East Palestine, Ohio
The railroad company runs this town now.
You remember East Palestine? If you don’t remember East Palestine, just think Flint.
Flint was poisoned by lead. East Palestine by vinyl chloride, an agent so deadly that when on fire it creates phosgene, which was responsible for most of the gassing deaths in World War I.
You might remember that a Norfolk Southern train carrying the chemicals through this small town near the Pennsylvania border went off the tracks last February. Instead of cleaning the spill properly, the railroad company decided it would be best to light it on fire.
It was cheaper that way, and time is money and money is keeping the trains running on time.
That was February. The president of all the United States promised to come. He hasn’t kept that promise. This past weekend he was asked by a reporter what’s taking so long?
“I haven’t had the occasion to go to East Palestine,” he said.
The governor of Ohio, Mike Dewine, sent a request for a presidential disaster declaration two months ago. It molders on the desk of Beach Blanket Biden.
That was February. The president of all the United States promised to come. He hasn’t kept that promise. This past weekend he was asked by a reporter what’s taking so long?
“I haven’t had the occasion to go to East Palestine,” he said.
The governor of Ohio, Mike Dewine, sent a request for a presidential disaster declaration two months ago. It molders on the desk of Beach Blanket Biden.
None of the clean-up crew was wearing hazmat suits, or respirators or gloves. One guy wasn’t even wearing a T-shirt, apparently working on his tan while working on the railroad.
There were no OSHA inspectors on site, and no FEMA trailer. The railroad employees directed my questions to the EPA Welcome Center on Market Street. The state and federal EPA offices have told citizens the water is fine and their homes are safe. But analysts hired by skeptical residents say their blood and soil is contaminated with vinyl chloride.
The Welcome Center has the appearance of a converted coffee shop replete with a sandwich chalkboard out front. When asked who was conducting the water sampling — the government or the railroad — a perky public information officer referred me to a website that didn’t have the answer. Inquiries to Washington, D.C., yielded an insulting email from an EPA bureaucrat asking for “questions in writing.”
That’s what they said during the Flint water crisis.
As in Flint, the big money behind the disaster tried to pin the culpability on a local dupe. In Flint, it was the mayor. In East Palestine, it is the local fire chief.
According to recent testimony in front of the National Transportation Safety Board, Gov. Dewine — a Republican —and railroad executives told the local fire chief Keith Drabick that the rail cars carrying the deadly chemicals were heating up and could explode at any minute. They told him that blowing open the cars and lighting the chemicals on fire was the only option. They gave the chief 13 minutes to decide.
Experts from the chemical company, however, testified that the cars were not overheating, they were in fact cooling down. The local fire chief testified that he felt “blind-sided.”
That’s how it goes in small town America. Corporate greed. Government incompetence. Some news stories. And then nothing. A community gets ruined and nobody does a day in jail.
Flint might be majority Black, and East Palestine majority White. But they’re alike in a lot of ways. Both are poor and forgotten, proving once again that the only color that matters in America is green. If you don’t have it, you don’t matter.
Where is Biden? At least Barack Obama went to Flint and drank the water.
