On 3 February, the devastating derailment of a 151-car train in East Palestine, Ohio leaked hazardous chemicals into the surrounding air, soil, and water, the latest in a growing list of recent US environmental disasters including the 2014 Flint water crisis in Michigan and BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Despite the official media narrative of a crisis averted and a return to normal life, East Palestine residents continue to experience troubling health symptoms and report horrific effects on surrounding wildlife. The derailment took place on the back of the Biden administration’s decision to break US rail strikes in December 2022; the denial of rail workers’ demands is a direct cause of the disaster Ohio residents face now. DAVID HETFIELD and SOMA KISAN report.
Environmental disaster of multiplying effects
Eleven of the 38 railcars derailed in the Ohio accident contained toxic chemicals, five of which specifically included hydrogen chloride and vinyl chloride – brain, lung, blood, and liver carcinogenic and flammable chemicals that can cause life-threatening respiratory problems. Due to the toxicity of the chemicals released, on 6 February, train owner Norfolk Southern had to perform a ‘controlled burning’ on the train to safely release the chemicals. Approximately one million pounds of vinyl chloride had to be burned at the site of the crash. While this action averted the greater dangers of toxic fumes and uncontrolled explosions, the burning of vinyl chloride also creates other hazardous substances like phosgene gas, a chemical warfare agent used in World War One that has been banned by the Geneva Convention, and dioxins, chemicals that cling to dust particles and can last in the surrounding environment for decades causing cancer, developmental issues, and reproductive issues years later.
The immediate effects of this disaster were felt by hundreds of residents in the area and several miles away, with citizens reporting headaches, burning sensations, severe dehydration, respiratory issues, and more. Nearby citizens also reported the sickness and deaths of fish, cattle, and household pets.
These are only the short-term effects. Experts say that as the chemicals seep into the soil, there could be enduring impacts on the region’s groundwater. Models of the direction and dispersion of the released hazardous chemicals run by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Air Resources Laboratory show that contaminated air from the crash has already spread to Canada, over 700 miles away, with particles up to 9,000 metres from the ground, a height at which rainwater is affected. The EPA has now confirmed that vinyl chloride and other substances have entered the Ohio River basin which is home to 25 million people and could impact the Great Lakes system, the source of 20% of the world’s surface freshwater. The immense spread of particulates in both air and water demonstrates how significant the effects of this leak will be on the region’s ecology deep into the future.
Government mishandling and distrust of the EPA
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued an official one-mile radius evacuation zone around the crash site only on 5 February, two days after the disaster, although many of the 4,700 residents living in East Palestine began evacuating immediately as a column of black smoke rose over the town. After the controlled burn on 6 February and state and federal authorities determined that air and water quality were safe for residents to return to their homes, this evacuation order was lifted on 8 February. Despite this, residents returning a week later, after the evacuation order had been lifted, still reported burning and itching eyes, rashes, migraines, and a pervading odour in the area. Residents 15 or more miles out from East Palestine who did not receive the evacuation order noticed odours in the air and experienced burning or itchy throats, and respiratory problems, indicating the four-day one-mile radius evacuation zone was far from sufficient.
While the EPA signed air and water quality off as ‘safe’ in the area surrounding East Palestine and has encouraged the population to ‘trust the science’, former EPA employees and longtime watchdogs of the agency are skeptical. The EPA has a history of using fraudulent testing practices to cover up environmental decisions like the massive secret military dumping of radioactive Cold War weapons waste in Uniontown, Ohio in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Dr Mike Kettering, who worked in the EPA’s Office of Enforcement 1987-93, describes how the EPA conducts scientific and regulatory fraud by manipulating how and where test samples are taken and not testing for specific chemicals.
Furthermore, the EPA and companies like Norfolk Southern often outsource testing and sampling to environmental service contractors who are looking to please their employers and win future contracts. Cases like this have already surfaced in East Palestine where Norfolk Southern had contracted AECOM for preliminary water testing. The Huffington Post reported that samples were not handled in compliance with federal EPA standards and deemed ‘sloppy’ and ‘amateur’ by other experts, a fact acknowledged by the Ohio EPA. Despite this, the samples were still deemed ‘acceptable due to the next-day processing at the laboratory.’
Media suppression
The EPA’s environmental write-off is also being used by major media companies to downplay the full implications of the disaster. One example is USA Today which has run multiple fact-checking articles on the disaster, implying the health effects are minimal, and also shares two top shareholders with Norfolk Southern: BlackRock and Vanguard. Furthermore, the Biden administration is telling police that the environmental activists informing Ohio residents of their rights, like the veteran campaigner Erin Brockovich, are ‘special interest extremists’ who pose a ‘terrorist threat’ because their ‘call for changes in governmental policy’ might lead to ‘protests’. It is clear that private entities like Norfolk Southern and USA Today are collaborating with state entities like the Biden administration and the EPA to suppress this disaster. Every effort has been focused on ensuring Norfolk Southern can quickly repair tracks and continue business as usual, even employing workers in hazardous conditions with no personal protective equipment (PPE). Neither Norfolk Southern nor the government will set aside profit potential to properly address a devastating environmental disaster whose consequences are still being felt more than a month after and whose cleanup may last for decades more.
