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Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed the night before burns in East Palestine, Ohio, Feb. 4, 2023.
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EPA outlines plans for long-term health, water monitoring following Norfolk Southern settlement. Is it enough?

(AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File)

EPA outlines plans for long-term health, water monitoring following Norfolk Southern settlement. Is it enough?

Jami Wallace doesn’t know if her 4-year-old daughter’s persistent cough is just normal for kids her age. Or is it something worse, a symptom of larger damage not fully understood yet? 

Ms. Wallace was quick to leave, and stay out of, her home after the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment unfolded. Still, like her daughter, she has been dealing with a chronic sinusitis diagnosis, characterized by inflammation of the sinus and nasal passages for at least three months. 

It also doesn’t give much peace of mind that her home sat just a few feet away from Sulphur Run, the creek that saw the worst of the contamination from the derailment. For months, she still had to return home to check on the place and pick up belongings before moving nearly 20 miles away. She always felt worse after those short visits.

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“We're lab rats,” she said. “We knew we were going to be lab rats, no one knows what happens if you're exposed to 50 different chemicals at once, even at lower levels.”

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Even in the midst of the immediate chaos, she always worried about the future, her family and community’s wellbeing in the years to come. Now, some 15 months after the disaster, there seems to finally be plans to address them.

Just weeks after Norfolk Southern reached a historic settlement with residents dealing with the aftermath of the East Palestine train derailment, federal agencies are one step closer to holding the company responsible for the community’s health for the long haul. 

The federal Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Justice announced an over $310 million agreement with Norfolk Southern for the damage caused by the Feb. 3, 2023, derailment near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. The federal agencies filed the complaint back in March 2023, accusing the company of unlawfully discharging pollutants and hazardous substances under the Clean Water Act. 

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If the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio approves the settlement, Norfolk Southern will have to do more than write a check. The railroad operator would fund a 20-year community health program, as well as monitoring of private water, groundwater and surface water for the next 10 years. 

The company also faces a $15 million civil penalty to address the Clean Water Act violations, and it must take other actions to restore nearby waterways and drinking water resources. Norfolk Southern estimates that it will spend more than $1 billion to address the harms caused by the East Palestine derailment and improve its safety operations — another provision of the settlement. 

While the latest agreement brings some assurances that agencies are thinking of East Palestine over the long term, it also raises questions around Norfolk Southern’s influence over the process and how community input will measure up. The EPA is opening a public comment period on the settlement through July 1. 

Ms. Wallace says the agreement doesn’t address symptoms people are experiencing now from the derailment. Her nieces have been hospitalized with chemical bronchitis. One has rashes all over her body. Her brother has nodules on his lungs and needs a biopsy. Her mother has become so sick that she and her stepfather are putting their 60-year-old home up for sale. 

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And without provisions for home testing, Ms. Wallace worries that there could be ongoing chemical exposure or contamination being ignored. The EPA says it has collected over 115 million air monitoring data points and over 45,000 air, water and soil samples.

Since the early days after the derailment, the EPA has told residents that no chemicals of concern have been found in the air, though it has discovered contamination in nearby waterways, including Sulphur Run and Leslie Run that run through the village. Despite ongoing concerns, residents have been routinely denied property testing, Ms. Wallace said. 

“It’s just go ahead and let your kids sit there in the chemicals and we'll study them,” Ms. Wallace said. “Is that the answer? I don't think it's addressing all of the concerns and not immediate needs.”

Under the agreement, Norfolk Southern will implement the community health program through a third-party, based on a plan reviewed and approved by EPA. The company will outline the enrollment process for the medical monitoring and mental health services in that plan. The medical monitoring program is designed to “focus services on individuals that were most impacted by the derailment,” the EPA told the Post-Gazette on Friday. 

People who live within two miles of the derailment area or 250 feet from Leslie Run and first responders that were onsite in February 2023 will be automatically eligible to receive medical monitoring. Norfolk Southern will be required to submit annual reports on the program to the EPA. 

The company will also administer the surface water and groundwater monitoring program under an EPA-approved plan. Norfolk Southern must provide quarterly reports on the progress being made. If any contaminants are detected “above actionable levels,” the EPA said it will work with the company to determine next steps. 

