains that are running
through communities that vary in the level of resources and
capabilities. You need to impose some minimum capabilities along the
entire route of the train, and that is a job, unfortunately, left to
the locals. But there should be coordination structures that would
enable you to get the right capabilities up at the state level to
manage one of these incidents.”

Jennings says “transparency” from the railroad company “is
critical.”

“There’s a vast amount of hazardous material on the rails and the
roads 24-7 all through the country, so this is not a novel
situation,” he added. “There should have been a playbook for this.
It’s not like it was a Chinese balloon that suddenly appeared over
Main Street — this is something that happens every day of the
year.”

Ironically, the same day, but before the derailment, Ohio’s State
Fire Marshal Kevin Reardon
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announced a task force to help address the state’s volunteer
firefighter shortage and the waiving of all training fees for
volunteers at the Ohio Fire Academy.

According to the US Fire Service 2021 National Needs Assessment
[[link removed]],
volunteer firefighters in towns the size of East Palestine are in
short supply with an average of 6.7 firefighters available on
weekdays, compared to 11.4 on the weekend.

And as it turns out, they are not that well-equipped.

When it comes to providing a Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus [SCBA]
for firefighters, the US Fire Service reports, “more than half (53
percent) of all fire departments cannot equip everyone with SCBA.
Departments protecting under 9,999 people have the highest rates of
unmet need for SCBA equipment.”

_[ROBERT "BOB" HENNELLY is an award-winning, print and broadcast
journalist. He has reported on a broad spectrum of major public policy
questions, ranging from homeland security to the economy,
environmental contamination to corruption.?_

_His first book was published in 2021: “Stuck Nation — Can the
United States change course on our history of choosing profits over
people?”_

_Bob was on-air as a senior reporter for WNYC-New York Public Radio
for more than 12 years. Before WNYC, he was national affairs
correspondent for Pacifica Network News. He continues to be an on-air
investigative reporter with WBGO-Newark Public Radio. His current
investigative work, focusing on the New York civil service, is
published in The Chief-Leader, a weekly newspaper covering government
and the civil service in New York since 1897. ?_

_He also continues to be a regular contributor to Salon, InsiderNJ,
and WBGO-Newark Public Radio.]_

* railroads
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* railroad safety
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* Donald Trump
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* Health and Safety
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* corporate profits
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* railroad workers
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* toxic chemicals
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* East Palestine Ohio
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* rail derailment
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* train disaster
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* Norfolk Southern Railway
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* epa
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