Democrats and Republicans pass the buck
After the carnage of the Ohio derailment, both Democrats and Republicans have sought to deflect blame, ignoring the fact that the two parties recently worked together to pass a bipartisan bill to impose a contract on the rail workers in the interests of the rail companies. The focus of the workers’ grievances was lack of paid sick leave, punishing schedules, and understaffing in train crews, maintenance, and inspectors. This came after years of both parties gutting any regulations that improved safety and working conditions at the expense of profits.
The Norfolk Southern freight train derailed after an axle overheated, with trackside monitors recording temperatures of 30, 103, 253-degrees Fahrenheit above ambient temperature at successive monitoring stations. It was only after the third alert that the train crew was alerted to stop the train. The over-heated axle, along with the 151 railcars using an outdated braking system that stops each car individually, caused the train to jack-knife, triggering 38 railcars to derail. There are no regulations governing this; it is down to the individual company to set procedures. Norfolk Southern procedures only require a train to be stopped and inspected if the axle temperature is 115 degrees above normal. One eye-witness videotaped flames from the axle 20 miles before East Palestine, showing there was a problem well before the sensors raised an alarm.
According to investigative journal ProPublica, Norfolk Southern’s policy allows dispatchers to instruct crews to ignore potential problems indicated by track-side monitors. Norfolk Southern’s total disregard for safety, except its own, was shown when it sent maintenance workers to the derailment site without any PPE, not even masks. Executives refused to attend a meeting with residents over fears for their own safety!
President Biden tweeted, ‘Rail companies have spent millions of dollars to oppose common-sense safety regulations. And it worked…This is more than a train derailment or toxic waste spill – it’s years of opposition to safety measures coming home to roost’, ignoring the fact that those millions of dollars went to his Democrat party and the Republicans, who enabled the lack of regulations. In 2022, Norfolk Southern alone made $725,000 in contributions to both parties, split 51-49% to the Democrats. Norfolk Southern was responsible for over half the damages caused by hazardous materials incidents on the railways in 2022; the East Palestine derailment was not a unique occurrence. The fact that there are around 1,000 derailments a year in the US (for comparison Japan has five; Germany has six) shows the appalling state of the railways.
Compromising safety for profit
The problem is capitalism and its relentless pursuit of profits. Norfolk Southern’s major shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, J P Morgan and Wells Fargo, none of which have technical experience in transportation. Their sole concern is profit. Hence, all the rail companies implemented Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR), which means reducing the workforce while increasing the weight and length of each rail consignment. Before PSR, a train with 80-90 railcars would require five rail workers on board, but now as many as 150 railcars have just two crew. Since the government imposition of the contract on the rail workers, some rail companies are piloting trains with just one rail worker. PSR doesn’t just cover train crews: safety inspectors used to have two minutes to inspect each railcar, but now are allowed 30-45 seconds, and signal workers who maintain signals and crossings have to cover larger territories as their numbers have been reduced. Norfolk Southern had been in discussions with the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED) union representatives to increase paid sick leave to four days (up from the one day in the contract imposed on the rail workers by the government). This would be in exchange for the union’s support for a pilot program to automate track inspection, an attempt to reduce the workforce by replacing workers with technology. The BMWED leadership rejected this deal only after the derailment and not due to increased militancy for workers’ rights or for public safety. It can only be explained by bad timing: the union leadership had already signed an identical deal with another rail company CSX, a deal praised by Bernie Sanders and the BMWED president, despite only covering maintenance crew, no train crew or other rail workers, and falling far short of the 15 days paid sick leave demanded.
After a 2013 rail disaster in Quebec, Canada involving a US-owned train that killed 47 people and destroyed downtown Lac-Mégantic, and a 2014 derailment in North Dakota that spilled almost half a million gallons of crude oil, President Obama issued new safety rules. The rules required there to be electronically controlled brakes, which stop the whole train simultaneously, as opposed to the car-by-car braking system. This was to be implemented on all trains with 20 or more railcars carrying hazardous materials by 2023. Although these new measures were timid, the rail lobby donated $6.6m to the Republicans in 2016, resulting in President Trump repealing the rules in 2018. Compared to the profits, buying off politicians is cheap: Norfolk Southern made over $8bn in gross profit in 2022 and has paid out nearly $18bn in share buybacks and dividends in the last five years.
The Ohio rail disaster is yet another example of a completely preventable accident, allowed to happen by a system that prioritises shareholder profits over basic safety precautions. The residents of Ohio and beyond are left to contend with the consequences on their own, unable to rely on a government that sold off their health and safety for capitalist greed.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 293 April/May 2023