When asked why such plans for long-term monitoring didn’t come sooner, even as residents demanded them, the EPA told the Post-Gazette that the water monitoring has been ongoing in the community since February 2023 under its existing administrative order. The statement did not address the delay on the health component. 

“The long-term monitoring provisions in the proposed consent decree will begin once the work being done pursuant to that order is complete,” the statement read. “This long-term monitoring is not something we could have otherwise ordered Norfolk Southern to do, and is instead, something additional that we were able to obtain through our settlement.”

Those answers aren’t necessarily satisfying residents like Ms. Wallace, nor experts who have worked closely with the community on their own studies already. 

Last year, Andrew Whelton, a Purdue University professor of civil, environmental and ecological engineering, found that buildings were chemically contaminated for months after the disaster and that the indoor air testing program approved by the EPA, which did not find any contaminated buildings, was “inadequate.”

Mr. Whelton said the government never used those results to inform their response moving forward, and community feedback didn’t seem to sway them much either. He noticed that a U.S. Department of Justice statement on the recent settlement marked a rare acknowledgement that homes saw damage from the disaster.

“This might be an inflection point where the federal government acknowledges that exposures and harm did occur,” he said. 

While the agreement represents a step forward, the fact is that Norfolk Southern, again, will be overseeing major community health and safety monitoring, even after such direct involvement has stirred doubt in the community. 

“Public trust was destroyed by government agencies outsourcing decision making responsibility during a public health environmental disaster,” he said. “There are a number of critical missteps that state and federal agencies made. The settlement is one positive development that can help pivot to greater community support, but the implementation is going to need to be well done.”

Norfolk Southern will likely tap outside contractors, but that doesn’t necessarily bring much more confidence in the process, given his own findings around the reliability of the testing done so far. 

“Even if the company gives it to an independent person, how independent are they when they're being funded by these guys?” Mr. Whelton said. 

Stephen Lester, toxicologist and science director for The Center for Health, Environment & Justice, thinks the government could have learned these lessons years ago, even decades ago. He served as a consultant for the Love Canal disaster, in which a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, N.Y., saw the dumping of toxic chemicals that killed residents and harmed hundreds of others. While there wasn’t a major, catalyzing event like a derailment and it was the state, not the EPA, that took control over the response, the same alarm bells are ringing.

The government didn't start the long-term environmental studies until residents had already evacuated five years later. With over a year already passed since the derailment, that’s critical time lost for understanding the scope of impact after exposure. 

“You've already had so much dilution, so much change going on,” Mr. Lester said. “Is it going to be five years after the accident that they begin this long term monitoring? I don't know, but I'd be concerned about what they’ve already missed.”

 The New York health department attempted to conduct a heath study in Love Canal, but the trust was so fractured by then that people didn’t want to take part. The study never happened. He wonders if the same will happen in East Palestine.

The state of New York had burned so many people, had upset so many people and lied – or at least that's what people felt,” he said. “There was no participation. Without participation, you can't learn anything.”

He says in the case of Love Canal, the government would eventually turn over the response to the party responsible for the damage, Occidental Petroleum. 

“That's really the right thing to do in a lot of these situations,” he said. “But if I'm living in that community, I don't want the company to cause the problem, to be the ones who's doing the testing, telling me that everything's OK. That’s the whole fox guarding the chicken coop problem, and that continues to be a problem in East Palestine.”

What did prove effective in Love Canal was allowing the community to designate a point person who could more easily communicate the response, and the science behind it, to residents. Mr. Lester was that person. If the agreement moves forward, he hopes the EPA would consider doing something similar for the long-term monitoring process, going beyond the window for public comment over the next month. 

“I mean, how long has the community asked the EPA to come in and do indoor air testing?” he said. “They've never done it, and they refuse to do it. So how do you trust that all this testing is going to be done appropriately, or done in a way that people can feel good about?”

 

First Published: June 3, 2024, 9:30 a.m.
Updated: June 4, 2024, 7:37 p.m.

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Portions of a Norfolk Southern freight train that derailed the night before burns in East Palestine, Ohio, Feb. 4, 2023.  ((AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar, File))
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